And Byron had to wonder, as did his wife: Would the leg hold out for one more season? Could his body? He would soon turn thirty-four. He had high blood pressure and a weak heart. Army doctors had warned him to go easy on his body, to find a desk job. Instead, he'd pursued one of the most punishing careers a crippled war vet could choose. And now he was facing postwar upstarts ten years younger, such as Tim Flock and Curtis Turner, both twenty-four.
Byron still received a monthly disability check from the army. It was small recompense for his permanent injury, but it helped offset his otherwise shabby income level. He had surely read the recent story in the Saturday Evening Post in which Fonty bragged of making between ten thousand and fifteen thousand dollars a year from stock car racing. Even if Fonty was exaggerating, Byron made nowhere near that much. Despite his many victories and his championship season, he still was sharing income from his death-defying stunts with Parks. He was beginning to feel the downside of that arrangement.
When Robert Jr. was born, a few days after Christmas, Byron decided to heed his wife's advice. He met with Parks and told him it was time for them to part ways. He was going to open his own mechanic shop in downtown Atlanta. And instead of racing Parks's number 22 Ford, he would cut back on his racing schedule and begin driving his own race car, also a Ford. Instead of using Vogt, he would be his own mechanic. He wouldn't have to share his winnings with anyone. The number he planned to paint on the door was number 1.
Byron's Speed Shop opened on Hemphill Avenue, not far from Red Vogt's place. Byron had grown beyond his status as a racing oddity into an unlikely southern folk hero. In the sports headlines, he'd become “the Old Master,” and Byron counted on his name recognition to lure customers to his shop.
Byron's other stab at domestic peacemaking (and moneymaking) was to visit Atlanta's new, quarter-mile, red-clay racetrack for a chat with the manager. The Peach Bowl was scheduled to open in north Atlanta in 1949, and manager Ray Shoemaker planned to host weekly midget racers, smaller versions of the open-wheel Indy cars. Midgets were easier for a one-legged racer to drive, requiring fewer pumps of the clutch pedal. Byron offered to race once a week at the Peach Bowl, which would draw fans and make some money for Shoemaker. In exchange, Byron would get to do something he loved, but closer to home.
That was the plan, anyway. To stay close to home. Build up a customer base. Join the family for dinner. Race at the Peach Bowl and a handful of other nearby tracks.
But, thanks to Bill France, Byron's new, lower-key lifestyle would not last.
For a decade, stock car racing had been sustained by a pure, very southern us-versus-them attitude. “Us” was the drivers, mechanics, owners, promoters, and fans. “Us” was poor-as-red-dirt farmers, grammar school dropouts, men who knew a mule from an ass. If “us” hadn't made moonshine, “us” had sure as hell tasted it. “Them” was anyone trying to get in the way: revenue agents, Yankees, the AAA, the police. In 1949, “them” was also bankers, lawyers, and more Yankees. That's because 1949 would introduce the previously inconceivable notion that there was real money to be made in stock cars.
Bill France had earned a decent profit during 1948, NASCAR's first season. But 1949 became the year Bill France defected to truly become one of them.
France still worked hard on the nuts and bolts of promoting his sport. He still scurried around on race day, selling everything from tickets to hot dogs. But France was also becoming more sophisticated and savvy by the day. After learning to fly, he had recently bought himself a new single-engine airplane to fly to and from races. He wisely remained good friends with Bernie Kahn, the sportswriter for the Daytona Beach News-Journal. And as 1949 began, France seemed almost to be gloating about it all.
“Stock car racing has boomed beyond anyone's wildest dreams,” he said. “And I feel that we are in for another big year.”
Indeed, more people would attend stock car races in 1949 than ever. That meant NASCAR would start collecting fatter sacks of cash, and France would take steps toward his first million. But the drivers would take no such steps, and the fight over stock car racing's growing profits would turn 1949 into a season of chaos, with rifts between France and his racers leading to threats, lawsuits, ultimatums, and other nastiness.
In mid-January of 1949, Byron said good-bye to his wife and infant son and drove to Daytona Beach for an awards ceremony, at which Bill France distributed bonus checks for the 1948 season. NASCAR had taken in sixty-four thousand dollars from the previous year's ticket sales, and, as promised, France had put aside five thousand dollars of that for his end-of-year “point fund.”
The top-twenty drivers of 1948, along with their mechanics and sponsors, attended the banquet, held at Daytona's Country Club, their oil-stained fingers clutching cigarettes and cocktail glasses, their ill-fitting suits obvious declarations that they were not club members. After dinner, France quieted the crowd with a tap on his water glass.
Bill Tuthill, NASCAR's secretary and France's right-hand man, took over as emcee and explained, somewhat defensively, that the point fund was no fairy tale. “OK, you guys, this is the point fund you've heard about,” he said, holding aloft a thick stack of bank checks, each with a stock car racer's name on it. “I don't care if it takes four hours, you're going to get your money right here in front of everybody.”
