Drivers loved or hated “the Horn,” as they affectionately or disdainfully called the track. The dirt surface of the one-mile circle, created in 1926 on a former swamp, had been blackened over the years by the millions of gallons of used motor oil sprinkled to tamp down summer's dust. A dangerous downhill section on turn three called “puke hollow” got slick and wet sooner than the other turns and claimed many cars and a few lives over the years. One sportswriter called Langhorne “the ultimate test of bravery.”
On Saturday afternoon, August 9, after watching his two racers drive their required qualifying laps, Raymond Parks decided with uncharacteristic spontaneity to test his own bravery. Instead of letting his new backup number 22-A Ford sit idle in the pits, he asked the promoters to let him drive a few qualifying laps as well. Parks was surprised to find that his Ford-driving skills from his old bootlegging days were still strong, and he drove fast enough to qualify for the next day's race. That night, Parks barely slept. He had worked himself into a sleepless tizzy over his first-ever stock car race and kept pacing the floor of the room he and Byron shared at the Howard Johnson's. “When that green flag goes down tomorrow they're going to run all over me,” he said.
“Ah, don't worry about it,” Byron said. “Get some sleep.”
But Byron would soon be grateful for Parks's spontaneous decision.
An enormous crowd arrived early, many of the fans wearing paper bags on their heads, the traditional method of combating Langhorne's dust clouds. The cars grumbled to the start line for the two hundred-lap contest. Bob Flock, starting in the enviable “pole” position, stomped on the gas pedal of his number 14 Ford, as forty-five engines and thirty-seven thousand voices merged into a riotous cacophony. In elegiac Roy Hall style, Flock kangarooed ahead of them all. Within three short laps, in less than three minutes, he was already catching up to and then passing the slowest starters. That group briefly included Red Byron, who had clocked a slower-than-usual qualifying time the previous afternoon and had therefore started in the seemingly insurmountable position of number thirty-six.
For Byron to find himself assigned to the extreme latter half of a starting lineup of forty-five cars was very unfamiliar. But he was not unfamiliar with the tactics needed to catch the leader. It took Byron just twenty minutes, nineteen laps, to pass more than thirty other cars—including his boss, Parks—and to grumble up behind the leader, teammate Bob Flock. Byron stayed in the number two slot until the halfway point but then decided to take a chance and vie for the lead earlier than usual. He cut to Flock's inside, and the two drove side by side for a full lap until Byron edged ahead and into the lead. For the next twenty-five laps, the two waged a door-scraping battle. Flock fought back into first place at lap 107, but Byron retook the lead at lap 119, only to give it up a lap after that.
As the two exchanged the lead, Parks found that his dormant whiskey-tripping skills had hardly withered. And he'd quickly gotten used to the awkward bulge of Byron's fatigue pins on the clutch pedal. He picked his way through the field and suddenly found himself in third place, just a few car lengths behind his two drivers.
If the lineup had stayed that way, it would have been the first and probably only time in stock car-racing history that a team owner's cars finished first, second, and third, with the owner driving his own car.
But at lap 123, Flock was forced into the pits with motor trouble. With only Parks stalking him a few dozen yards behind, Byron seemed headed for victory, taking some satisfaction that his teammate was suffering from engine woes, not him. But then it began happening again. The sputters and the misfires and the smoke. Byron cursed and pulled into the pits beside Flock, whose car Vogt had already repaired. Flock sped away and rejoined the race while Byron stewed and cursed. Vogt popped his hood and began to assess the engine, but the prospects of rejoining the race looked grim. Suddenly, Parks and his number 22-A came to a gravel-ripping stop beside Byron.
“Get in,” Parks shouted, and Byron didn't hesitate.
Byron flew out of the pits, spewing black dirt behind him, and within ten laps caught up to Flock. But the car didn't have the same zoom as his primary car, and no matter which angle he tried, Byron couldn't find a slot through which to pass. Still, he'd overcome great odds to make it to the front of the pack. The teammates finished 1-2.
As Henry Ford had exclaimed after his one and only race—“I'll never do that again. … I was scared to death”—Parks was wired, both thrilled and relieved to have competed at such a level and survived. It was satisfying, too, to find his moonshine-driving skills still intact, further proof of their transferability to a racetrack.
