Driving with the Devil

by Neal Thompson

  THE MOONSHINERS AND THE REBELS

  Hard-drinking, hard-living Curtis Turner won hundreds of races and became a crowd favorite through the 1950s. He flew an airplane from race to race, once landing on Main Street in Easley, South Carolina, in search of whiskey; on takeoff, he ripped out the town's main telephone line and lost his pilot's license. He occasionally drove rental cars into motel swimming pools, befriended celebrities, and bedded beautiful women. Turner partnered with Bruton Smith in 1959 to build Charlotte Motor Speedway (later renamed Lowes Motor Speedway), but his financial management was awful—he once bounced a seventy-five thousand-dollar check—and the board of directors ousted him. In 1961, he teamed with Tim Flock and Fireball Roberts to start a drivers' union, and France banned them all from NASCAR for life. France reinstated Turner four years later, and he returned to NASCAR with a vengeance, winning his second start. In 1968, Sports Illustrated commemorated Turner's career by putting his face on the cover, calling him “King of the Wild Road” and “the Babe Ruth of stock car racing.” Turner was killed in a plane crash in 1970.

  Junior Johnson became NASCAR's most famous moonshining racer, considered by many to be the best driver in NASCAR's history. Born into a notorious bootlegging family from North Wilkesboro, he began winning NASCAR races in the mid-1950s, including five Grand National wins in 1955, until a moonshining conviction in 1956 sent him off to Chillicothe federal prison in Ohio, the same prison that had held Raymond Parks twenty years earlier. Johnson was released a year later and in late 1958 began winning once more, including three in a row that fall and 1960's Daytona 500. Johnson became the subject of Tom Wolfe's 1964 profile in Esquire, “The Last American Hero Is Junior Johnson. Yes!” But a year later, Johnson abruptly quit racing, at age thirty-three, after winning his fiftieth Grand National race. He soon began a second act as owner of his own successful racing team. In 1972, he introduced R. J. Reynolds tobacco company to Bill France, the result of which was RJR's longtime sponsorship of NASCAR's Grand National division, which became the Winston Cup. In 1985, Ronald Reagan issued a presidential pardon that cleared Johnson's 1956 moonshining conviction.*

  Marshall Teague, NASCAR's first treasurer, after initiating the complaints about NASCAR's payouts in 1949, had defected to AAA and was named AAA's stock car champ in 1954. When AAA's stock car circuit ended, he switched to Indy cars and raced at Indy throughout the mid-1950s. In 1959, he was preparing to race his Indy car in a NASCAR-sponsored Indy race at Daytona. He met with France to discuss a return to NASCAR and stock cars, which France agreed to consider. But first, he wanted Teague to try breaking the closed-course speed record (of 176.8 miles per hour) at Daytona International Speedway. France figured it would be great publicity for the new track. While attempting that record, Teague crashed into the wall and was killed. He was thirty-seven.

  Fireball Roberts, one of the most dominant racers of the 1950s, and one of the last to have Red Vogt as his mechanic, briefly stood fast with Curtis Turner and Tim Flock in the 1961 effort to start a union. But

  Roberts resigned as union president, and France allowed him to return to NASCAR. Three years later, at Curtis Turner's Charlotte Motor Speedway, Roberts tried to steer away from the spinning car of Junior Johnson. He collided with Ned Jarrett, and both cars exploded into flames. Jarrett quickly escaped from his car and rushed to help Roberts, who was trapped inside. “My God, Ned, help me! I'm on fire!” he screamed. He died six weeks later and was buried a few blocks from Daytona Speedway, one hundred yards away from Marshall Teague's grave.

  Other NASCAR defectors, including Gober Sosebee and Ed Samples, applied for reinstatement to NASCAR in the early 1950s and raced for a few more years before leaving the stock car world to run their garages. Buddy Shuman lasted the longest, racing into the mid-1950s before taking on an administrative role overseeing Ford Motor Company's NASCAR racing program. But the night before a 1956 race in North Carolina, he fell asleep while smoking in his hotel room and died in the ensuing fire.

  Billy Watson, the “kid” who used to hang around Red Vogt's garage and whom Roy Hall taught to drive, ran moonshine in the mid-1940s but joined the Marines in 1948 to avoid an indictment on liquor charges. After his return in 1951, he started running numbers, driving Raymond Parks's Cadillac—the one Red Byron had raced in 1949. He was busted in that car in a sting operation and spent seven months behind bars. He considered a racing career after his release, but Parks warned him, “You wanna be broke the rest of your life? If you do, you stay with racing.” Instead, Watson created a chain of “Billy's” restaurants throughout Atlanta and became very wealthy. He remained friends with Parks, whom he always called “boss.”