In recent weeks, Tuthill had become increasingly wary of the whispers among drivers about all that NASCAR money sitting in France's bank account. Tuthill told France the drivers knew how easy it'd be for them to “take some money off the top.” After all, promoters had been stealing from the drivers for years. Tuthill warned France that if they didn't “keep everything totally above board,” a suspicious driver might sue them and tie up their funds. So they had decided to write the checks weeks before the banquet, to legally and symbolically assure drivers that the money was coming their way.
Tuthill then called the sport's first champ to the podium, and Byron rose from his seat and hobbled forward, dragging his bad leg amid the cheers of his colleagues. Cannonball Baker, NASCAR's commissioner, handed Byron a shiny, three-foot-tall bronze trophy with a miniature ′39 Ford on top and “champion” etched into it.
It was a significant moment in motorsports history. After years of being tossed about with abandon, the term national champion actually, finally meant something. Without a truly national organization—such as Major League Baseball, formed in 1920 to oversee the American and National leagues—and without a defining year-end contest such as the World Series or football's Super Bowl, the naming of stock car champs had for ten years been a bit of a joke. The trophy declaring Byron the champion of 1948 marked the first time that stock car racing crowned a legitimate single national champ.
France took the microphone, praised Byron's victorious season, and handed him a check for $1,250. Byron was gracious and uttered a few words of thanks, then limped back to his table. At a time when the average annual income in America was less than $10,000, the bonus would have been a welcome dose of cash for the Byron clan—if two-thirds of it didn't belong to Raymond Parks, leaving Byron with just $416.
France and Tuthill then began handing out the rest of the checks, starting with $600 to Fonty for second place and $400 to his brother Tim, who'd finished third.
Afterward, the numbers confounded some of the drivers, at least those who could do math. The top-five finishers of 1948 together won thirty-six out of NASCAR's fifty-two races. Those five men shared $2,700, which meant each of their victories was worth a bonus of just $75. The other fifteen top finishers each received checks of $100 or less. France had intended for the year-end bonuses to inspire drivers' loyalty, to keep them committed to NASCAR and prevent them from wandering off into non-NASCAR events. France would soon learn that it took more than $75 per victory to buy drivers' loyalty.
The question of NASCAR's profitability was one that Raymond Parks was pondering more and more. About the time that Red Byron was receiving his bonus check and trophy, a short news article
appeared in the Atlanta Journal, praising Parks, the “Atlanta sportsman,” as one of the city's finest businessmen and community leaders.
“We congratulate Mr. Parks on his record and sincerely hope that his career will be as colorful and completely successful in the years ahead as it has been in the past,” the writer puffed. It was unclear whether “colorful” was a veiled reference to the origins of Parks's success.
In the late 1940s, moonshine still gushed in riverlike quantities from Dawsonville into the homes and nip joints of Atlanta, and beyond. Though liquor in America had been legalized for sixteen years, homemade liquor was still a no-no. Uncle Sam wanted his cut, and the makers of untaxed whiskey were still aggressively pursued by revenue agents throughout the South. In fact, Georgia led the nation with the most moonshining violations in 1948, followed closely by North Carolina, Alabama, and South Carolina.
For Parks, that world was now solidly part of his past, a memory up on a shelf. It had been years since Parks had brokered in untaxed whiskey. He'd quit running numbers, too. The illegal lottery business, the so-called bug, was also now a relic among the many unspoken stories in his rise to prominence.
But the world of crime had served him very well. Except for his three months in jail at age fourteen, and his nine months in prison, he had been lucky. He had snubbed and taunted the law for more than a decade, had earned hundreds of thousands of dollars, and could have paid a much higher price than twelve months behind bars. In fact, learning to read, write, and do math during his 1936-1937 prison term had actually helped him become a legitimate businessman. Parks called it “going to college.”
His “Novelty Company” now earned its substantial profits by supplying equipment to Atlanta's legal bars and taverns. Parks rented out scores of coin-operated Wurlitzer and Seeburg phonographs—which in the 1930s had earned the name jukebox—along with hundreds of cigarette machines, pinball machines, and pool tables to taverns, VFW halls, and private clubs. He and his brother would drive around collecting bags filled with millions of coins, which they'd sort in machines at his office. He also owned at least a half dozen liquor stores. Even if he'd had to pay off some politicians and put the stores in the names of friends or family members, he was now a mostly legal and respected beneficiary of the South's taste for liquor.
At age thirty-five, he attended civic meetings and knew Mayor Hartsfield, the police chief, and various judges by name. He had purchased many acres of land in northwest Atlanta, around Georgia Tech University. He'd even begun giving away some of his fortune, donating large sums to north Atlanta churches and other charities.
Parks had grown, financially and socially, far beyond the crass world of stock cars. Yet there he was, each weekend drawn to some dusty track, in the stands among rowdy, drunken fans. At these raunchy affairs, Raymond Parks—the civic leader, noble citizen, and philanthropist—mingled among the likes of Buddy Shuman, the moonshiner with the mangled hand who once served on a chain gang after getting shot by police.
It would have been easier to rationalize the strange, magnetic pull that stock cars had on him if he had been making money off his hobby. But the truth was, he was still only breaking even on his investment—if that. He had learned enough about business to know when to dump money-losing enterprises. He'd rid himself without emotion of his Polar Bar ice cream shops and a few other business experiments that began losing money.