Seven days later, the Georgia Gang drove south for Bill France's end-of-summer race at Daytona Beach. Engine problems again created grief for the team. Both of Parks's cars spewed smoke during prerace qualifying laps on Saturday. Flock and Byron were therefore given, as a courtesy, the last two slots in the next day's lineup, starting side by side at the rear of the entire pack. But Byron wouldn't race a lap. On Sunday, his engine wouldn't start, and he was scratched from the race altogether—the second time in a row, dating back to March, that he failed to start at Daytona, the site of his early glory.
Byron had won two of the biggest races of his career here, in 1946 and again in 1947, and was hoping for an unprecedented third victory. But even with a working engine, he might not have succeeded. This, it turned out, was to be Bob Flock's race, one more step toward Flock's seemingly inevitable championship season.
As if the soul of Roy Hall had been transplanted into him, Flock put on an amazing show that Sunday afternoon. Starting last in the field of thirty-one cars, it took Flock just one mile to pass every single competitor. Down the narrow paved backstretch, he rocketed from last place to first, and by the end of the first 3.2-mile loop was firmly in the lead. He stayed there for the next thirty-two laps. No one in the crowd of eighty-five hundred had ever seen a driver bury the entire field in such a short time, especially on the paved backstretch, which was barely wide enough for two cars.
“I just drove where they wasn't,” Flock said after the race, then gushed that Red Vogt had built “the best car I've ever driven.”
Although Parks was thrilled with Flock's victory, as Red Vogt liked to say, speed cost money. Parks's dual patronage of Flock and Byron had put a serious strain on his considerable financial resources. Compared to the seven thousand dollars he'd spent in all of 1941, Parks had already invested twenty thousand dollars halfway through 1947. And, despite having two of the best drivers in the sport, he was still barely breaking even. Parks once told a friend how to make a small fortune: “You take a huge fortune,” he said, “and then you go racing.”
But Parks's fever for stock cars was as high as ever, the costs be damned. Bob Flock's victory was the fourth straight at Daytona Beach for a Parks-owned car, dating back to Lloyd Seay's victory in 1941. Parks couldn't quit now, and he tried not to think about how long he'd be able to keep pouring money into his team.
Flock's Daytona win moved him into a tie with brother Fonty for the points lead in France's NCSCC. Byron seemed to have lost his edge and became dejected. Maybe it was the bad leg, Parks wondered. Byron's friends knew it hurt more than he ever let on.
Sportswriters were now calling Bob Flock “the Wizard of Whiz” and seemed to have forgotten about the wounded war vet with the makeshift clutch and gimp leg. Byron didn't blame Vogt, though, despite the mechanical difficulties he'd suffered. He knew prewar Fords were getting older and more difficult to keep running at peak speeds, and he still considered Vogt “the best mechanic in the business.” He told Bernard Kahn, France's sportswriter friend, “If there was a better mech anywhere, I'd get him. But there isn't.”
Through the summer of 1947, Parks and his two drivers dominated the stock car circuit, with Byron or Flock taking the top two spots race after race.
The two weren't as personable or fan-friendly as the duo of Roy Hall and Lloyd Seay had been. Byron and Flock were both quieter, more
serious and intense. Still, they were becoming heroes throughout Dixie. After winning a fifty-lap event at a new track in Martinsville, Virginia, Byron sat in the driver's seat, his throbbing left leg dangling toward the ground, as teenage boys crowded around the car, peering inside, running their hands over the hot metal. A photograph in the next day's paper showed the deep lines of Byron's serene face packed with dust, which had also darkened his white coveralls and his muscular, veiny arms. He wore dark sunglasses, a cigarette smoldering in one hand, the other clutching a water canteen. A white helmet covered his bald head, but he appeared grimly content, with an expression that seemed to say, I needed that one.
Byron followed that win with a second-place finish at North Wilkesboro, North Carolina, and a win at Elkins, North Carolina, which put him into third place for the overall championship behind the two Flocks. Because he'd driven in nearly all of France's NCSCC races, Fonty was still in the lead, with Bob in second.
