“Stock car races not held on dirt are nowheres near as impressive,” he said.
On the final day of the three-day meeting, the participants decided to come up with a new name for the organization. Byron offered up the first suggestion: the National Stock Car Racing Association, or NSCRA, which was seconded and approved. But after a break for lunch, Red Vogt offered an alternative suggestion: the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing, or NASCAR. France suggested that everyone write down some more ideas on pieces of paper, but the group ignored him and decided to put Byron's and Vogt's suggestions to a vote.
Some of the men liked the idea that Vogt's acronym could be easily pronounced. Others were concerned that it sounded too much like “NASH-car.” Nash was, at the time, an automaker, but it didn't make a very good race car. When they voted, seven men chose Byron's NSCRA; four chose Vogt's NASCAR.
Vogt and a few others quickly pointed out that a group called NSCRA already existed in Georgia. So the participants overruled Byron's idea and unanimously approved Vogt's name, NASCAR. As the new word made its entry into the American lexicon, Speed Age magazine declared in its next issue the creation of NASCAR to be “the dawn of a new era.”
“The eyes of the rest of the auto racing world will watch this experiment very closely,” the editors wrote.
Almost as an afterthought, the group chose a few members to serve in various administrative roles. Byron suggested that the group create a governing body consisting of a president, secretary, two promoters, two drivers, two car owners, and two mechanics. He then humbly nominated Bob and Fonty Flock as the two driver representatives. The group instead elected Byron and Buddy Shuman (the moonshiner from Charlotte). Red Vogt and Marshall Teague (a racer and mechanic from Daytona Beach) were chosen to represent the mechanics, and Teague was also chosen to serve as treasurer. Vogt suggested that Raymond Parks serve as one of the owner representatives, but the group ended up voting for two other car owners. Last, they chose two promoter representatives.
E. G. “Cannonball” Baker, a highly respected open-wheel racer from Indianapolis, was chosen as NASCAR's “high commissioner.” The men felt Baker's pedigree, and his lofty title, would give NASCAR an added air of legitimacy, which might help in the expected confrontations with snooty AAA. France then suggested that Bill Tuthill, a motorcycle-racing promoter he had invited down from New York, serve as secretary.
Finally came the question of who'd oversee the paperwork, file the incorporation papers, and be given authority to collect and spend money. Byron suggested the obvious: that France serve in that position, as president of the NASCAR governing body.
France never said so publicly, but he believed stock car racing could not survive as a democracy. There'd be too much infighting and what he called “dissidence.” Bill Tuthill agreed with him and before the meeting told France, “The democratic method… never worked.” France and Tuthill had therefore schemed beforehand to prevent representatives of rival organizations from taking a lead role in any new organization. To avoid getting into detailed debates over bylaws and definitions, France and Tuthill hoped to set themselves up as the new organization's top dogs. That way, they could afterward make the rules themselves. Only such an autocracy, they truly believed, could survive.
Other participants in the Ebony Room meetings wouldn't realize until later that they'd given France the power he'd always wanted. Raymond Parks was among those who later grumbled, “The next thing we know, NASCAR belongs to Bill France.”
Which, of course, had been France's plan all along.
* The anniversary of the day Alexander Hamilton proposed taxing whiskey to create the Bank of the United States in 1790. Also the day George Washington died in 1799; at the time, he was the nation's largest whiskey distiller.
There are only three sports. Bullfighting, mountain climbing
and motor racing. All the rest are merely games.
— ERNEST HEMINGWAY
13
“Racing Car Plunges
into Thron?”
H listory would eventually declare 1948 the year of NASCAR's birth and, to the gall of many who were there in the birthing j room, would dub Bill France the sport's lone, heroic founder. At the start of the 1948 season, racers and mechanics who'd only been racing for a few years indeed saw France as their sport's savior. Those who'd known France for a decade, since before the war, knew the more complicated truth.
