Driving with the Devil

by Neal Thompson

  Sean and Leo cover their ears. A huge gust of hot, gritty wind follows the pack. Drivers call it “dirty air,” and that backdraft of dust, smoke, and microscopic rubber swarms over us, forcing us to squint as the blast knocks off hats and sunglasses, topples cans. A kid in front of us decked out in Jeff Gordon gear turns around grinning; we learn it's his first race, too. His dad, in Dale Earnhardt Jr. gear, puffs out his chest, as if he were absorbing the tsunami of debris-filled air into his very soul. As if it were pure oxygen, the breath that sustains him. But it's soon clear that my sons don't quite get it.

  “I'm getting a little bit bored,” Leo says a hundred miles into the race. “All it is is going around and around and around.” Adds Sean: “When are they going to go faster?”

  My sons, with their Yankee-tinged ennui, are clearly part of an ever-shrinking minority. In living rooms across America, millions of men and, increasingly, women—drawn by studly youngsters such as Earnhardt, Tony Stewart, and Ryan Newman—are at this moment watching the same race, contributors to NASCAR's $2.8 billion TV contract (which will jump to $4.8 billion in 2007), boosters to NASCAR TV ratings that are double those of baseball, basketball, or hockey, and growing.

  Though Sean and Leo aren't yet converts, they can at least at some future date (say, while wooing some southern belle) claim to have personally partaken in the number two spectator sport in America, on its way to overtaking football as number one.

  Back in 2001, NASCAR received an unintended boost from former wild child and high school dropout Dale Earnhardt, who had become a NASCAR legend and a multimillionaire. He was modern NASCAR's icon, its Babe Ruth.

  Then, on the final lap of the 2001 Daytona 500, Earnhardt's two teammates—snake-bit veteran Michael Waltrip and Earnhardt's rising-star son, Dale Jr.—sped toward a one-two finish. While trying to block other cars and protect his teammates' apparent victory, Earnhardt's black number 3 car—all thirty-four hundred pounds, traveling at 180 miles an hour—got nicked in the butt, veered left toward the infield, and then shot hard right, up the bank and straight into the concrete wall. A split second later, Waltrip took the checkered flag, the first of his career, followed a few feet later by Dale Jr.

  Fans stood to see Dale Sr. emerge from his wrecked car and wave. Heck, he'd survived worse-looking wrecks than this. Instead, they waited. As they watched a blue tarp being draped over the number 3, they reluctantly, nervously shuffled toward the exits. Soon, the world learned he was dead. It was NASCAR's most painful loss, and fans to this day will shed tears at the memory of Earnhardt's death.

  I've given a lot of thought to what sustains Earnhardt's posthumous, perpetual legend. I've visited his hometown and his former racing headquarters outside Charlotte. I've studied his squinting, Clint Eastwood-like photographs. The Man in Black and the Intimidator, they called him, and he remains—four years dead—NASCAR's biggest star. But why? Even his son, who had a mediocre year in 2005, is one of the most popular drivers. A ten thousand-dollar fine for saying “shit” on national TV only improved his rock-star image. My view is that the Earnhardt family, but especially the Intimidator, represents the outlaw spirit that helped create NASCAR in the first place. Dale Sr. was the modern incarnation of Lloyd Seay, Red Byron, Curtis Turner, and especially Roy Hall. Born and raised in the South, Earnhardt had dropped out of school to work at the local mill. But he managed to escape the drab life of his peers because he learned to tame the V-8 beast.

  When he died—partly because he died, and NASCAR became national news—NASCAR continued its explosive growth as America's sport. NASCAR fans are wildly attracted to their visceral, animal, sexual romp of power and noise, all oomph and brightly painted cars bumping, nudging, and scraping in a high-speed dance. As one modern NASCAR observer said, “Fans get a few beers in ‘em, the Dixie comes out.”

  One of the attendees at NASCAR's 1947 organizational meeting once said that stock car racing was “kind of like country music. Nobody likes it except the public.” Maybe my sons are just too young, or too short on Dixie mojo. Whatever the reason, with a hundred miles left in the Golden Corral 500, they ask to leave.