Bill France's game plan seemed to be coming together. By awarding 100, 90, and 80 points, respectively, for first, second, and third place (instead of the 500, 400, and 300 some organizations gave), France was keeping his championship contest a close race. Racers hungry for the potential year-end “champion” payoff were following France-sponsored races throughout the South and as far north as Rhode Island. And
France couldn't have asked for a better front-runner than Fonty Flock.
Even Parks acknowledged that Fonty was “a Bill France dream.”
Fonty and Bob's father had been a carnival daredevil and amateur tightrope walker until he died of cancer, leaving their mother to raise eight children. When the older boys reached their teens, they were sent one by one to Atlanta to help with the successful moonshining business of their uncle, Peachtree Williams, who had been one of Red Vogt's first and best customers, and one of Atlanta's top moonshine suppliers.
After Peachtree was killed in a mysterious car wreck,* his eldest nephew, Carl Flock, took over the family business. Carl became very successful and hired his younger brothers, Bob and Truman Fontello, known as Fonty, to help him with deliveries.
Fonty started racing at age seventeen, sometimes under the name “Wild Bill Dawson,” in homage to Dawsonville. In mid-1947, Fonty teamed up with Bob Osiecki, an Atlanta mechanic and car owner whose reputation with whiskey cars rivaled Vogt's. Osiecki also worked on cars for Ed Samples, who ranked in the top five on the NCSCC circuit. The fact that Osiecki now had two of NCSCC's fastest cars, as did Red Vogt, inevitably ignited a bit of competition between the two mechanics. In no time, each man decided to hate the other. Osiecki once called one of Vogt's cars an “also ran,” which prompted an extremely foulmouthed retort from Vogt.
That Flock-versus-Flock competition—with Fonty and Bob each driving the car of a rival mechanic—was exactly the kind of show Bill France had hoped for.
The brothers hardly seemed related. Bob was rail-thin, nervous, and just plain goofy-looking, with wide, wild eyes and a crazy smile of bad, broken teeth. Bob hated to be touched and would wheel around and punch a racer who put a hand on his shoulder. (If he'd been born years later, he could have been cast as an extra in the movie Deliverance.) But Fonty was smart, funny, and mischievously handsome, with a pencil-thin mustache, a pudgy, Clark Gable-like face, and a shark's smile. Both Flocks were exciting drivers, both presciently aware that stock car racing was about entertaining the crowds as much as beating the other guy. Bob would feel guilty for cheating the fans if he won a race by a large margin. “I know they like action and they're the ones who make stock car racing possible,” he once said. Fonty waved to fans and sometimes drove wearing madras-plaid shorts that he called his “ber-MOO-da” shorts. Younger brother Tim would soon get into the act with a live rhesus monkey named Jocko Flocko as his copilot.
Byron, in contrast to the Flocks, was the intense and mysterious introvert. He had the kind of lurid backstory that appealed to southern racing fans who loved underdogs. But he was also sullen, occasionally moody, and seemed uninterested in self-promotion. He didn't get liquored up on moonshine. He read books, for crissake. Stock car fans, as they would half a century later, wanted rowdy, defiant personalities to root for.
Bob Flock, both rowdy and defiant, had recently entered a race at Lakewood, despite the ban against drivers with criminal records. A cop recognized him and literally chased him off the track, tailing him down the straightaway in his patrol car until Flock slipped through an opening in the fence and disappeared into downtown Atlanta.
By late 1947, the Flocks were locked in a race for the NCSCC championship, until Fonty's bid got an accidental boost from Bob, who nearly killed himself.
At a mid-October race in Spartanburg, South Carolina, Bob blew a tire and crashed through a fence, taking a few other cars with him. As the entangled swarm of cars crunched and rolled, the roof of Bob's Ford caved in, crushing him inside—just as Fonty had been crushed in his Ford at Daytona six years earlier. X-rays found shattered vertebrae, and doctors encased Bob's torso in a plaster cast that became his personal prison for months. The career of the Wizard of Whiz seemed over for good.
In Bob's absence, Fonty and Red Byron swapped victories across the final weeks of the season. By December, it seemed to the public that the winner of NCSCC's 1947 championship would be determined by Bill France's final race, a twenty-five-lap contest at Jacksonville Speedway's half-mile dirt track. But a week before that race, France issued an announcement that made the race an afterthought.