No one could deny that France worked hard to promote his sport and his vision. Over the years, he did whatever it took to pull off a race. On race day, he was a tornado of energy, seemingly everywhere at once. He sold tickets, sodas, programs. He ran out to rescue injured drivers and constantly shooed spectators back from the track. He started taking flying lessons so he could fly to and from races and visit new tracks, meeting with local promoters interested in hosting their own NASCAR race. He would soon hire NASCAR's first public relations man, a smart smooth-talker named Houston Lawing, who would almost always refer to Red Byron as “the disabled war veteran.”
But France wasn't the only one who'd dedicated his life to the sport. Most of NASCAR's other founders had also been at it since the 1930s. For some, their obsession with stock car racing was progressively taking a significant toll.
For Red Vogt, the start of the 1948 season saw his personal life sink to new lows, depth-charged by his near-maniacal devotion to cars and engines and speed. He was among the first of his day to actually make a half-decent living as a race car mechanic. But that's all he was. Other titles—father, husband, friend—didn't apply.
Twentieth-century history books are filled with tales of iconic men, such as Henry Ford himself, who loved machines more than their wives, children, peers, or selves. Such men became singularly obsessed with the real loves of life at the expense of a so-called normal livelihood. An almost sexually charged ardor for machinery could consume the lives of men wooed by mysterious car engines, the smell of burning fuel, the whump of their exhaust. “With the gentleness of a lover, he had stuck his hands into their dark greasy mysteries,” one writer said of men such as Red Vogt. But for the mechanical genius who had recently coined the name NASCAR, who had suggested many of the new sport's rules and regulations, Vogt's devotion to Ford V-8s had grown far too deep.
Vogt and his wife, Ruth, had split years earlier, before the war. It had never been an ideal partnership. She was educated, headstrong, and impatient. He was wweducated, headstrong, and impatient. The Vogts' two sons had been raised largely by their maid, Ollie Mae, a heavyset woman who ran the household. Ollie Mae was hired to replace the previous housekeeper, who often ignored the young boys. Ruth came home one night to find one son in his crib, covered in his own feces. Ruth Vogt was rarely at home; Red, even less. On the rare nights when the couple was together for a family meal, the evening often splintered and cracked into a dissonant chirr of curses and angry voices. They screamed at the kids, at each other, at the help. Neighbors wondered how these two embittered screamers, who seemed to despise each other so intensely, had ever been able to procreate, and Ruth once confessed that both pregnancies had been accidents. Eventually, the sons—Tom and Jerry—were sent away to a military boarding school, the Georgia Military Academy. In their absence, Ruth quit managing the books at her husband's garage to pursue an interest in cosmetics. As her success in that field grew, and Red spent more and more time in his garage, the two agreed to divorce.
One side effect of the divorce was a sharp decline in Red's finances. Ruth had been a shrewd and aggressive business manager, able to collect debts from elusive moonshining clients. Red, on the other hand, was a brilliant mechanic but an inattentive businessman. He wouldn't realize how valuable she'd been to his shop until she was gone. During the breakup, Red accused her of stealing all his money, and she accused him of wasting and mismanaging it. In the end, he had to move out of the large house they'd shared in the upscale East Lake section of Atlanta and into a downtown hotel.
As a divorce, Vogt worke
d harder than ever, spending most of his days and nights at his shop. Word of Vogt's mechanical prestige spread, and customers, particularly racing fans, came from all over the Southeast just to have Vogt tune their car to perfection. One customer who drove up from Miami for some engine work had to stay in Atlanta for three days waiting for Vogt to get around to fixing his car. To pay his bills, Vogt took on so much work that he hired a staff of a half dozen mechanics, demanding that they arrive by 7:00 a.m. Vogt would be there when they arrived, and he'd still be working when some of them left twelve to sixteen hours later. After midnight, Vogt would lock himself in the back room and continue working alone. Occasionally, Vogt's young friend from the neighborhood, Billy Watson, would tag along.