  In a sense, I feel I've failed to properly indoctrinate them into the sport whose roots I've spent three years exploring. I try a few statistics on them: the concussive wails pulsing from forty-three engines together equal more than thirty thousand horsepower, enough to blast a rocket into space. Each car gets four to six miles a gallon. Inside, the temperatures reach 150 degrees, and drivers are on their way to losing five to ten pounds. Each driver will grind through thirty to forty tires, each tire worth a dozen of those on our car (about four hundred dollars). Then I explain how a NASCAR rookie named Kasey Kahne nearly won this race back in 2004, after he was hired to replace legendary Bill Elliott— “Awesome Bill from Dawsonville.” With his third-place finish in 2004's Golden Corral 500, Kahne became one of the few drivers in NASCAR history to earn three top-five finishes in his first four races. The first to accomplish that feat was Red Byron in 1949.

  My sons nod politely, wait to make sure I'm finished, then ask again if it's time to leave. We extract ourselves from Atlanta Motor Speedway, passing an entire trailer dedicated to selling Dale Earnhardt memorabilia. I stop at the trailer selling Jack Daniels merchandise and pick up a T-shirt for my dad.

  While driving north toward Atlanta, we learn that the race has been won by Carl Edwards, one of many up-and-comers trying to fill Earnhardt's big shoes. Like many current racers, Edwards is handsome, toothy, charismatic, and well spoken. He's from Missouri, not the South. He won the previous day's minor league “Busch” series race and does backflips off his car after victories. His team owner loves him: “He's a hunk,” says Edwards's team president, Geoff Smith. “They're all good-looking.”

  Though I'm a bit disappointed to have missed Edwards's backflip, I take comfort in the fact that he was driving a Ford. Although Chevys and Dodges outnumber them, Fords are solidly back in the NASCAR game. There's the Sharpie Ford, the Viagra Ford, the UPS Ford, the Combos Ford, and my favorite, the Trex USG Sheetrock Ford—USG being the company that once employed Red Byron's father. USG also co-hosts the annual USG Sheetrock 400 race at Chicagoland Speedway, not far from where Byron died.

  I'm also partial to the Jack Daniels car—which today finished eighth—since that sponsor's Tennessee Whiskey, which my dad favors, is basically charcoal-filtered corn liquor and a descendant of the southern moonshine of Raymond Parks's generation.

  Southerners such as Raymond Parks's Uncle Benny had come to rural Georgia to be separate. As president of the Confederate States of America, Jefferson Davis once said, “All we ask is to be let alone.” In the hills and hollows of the Confederacy, Parkses and other hardy, independent, yet wary and distrustful Irish and Scots-Irish learned to fend for themselves, to live off the land, to build their own homes, to heal themselves with homemade salves and herb poultices, to make their own music—and their own whiskey, whose role in the history and culture of the South is more prominent than even Davis's.

  But it has been more than thirty years since a known whiskey tripper spun around a NASCAR track. Except for the new Jack Daniels and Jim Beam cars, the ghosts of southern moonshine have been fully excised from today's NASCAR.

  In fact, NASCAR conveniently overlooks (or flat out denies) that it was created by moonshining men such as Raymond Parks. When NASCAR president Mike Helton told reporters, just before the 2006 Daytona 500, that “the old Southeastern redneck heritage that we had is no longer in existence,” he was simply echoing similar revisionist efforts by Bill France—senior and junior. Helton was forced to explain his words, claiming that NASCAR wanted to keep its “roots intact.” “We're proud of where we came from, we're proud of how we got here,” he said, but in the same breath said NASCAR's “heritage” dated to 1948, as if the time line of stock car racing began ticking that year, as if the previous decade meant nothing.

  This remains NASCAR's consistent, official stance: the sport was created by Bill Fr
ance in 1948. Period. NASCAR's website says it was “formed in 1948,” and the narrator of the official History of NASCAR DVD says, “NASCAR's entire existence in fact is due in large part to the determination and effort… of Big Bill France.”

  If he had lived a bit longer, maybe Big Bill would have come around to defending the redneck heritage, to acknowledging that he did not single-handedly create NASCAR, that he had help, that he couldn't have done it without Raymond Parks, Red Vogt, and the other Atlanta bootleggers. But France is dead, and it's not in the best interests of today's NASCAR conglomerate to contradict France's heroic image nor to embrace the more accurate version of history—the one full of dirt-poor lawbreakers.