Racing was different. On paper, his stock car investment was a financial failure. But he knew that Red Vogt, Red Byron, and Bob Flock were all counting on him. They had become members of his dysfunctional family.* And soon, Parks would be rejoined at those tracks by the most infamous and dysfunctional southern bootlegger of all.
Cousin Roy Hall was scheduled to be released from prison in late 1949.
Parks was used to dealing with men incapable of living normal lives. He'd returned from war to learn that Roy Hall, in his absence, had wandered across to the dark side, crossing the line between bootlegger and full-fledged criminal. Before that, he'd watched his intelligent, widowed father drink himself silly.
Parks also knew how an addiction to stock cars could damage a man's life. He watched Vogt grapple with relationships, money, and life in general and witnessed Red Byron's struggles with his demon leg and the ghost of Roy Brannon. Parks knew that Vogt was partly estranged from his own kids, and that Byron was trying not to fall into the same trap. Parks himself was now on his fourth wife. His only son, now a teenager, lived with his first wife. He'd see Ray Jr. now and then, but his son didn't care much for racing. It was understandable, then, for Parks to wholeheartedly believe that Vogt and Byron might not make it without his patronage. They were all three alike, incapable of releasing the grip that racing had somehow gotten on their very souls.
The simple truth was that the three men needed one another. Byron needed a wealthy patron for his car and a great mechanic for speed. Vogt needed someone willing to pay extra for his expertise and a driver who could handle the finished product. And Parks needed the best driver and mechanic in the business, men who'd help him win races, maybe earn back some of his investment, or at least witness glory.
Because racing had become more than a fever.
Those weekend trips to Langhorne, Daytona, and Wilkesboro, the trophies now filling his office shelves, the newspaper clippings, and the postrace parties with groupies and beauty queens … it was strange and new, sassy and risky. Maybe Parks missed his old bootlegging days, the car chases with revenue agents, and couldn't quite bring himself to shun his daredevil side. Maybe stock cars satisfied some deep, southern instinct. Or maybe, as one southern writer put it, Parks “found God in cars, or if not the true God, one so satisfying, so powerful and awe-inspiring that the distinction is too fine to matter.”
Whatever it was, Parks felt powerless to deny his passion. “What else was I gonna do?” he once pondered aloud. “Stay home and listen to radio?”
Byron must have asked himself the same question. The answer, of course, was no. Despite his best intentions—stay home, race less, start a business—Byron realized that racing was undeniably his life's devotion as well.
Racetracks were his church. And victory was his salvation.
Byron met with Parks again just before the 1949 racing season began. Together, they negotiated his return to the Parks-Vogt team, and Parks agreed to share a larger cut of Byron's winnings. The three seemed relieved to be reunited and optimistic about a new season of worship at the altar of speed.
None of them foresaw Bill France's plan to make their church entirely his own.
* Parks had recently lost a member of that family. On a cold winter night, Byron's mechanic, Fat Russell, had pulled his car into a garage beneath Parks's office, presumably to keep warm. He closed the door and left the engine running. Russell, a hard-core drinker, must have passed out. They found him the next morning.
We are the first nation in the history of the world to
go to the poorhouse in an automobile.
— Wi LL ROGERS
15
The first race, a bootlegger,
and a disqualification
N lASCAR had compiled an incredibly busy schedule for 1949, with nearly four hundred races. Entrepreneurs were opening new racetracks all over the Southeast and in turn begging France to schedule a NASCAR race there. Local promoters who wanted to schedule their own race were also seeking out France, requesting that he “sanction” their event. NASCAR expanded into new markets every day.
At established racetracks such as North Wilkesboro in North Carolina, Martinsville in Virginia, and Spartanburg in South Carolina, ten thousand to twenty thousand fans came from far and wide to pay two dollars or more apiece to get through the gates. Fans began arriving a day or two before a race, sleeping in their cars or tents, staking out prime viewing spots beside the track. One writer observed that as race day approached, the parking lot outside the tracks resembled a Civil War encampment, and word began to spread that a NASCAR race was more t
han just a race. It was a party, a circus, a jamboree, all in one.
With five to ten such races scheduled each week, NASCAR was beginning to take in more money than Bill France could ever have imagined.
NASCAR's expenses were growing, too. France found an insurance agency that agreed to cover drivers' hospital bills. The cost to NASCAR was one hundred dollars per race, and France had to promise the insurance company that he'd host at least three hundred races, guaranteeing the insurance company a total payment of thirty thousand dollars. Also, since NASCAR didn't own any racetracks, essentially borrowing other tracks, France had to share profits with local promoters and track owners. He had to stash some of his profits in the escrow account for the year-end points fund, and he had to make sure he always had enough to cover the winners' purses, somewhere around two thousand dollars per race.
Still, even after all the expenses, NASCAR was collecting many thousands of dollars per race and tens of thousands each week overall. Early in the 1949 season, NASCAR's own treasurer, the Daytona Beach racer Marshall Teague—who had won the 1949 season opener at Daytona— raised what seemed like a logical question:
Driving with the Devil Page 30