Vogt ate erratically scheduled meals at the Davis Brothers Restaurant, the nearest eatery to his shop. After a marathon session with an engine, he and Watson would scuttle across the street for coffee and eggs or a steak. At Davis Brothers, he met an attractive waitress named Betty, who had escaped an alcoholic husband in Kentucky and had brought her sickly daughter, June, to the ostensibly cleaner air of Georgia.
Vogt could be foulmouthed and bitter with other men, with his wife and kids. But he could act surprisingly cordial and polite with strangers, especially women, some of whom he could charm with his hungry eyes and simple tastes. “When Red looks at me, it's like he's taking my clothes off,” a family friend once said. Apparently, the false teeth he wore—to replace those knocked out in his motorcycle-racing accident as a teen back in D.C.—shone quite a smile. Red shone that smile at Betty during his visits to her restaurant. He finally invited her on a few dates, often taking her on test-drives into the countryside in a Ford that he'd been working on. In time, she agreed to marry him.
It was an agreement she'd make and break four more times over the years. After first marrying in late 1944, they had already divorced and remarried once by the time they headed to Daytona for NASCAR's first official race in February of 1948.
Betty realized that to be with Red meant coming down to his level. Despite her dreams of a more typical postwar family life with friends and parties and vacations, she had to accept that Red had no real need for a wife. What he cared for most were engines and racing. If she wanted to be part of his life, she'd have to adopt the racing world, too. The more familiar Betty became with that world, the more she realized—as Red's first wife had—what a complicated relationship existed between Red and his childhood friend Bill France. They'd now known each other for decades and during that time had mostly remained friends, even if the friendship bore a slight sully of competitiveness and mistrust. Vogt's first wife had warned him—”I don't trust that man”— and though Vogt had initially dismissed them in anger, her words had stayed with him.
One night, a few weeks before driving to Florida for NASCAR's first race in early 1948, Betty found Red sitting at the dinner table, seething. Since he rarely came home to eat, she began putting together a family dinner. Red grumbled through the entire meal. He was pissed-off, he finally admitted, that France had created an association using his ideas, his acronym, but didn't recommend Red for one of the top positions. Instead, France had seemed almost to have conspired with Bill Tuthill, the promoter from New York—a goddamn Yankee, no less—who was now NASCAR's secretary. Maybe France felt he needed men around him with business smarts, not just car smarts. But Vogt felt that France, especially in his zeal to lure northern promoters into his southern sport, had stabbed him in the back. “He stayed mad the rest of his days,” Vogt's daughter, June Wendt, said many years later. “And yet, he loved Bill France, too.”
Despite his simmering anger at France, Vogt mostly kept his complaints to himself. Betty and June sometimes heard him loudly cussing out France over the phone, and a colleague of Vogt's remembers seeing him once punch France in the nose. But strangely, if Vogt ever overheard someone else disparaging France, he'd come to his defense, claiming that France was only doing what needed to be done for the survival of stock car racing.
“Well, you know who the hell would do any better?” he'd snarl at France's critics.
No matter how angry he might have been with France, it wasn't enough to make him quit racing. During the long drive south to Daytona in mid-February of 1948, Betty sat up front beside Red; daughter June sat in the back, looking at picture books and sleeping. Red demanded silence on such long, prerace drives and banned any chitchat or radio listening. Drive time was his thinking time, he explained, snapping at them if they tried to talk. June learned to read and spell in the backseat of the family Ford, picking out letters and words from road signs. Betty brought along self-help books on accounting, intent on teaching herself how to manage the books for Red's garage and to become, at least in some small way, a part of his NASCAR-centric world.
In the silence of that drive to Florida, Vogt had to wonder where he'd now fit in the sport he had named. He'd never been good with numbers or in business. He knew one thing: how to make a Ford V-8 surpass its own capabilities. As he reached the outskirts of Daytona, heading yet again to Big Bill's turf, his thoughts surely turned toward the race. If he was to be denied a role with NASCAR's hierarchy, there was only one place for him to exact any revenge. In this race and every other, he'd have to win—at any cost.