  ROY HALL

  After his critical head injury in the final race of 1949, Hall incredibly returned to race at Darlington in 1952. He drove the only Desoto (numbered “22,” in homage to Red Byron) in a field of sixty-six cars. After problems with tires and fuel, he pulled out less than halfway through the race and finished forty-eighth. Except for an ill-advised return to Lakewood in 1960, where he broke an axle and wrecked, he never raced again. “It's a shame about Roy,” a retired Dawsonville whiskey tripper once said. “Folks say he never really was the same after Lloyd Seay's death.” Hall lived in downtown Atlanta and sold cars—mostly Chevrolets, which was an ironic career choice for someone who had spent his youth fleeing revenuers and winning scores of races exclusively in Fords. In 1972, Jim Croce immortalized Hall—”Yeah, Roy so cool that racin' fool he don't know what fear's about”—with his song “Rapid Roy (The Stock Car Boy).” He died in 1992 at seventy-two.

  DAWSONVILLE, GEORGIA-AND MOONSHINE

  After World War II, moonshining arrests shot upward again in the late 1940s and early 1950s, approaching Prohibition-era levels. For many decades, an unwritten code of ethics existed among southern moonshiners, many of whom aspired to create a quality product. But the postwar years saw a decline in scruples: an outbreak of poisoned moonshine in Atlanta in 1951 was blamed for the deaths of forty-two people.

  Curtis Turner and Junior Johnson remained the poster boys for moonshining racers through the 1950s and ′60s. Two years after Turner's death, NASCAR saw the arrest of its last known moonshiner, Martinsville, Virginia's Buddy Arrington, busted in 1972.

  Dawsonville's influence on NASCAR seemed dead and gone, until 1988, when Bill Elliott—”Awesome Bill from Dawsonville”—became NASCAR's champion, exactly fifty years after Lloyd Seay's “championship.” In 1991, Elliott drove his number 9 car to victory at Daytona, exactly fifty years after Dawsonville moonshiner Bernard Long had raced his own number 9 car to victory there—just two of the six Dawsonville natives to win at Daytona. Photos and news clippings of Elliott today plaster the walls of the Dawsonville Pool Hall, among clippings and photos of Seay, Hall, Parks, Samples, Sosebee, and others. It has become a museum of sorts honoring the symbiotic heyday of stock cars and moonshine.

  Local race fans built a twelve million-dollar museum called “Thunder Road” in 2002, displaying a couple of Raymond Parks's cars. But the venture failed, and Thunder Road is now home to Dawsonville's City Hall. Dawsonville hosts an annual Moonshine Festival, which draws old-timers and replica whiskey cars.

  NASCAR, meanwhile, continues to downplay the original link between southern moonshine and the sport's creation. In a DVD called The History of NASCAR, the narrator praises the young and talented drivers of the fifties who no longer had the “unsavory pedigree of a bootlegger.” And yet, NASCAR's search for profit led to a 2005 decision to lift a ban against hard liquor companies' sponsoring race cars. Fans now cheer for whiskey cars once more: the number 07 Jack Daniels car and the number 7 Jim Beam car, both of them Chevrolets.

  FORD MOTOR COMPANY

  After getting soundly beaten by Oldsmobile, Plymouth, and Hudson through the early 1950s, Ford introduced a new overhead valve V-8 in 1955 and jumped back into the world of stock car racing, sponsoring the race cars of Junior Johnson, Curtis Turner, and Fireball Roberts. Chevrolet also came
on board in 1955 when it introduced a compact but powerful “small block” overhead valve V-8 that was deemed even better than Ford's. Ford and Chevy soon were getting beaten by even faster Chrysler engines. The carmakers of Detroit, after being introduced to NASCAR when France brought his first race there in 1951, were all financing NASCAR teams by the mid-1950s. But then came AAAs 1955 decision to pull out of racing, followed by news reports that fifty thousand people were now dying each year on U.S. highways. Carmakers began to receive bad press for their role in NASCAR racing, and under pressure from the Automobile Manufacturers' Association, Ford, Chrysler, and GM all pulled out of NASCAR by 1957 and would not return until the following decade.