As he'd promised earlier in the year, France had pulled together a nice little bonus fund to cap off the 1947 season. France took a portion of the profits from each NCSCC race and stashed it in a bank account, which, by December, held twenty-eight hundred dollars. Of that, one thousand dollars would go to the 1947 champion, the rest to be divvied up by the other top NCSCC finishers. The year-end bonuses would be paid out at a banquet in January, marking the first time in stock car history that drivers got money after the season.
Before the December 6 race in Jacksonville began, however, France announced the current point standings. The math made it clear that even with a victory, Byron would not be able to earn enough points to catch the presumptive NCSCC champ, Fonty Flock.
Fonty had only begun racing halfway through the 1947 season, competing in twenty-four races sanctioned by NCSCC and winning seven of them. Byron had raced in a total of thirty-five stock car races that year and won sixteen times. But only eighteen of those races were in France's NCSCC league. So, even though Byron won half the NCSCC races he'd entered—two more than Fonty—the mathematics of France's incentive plan worked against him. Flock was named the champ simply because Byron had raced in a number of events not sanctioned by Bill France. And if a race wasn't sanctioned by Big Bill, it didn't count. It turns out Byron's nine NCSCC victories weren't even good enough for second in France's new league. According to France's announcement prior to the Jacksonville race, Fonty Flock had accumulated 1,755 points. Next came Ed Samples and Buddy Shuman, the hard-driving moonshiner from Charlotte, with 1,460 and 1,415, respectively. Byron was way down in fourth place in the NCSCC, with 1,410 points.
Byron hoped to at least climb into second place and to collect the five hundred dollars that came with it. To do that, he'd have to soundly beat Samples and Shuman in France's last race.
Byron climbed into his Ford, angry about losing the championship, and got off to an unusually aggressive start. After just a few laps, Byron was racing side by side with “Wild Bill” Snowden, who'd beaten him back in March by just two feet at this very track. This time, Snowden lost control in the second turn. His car tumbled off the track and came to a stop on its roof. A group of teenage boys ran to the smoking wreckage just as Snowden crawled through the window with only a cut on his eye and a bruised shoulder.
Byron took the lead until Buddy Shuman started to nudge him from behind, a dangerous move that threatened to take them both out of the race. Byron wisely slid right, out of the main groove of the track, and
let Shuman pass. As soon as Shuman passed, Byron dropped down into the groove and began shoving Shuman's rear end. The two kept at it for two full laps. Finally, in the north turn, Byron gave Shuman a hard, pissed-off nudge from behind, and Shuman's car fishtailed, then swerved to the right and toward the grandstands. If not for a high retaining wall recently built in front of the grandstands, Shuman would have mowed down hundreds of spectators. Byron roared ahead and lapped the rest of the field, charging on to victory.
Afterward, Byron was restrained, but gracious and gentlemanly. “I am lucky to have Raymond Parks to back me, and I am lucky to have Red Vogt to build my car,” he said, before also thanking his pit crew chief, D. C. “Fat” Russell.
Byron had knocked Shuman out of the race, and Ed Samples had finished behind him, in fourth. But Byron's spirits sank when France did a quick calculation and announced the final NCSCC standings. France determined that Ed Samples's fourth-place finish was worth seventy points, enough to put him just ahead of Byron in the standings. Samples would be runner-up in the NCSCC behind Fonty Flock. Byron finished third, followed by Shuman, and then Bob Flock.
Byron won more races than any other stock car driver that year—in the NCSCC alone, he won as many races as Ed Samples and Fonty Flock combined. In thirty-five races, Byron's sixteen victories amounted to an incredible winning rate of 46 percent—a feat that would never be repeated in stock car racing. Samples, meanwhile, had won just two of his thirty-four NCSCC races. But he had raced in nearly twice as many France-approved events as Byron and therefore earned points even when he didn't win the race.
The message in all the math was: loyalty to Bill France meant championships—and cash. A writer for a new magazine called Speed Age was disgusted. “It is the opinion of this writer, as well as that of many others, that Red Byron was the most successful driver of stock cars this season,” he wrote in an editorial.
Driving with the Devil Page 24