  It's not just moonshine that's become a buried piece of NASCAR's story. The sport's southernness is disappearing, too. The famed Southern 500 at Darlington, the traditional Labor Day race for half a century, in 2003 was moved to mid-November to allow a California race to become NASCAR's new Labor Day event. The Southern 500 was eliminated altogether in 2004 to make room in NASCAR's schedule for a race in Texas. The racers are becoming less southern, too. Until 1988, when “Awesome Bill from Dawsonville” won the championship, every NASCAR champion except one came from Dixie. Since then, only seven of seventeen champions were southerners, including Dale Earnhardt—four times since 1989 and seven overall—and two Texans.

  Even nonsouthern NASCAR champ Tony Stewart has noticed: “I don't think anyone can call it just a Southern sport anymore… we're covering all four corners of the United States now.” And some fans and old-timers bristle against that. It's like the Civil War diarist Mary Chestnut complained after Dixie's defeat: “They are everywhere these Yankees, like red ants, like the locusts and frogs which were the plagues of Egypt.”

  After leaving the Golden Corral 500, on a hunch, I drive into northeast Atlanta.

  My assistants and I pass the old Ford factory on Ponce de Leon and Red Vogt's old shop on Spring Street and the site of Raymond Parks's first service station on Hemphill Avenue, as I tell the boys bits of the NASCAR story. We finally pull up at the Northside Avenue liquor store, and next to that, I knock on the thick-glass front door.

  The lock unclicks, the door opens, and there stands Raymond Parks, can of Coke in hand, looking regal and nowhere near his ninety-one years. I have known him three years now and have been looking forward to introducing my sons to NASCAR's patron saint. Parks is still tall, thin, and, while a bit frail and forgetful, looks sharp in his narrow tie and pressed white shirt; the gray fedora and tan sports jacket hang on a nearby hook.

  Almost as if he's been waiting for us, Parks dutifully shows my boys the black-and-white photographs and the pre-Wo rid War II loving cups, and lets them run their small fingers over the engraved words “Roy Hall” and “Lloyd Seay.” He lets them each hold a replica of the 1949 Oldsmobile Rocket 88 that Red Byron drove en route to becoming NASCAR's first strictly stock car champ. After a while, as he shakes their hands and we begin to leave, a handsome glitter comes to his eye.

  “Come back and see us, now,” he says.

  “Okay,” says Leo.

  “Okay,” says Sean.

  Before getting back in the car, we stop in the adjacent liquor store. While my boys run dangerously among aisles of bottles, I chat with Parks's brother-in-law, “Bad Eye” Shirley's brother, Marion. (Bad Eye died in early 2005, taking with him one more of the dwindling pieces of the story of NASCAR.) After Marion and I talk about his own moonshine memories, I buy a bottle of bourbon and say good-bye. The bourbon isn't moonshine, exactly, but corn liquor at least. On the drive home to North Carolina, I explain to Sean and Leo how they have just met the only person alive today who witnessed the full history of NASCAR. And I explain the lineage that ties our own Irish ancestry to moonshine and NASCAR, to Atlanta and bourbon, to Parks himself.

  “Cool,” says Leo.

  “Cool,” says Sean.

  I visit Raymond Parks a few more times after that. I see him at the birthday party held each year at a racing museum near Greenville-Pickens Speedway outside Greenville, South Carolina. I see him at Dawsonville's Moonshine Festival, where a few NASCAR fans recognize him and ask for his autograph, where Raymond's sister and Billy Watson and Ed Samples's son and Gober Sosebee's son all tell me wonderful old stories, where I walk over to Lloyd Seay's grave and touch his photograph and the cool granite. Whether it's modesty or southern decorum, Parks never talks freely about his moonshining days. I've met with him at least a dozen times across the years, but he'd still sometimes say, “I ain't gonna talk about that,” and I'd have to rely on others to fill in some of the blanks.

  Still, my most enjoyable moments have been one-on-one with Parks in his office.

  I've found myself mesmerized watching him flip through his photo albums, his long, thin, wrinkled fingers turning pages and pointing at long-dead faces and friends, at black-and-white images of his younger self. I've seen his eyes mist up at some unspoken memory. For me to look at those images and then look up into his face and realize he was there … I mean, he's old, but he doesn't look nearly old enough to be seventy years removed from the events in the fading photographs. Over time, it became moving for me, visiting his office time and again, to see how infatuated he still is with it all.