Vogt wasn't alone in his love-hate feelings for France. While many drivers, mechanics, and car owners were glad to see a new organization that promised to bring consistency and bigger paychecks to their sport, others were wary of France's ambitions. And none of them wanted to be at the mercy of one man. Still, what choice did they have? No one else wanted to handle the business side of things. Many had left school by their teens and didn't have the skills for the job—math, for example, or even the ability to read and write. Many moonshiner/racers wanted simply to race, not shuffle paper. So they allowed France a free hand to create NASCAR however he saw fit.
In the weeks after NASCAR's late-1947 organizational meeting at the Ebony Room, France had ironed out all the financial and corporate details. To help file the incorporation papers, he hired a lawyer, Louis Ossinsky, who was a regular customer at his Daytona Beach gas station. Few drivers knew or even cared about this paperwork stage of NASCAR's creation. But men such as Vogt and Parks knew this much: everyone at the Ebony Room meeting who didn't insist on making the short list of NASCAR's top officers and stockholders was guilty of putting the entire sport in Bill France's hands.*
NASCAR began in a forty-dollar-a-month, second-floor office atop a creaky set of stairs above a defunct bank building, where France and his lawyer decided to create one hundred shares of stock and divide it among three stockholders. Because the corporation was private, the exact details of the stock split would never be fully revealed. But it was generally understood from the start that Ossinsky received ten shares of NASCAR stock in exchange for his legal services, Tuthill received forty shares, and France took the rest, giving himself fifty shares and half ownership of the entire sport. (By this point, the NASCAR “board” that was elected back in December had become largely inert, and apparently no one questioned France's distribution of stock shares—at least not openly.)
In time, France would own all of NASCAR's shares, the start of his family's ironfisted, incredibly lucrative possession of American stock car racing. Tuthill would eventually transfer his shares to another promoter, who, after many disputes with France, would finally sell his shares to France. When Ossinsky died in 1971, France took over his shares, too. Today, NASCAR remains a France-owned business.
No one could have imagined in 1948 that NASCAR would grow to become the world's largest privately held sporting enterprise, nor that France would become a billionaire, ranking—as Henry Ford had— among America's wealthiest men. At the time, stock car racing was hardly a guaranteed moneymaker. But there were a few early suspicions that France was setting NASCAR up as his own personal cash machine.
Yet none of it would have happened without the quiet help of Raymond Parks.
One of the many
untold nuggets of NASCAR's unchronicled origins is this: Bill France sometimes needed money to finance races and pay drivers, and he sometimes borrowed that money from Parks. France knew that failing to pay drivers could doom NASCAR, just as it had doomed other race organizations of the 1940s. He needed a backup source of cash in case the ticket sales of a particular race didn't bring in enough to cover the winner's purse. Neither Parks nor France acknowledged their arrangement, but there were signs. Parks once asked Gober Sosebee to deliver a locked briefcase to France at a Daytona race. Parks refused to say what was in the case, as did France, and Parks never publicly admitted to being France's private sugar daddy. But a few of Parks's relatives and friends were aware of the arrangement and have since confirmed its existence.
Parks, therefore, more than anyone else at the time, should have expected an official role within NASCAR or at least a token share of the stock. It was true that France always paid back the money borrowed from Parks and at the time of NASCAR's creation apparently didn't owe Parks a thing. It's also true that Parks did not sit in on the organizational meetings of 1947—he was too busy talking with the pretty charm school girls. Still, he felt cheated that he, along with Vogt, had been left off the list of stockholders. He mostly kept his feelings to himself, swore those who knew of his loans to France to secrecy, and remained France's friend, intent on taking the secret matter to the grave. But he once let slip his true feelings.
“We weren't businessmen, just car owners, drivers and mechanics that wanted to race,” Parks said years later. “We had the know-how, but France had the lawyers.”
Driving with the Devil Page 26