  In the 1960s, Henry Ford's grandson, Henry II, led Ford Motor Company back to the sport that its creator so famously “never really thought much of.” Fords are now a mainstay of the NASCAR circuit, although in the first years of the twenty-first century, they've been far outnumbered by Chevys and Dodges. The champions of 2003 and 2004 were both driving Fords, but Chevy has twenty-two championship cars compared to Ford's eight. Ford today cohosts NASCAR's annual UAW-FORD 500 at Talladega Superspeedway (near Red Byron's old hometown), an ironic collaboration between Ford and the United Auto Workers, given Henry Ford's notorious union-busting efforts.

  Ford Motor Company's century-long presence in Atlanta seemed to be ending. In early 2006, Henry Ford's great-grandson, William Clay Ford, announced plans to lay off thousands and close fourteen factories, including its assembly plant outside Atlanta.

  THE CO-FOUNDERS

  RED VOGT

  In 1951, Vogt had briefly considered Bill France's offer to run a Nash car dealership in Florida and to help France start a Nash racing team. But the two longtime friends and occasional foes could never agree on the details, and the precarious partnership fell apart with the men screaming into their respective telephones.

  Vogt remained in Atlanta, working on customers' cars and the occasional race car, until 1954, when he moved to Daytona Beach to work for the well-known carburetor maker Bob Fish, whose drivers included Fireball Roberts. A year later, Fireball Roberts won the season-opening race at Daytona, giving the Fish Carburetor shop its first Grand National victory. But twenty-four hours later, NASCAR commissioner Cannonball Baker announced that Roberts was disqualified. Inspectors had spent all night tearing apart Roberts's Vogt-tuned engine and found a push rod that was .0016 of an inch too short. They gave the victory to Tim Flock and his Chrysler. This was an ironic twist, since Flock had resigned from NASCAR after the previous year's Daytona race, accusing France of disqualifying him in order to award a victory to another manufacturer's car. Vogt suspected—just as Tim Flock had in 1954—that France wanted a Chrysler to win the race and had instructed his inspectors to keep dismantling Roberts's car until they found something to disqualify. It's just as likely that France knew Vogt well enough to believe that if he looked long and hard enough, he'd find a rule violation.

  In the wake of that loss, Vogt left Daytona to work in Charlotte for Indy-racing legend Peter DePaolo, who was starting a Ford-sponsored NASCAR team and wanted Vogt as his mechanic. For the 1956 season, DePaolo hired racers Fireball Roberts, Curtis Turner, and Turner's pugnacious friend Joe Weatherly to drive his Vogt-built cars. He also hired a talented mechanic named Ralph Moody, whom Vogt allowed to join his car-building team. Ford factory officials soon decided to add their own guy, John Holman, to keep an eye on Ford's investment. Knowing that Vogt wouldn't agree to partner with a third mechanic, DePaolo was purposely vague about what Holman's exact role would be. One night, Vogt worked on Curtis Turner's car, finished at 5:00 a.m., and went home for a few hours of sleep. When he returned to the shop, he found Holman tinkering on his car. He argued with Holman, marched into DePaolo's office, and quit. Holman and Moody later left DePaolo to form their own racing team, taking Turner and Roberts with them.*

  After quitting DePaolo's team, Vogt immediately got a call from Tim Flock's sponsor, Carl Kiekhaefer, asking him to work for his Chrysler-Dodge team. Kiekhaefer was a control freak who made his drivers wear uniforms and abide by curfews. Vogt didn't seem to mind the strict culture, and he helped Kiekhaefer's Chryslers dominate NASCAR during the mid-1950s. That success infuriated France, who had initially wanted Chrysler to join NASCAR but didn't want one carmaker winning all of NASCAR's events. France also knew that the cars had been worked on by Vogt and were therefore suspect. He frequently called for inspections of Vogt's Chryslers, until Kiekhaefer quit NASCAR in frustration after the 1957 season and dismantled his team.

  Vogt returned to Daytona to work for Smokey Yunick, who called Vogt “Merlin” and “the granddaddy of NASCAR mechanics.” Yunick understood that Vogt, now in his fifties, “couldn't handle the bullshitting and political ass-kissing. He was a simple man [who] refused to or couldn't accept the ‘new world’ we got flung into.” Unfortunately, in the new NASCAR, you had to play politics. Vogt soon left Yunick's shop— Yunick may have understood Vogt, but the two headstrong masters never quite meshed as partners—and in 1958 opened a new garage, where he would spend the next dozen years building special-order racing engines and working on everyday passenger cars.

  Vogt retired in 1970 and in the late 1980s managed to rekindle a lukewarm friendship with France, whom he'd known since France was still in utero. The man he once called “watermelon” was now a powerful billionaire; Vogt, on the other hand, lived modestly in the shadow of Daytona Speedway with the woman he'd married five times.

  Their different circumstances and many disagreements over the years couldn't undo a deep-rooted connection. Bill France was diagnosed with Alzheimer's, which progressed through the late 1980s, and as his health got worse, he would call his old friend Vogt frequently. Vogt hated to see his formerly cocky and burly friend slowly deteriorate. Once, after visiting France in person and sitting beside his bed and talking about the simple old days of racing, Vogt came home and “cried like a baby,” his daughter, June Wendt, recalled. Despite all their battles, “He loved Bill France,” she said. Vogt, a chain-smoker for many decades, died of cancer in 1991. He was eighty-seven.

  RED BYRON

  Byron seemed to feel no sorrow or regret when he left NASCAR after the 1951 season. In fact, he seemed relieved to be moving on. Friends speculated that the ghost of seven-year-old Roy Brannon haunted every race, and many believed he “lost heart” after that tragedy. The NASCAR community had never entirely been his home. Though born in the South, he wasn't raised a southerner, and moonshine never ran in his blood as it had for his patron, his mechanic, and so many of his peers. When he walked away, it was sudden, and without emotion. He and Raymond Parks, after five years as partners and one near-death experience in Mexico, did not call each other up or meet for beers or write letters. Byron never attended NASCAR races as a spectator. He simply drifted south.

  Byron finally followed through on his promise to move his wife to Florida and to buy her a house near the ocean. With their son, and now two daughters, Red and Nell moved to West Palm Beach in the mid-1950s where Red took a job with a millionaire sportsman named Briggs Cunningham, a longtime patron of sports car and open-wheel racing. Cunningham wanted to develop a new top-of-the-line sports car—an American version of Italy's Ferrari—to race at the premier events around the world, such as Le Mans. Cunningham built a factory in an airplane hangar in Palm Beach and, in addition to hiring Byron, brought aboard racing legend Phil Walters, a World War II POW with one lung who had frequently raced stock cars under the nom de guerre Ted Tappett (to avoid the wrath of his wealthy Long Island family, who thought stock cars were dirty).

  Cunningham introduced Byron to a world of wealth, and he mingled amid the gentlemanly side of motorsports. His friends included famous Indy and Grand Prix racers and racer-playboys such as Porfirio Rubirosa. He was hardly in their league but was earning enough for a few luxuries, including a spectacular two-seater Mercedes ragtop. Byron developed a taste for nice clothes and fine wine and got to know the best restaurants
of South Florida. But after the 1955 tragedy at Le Mans, Cunningham decided to close his factory, and Byron went job hunting.

  After leaving Cunningham, Byron—now smitten with fancy race cars—worked for a racing team started by Chevrolet for its new sports car, the Corvette. He then opened Red Byron Automotive in Lake Worth, Florida, and worked on the sports cars of wealthy patrons. His love of racing never entirely left him, and he traveled often and for extended periods to work as a mechanic for Sports Car Club of America teams, which raced expensive sports cars on squiggly tracks. He also drove open-wheel cars in a few late-1950s Grand Prix races, including the prestigious “12 Hours of Sebring” in Florida.

  Red Vogt used to joke that the Japanese had collected so much American scrap metal for making bombs in World War II—including old Fords—that the first jagged hunk the doctors had pulled out of Byron's wounded leg had the word Ford stamped into it. Recycled bits of Ford or not, the remnants of shrapnel still buried in Byron's hip continued to affect his health—and happiness. The withered leg always determined whether it'd be a good day or bad, whether he'd be his usual upbeat and confident self or, as Vogt once observed, “If he wasn't feeling good, he wouldn't say nothin' to nobody.”

  Byron's health continued to decline in the late 1950s, and he suffered a heart attack in Texas, then another in California, and came home on a stretcher. Doctors insisted that he rest, travel less, slow down. He ignored them.

  In 1960, he received a call from Anheuser-Busch, which was considering a sports car team and wanted to hire Byron. He flew to Chicago for a series of meetings. Afterward the Anheuser-Busch people threw a party for the prospective team at a downtown convention hall. Byron caught a chill and went back to his hotel room to rest. He called the front desk to ask them to turn up the heat, and then he lay down.