  As if the naive early days of stock cars had been his first true love.

  And each time I visit Parks, I see something new, something I missed. On one of my final visits, just before Christmas of 2005, I'm about to walk out the office door when I notice a framed letter on NASCAR letterhead hanging on the wall. It was sent to Parks on his eighty-fifth birthday and praised his 1948 and 1949 championships as “an amazing and historical accomplishment.” The letter said, “Your place in NASCAR history is unique and enduring.” It is signed by Bill France Jr., who closed the letter with this:

  “We thank you for being a leading pioneer of NASCAR competitors.” As I drive back home toward the mountains of western North Carolina, I wonder whether the France family knew to be grateful to Parks after all. Maybe the long-ago relationship between Big Bill and Raymond Parks was just a private matter that didn't need to go into the history books. As I drive past the Dawsonville exit off Highway 400, I also find myself wondering—as I often have during my time in the South—if maybe a New Jersey boy can never fully understand all the deeper truths beneath NASCAR's creation and its enduring popularity. Maybe it's as Faulkner said long ago, before there was a NASCAR: “You can't understand it. You would have to be born there.”

  A note on sources: Record keeping was sloppy or nonexistent before NASCAR was created. In attempting to unearth relevant j details about the years before NASCAR's existence, I tried to be careful to rely on solid, primary sources, such as photographs, interviews, and newspaper or magazine stories. But even then, I found it sometimes difficult to discern from faded articles (in old racers' private scrapbooks, for example) the writer's name and/or the date or even, occasionally, the name of the publication. In cases where I'm unsure of the source, I'll say something like “exact date unknown.” Raymond Parks and Eddie Samples graciously shared their scrapbooks; Samples's multi-volume collection was especially useful. But again, details were sometimes missing, which prevented me from providing a perfect and scholarly annotation. Otherwise, every effort has been made to cite and/or explain the source of the information in this book.

  l. “NASCAR is no longer a southern sport”

  page 6, TV contract worth nearly $5 billion: “NASCAR Signs New TV Deal,” Associated Press, Jan. 16, 2006. page 6, Nextel… $750-million deal: Lisa Napoli, “A New Era in Stock-Car Racing,” New York Times, July 14, 2003. page 6, “NASCAR is no longer a southern sport”: Liz Clarke, “NASCAR Boom Puts South in Rearview,” Washington Post, Nov. 20, 2005.

  pages 8-9, “the old Southeastern redneck heritage”: Lorenzo Lopez, “NASCAR Still Proud of Its Heritage,” Raleigh News& Observer, Feb. 17, 2006.

  page 9, “shedding its past as if it were an embarrassing family secret”: Liz Clarke
and Dan Steinberg, “The New Language of NASCAR,” Washington Post, Oct. 6, 2004.

  2. White lightning

  Unless otherwise noted, the story of Benjamin Parks is from Larry E. Mitchell, “Benjamin Parks Jr.: A Really Golden Heritage,” North Georgia Journal 2, no. 1 (Spring 1985); Walworth Publishing, Dawson County, Georgia Heritage, 1857-1996 (Waynesville, N.C.: Walsworth Publishing, 1997); Eddie Samples, “Garhofa's Raymond Dawson Parks,” Georgia Automobile Racing Hall of Fame Association's Pioneer Pages 5, no. 1 (Feb. 2002); and interviews with Raymond Parks, Violet Parks, and Lucille Shirley. The story of Parks's childhood, departure from the farm, work as a still hand with Walter Day, and move to Atlanta is also based on Eddie Samples's Pioneer Pages story and interviews with Raymond Parks, Lucille Shirley, and Violet Parks. The Civil War reflections and summaries are from various other sources, including E. L. Doctorow, The March: A Novel (New York: Random House, 2005). The recipe for southern moonshine and all descriptions of making moonshine are from: Esther Kellner, Moonshine: Its History and Folklore (New York: Ballantine Books, 1973); Joseph Earl Dabney, Mountain Spirits (Asheville, N.C.: Bright Mountain Books, 1974); Jess Carr, The Second Oldest Profession: An Informal History of Moonshining in America (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1972); Horace Kephart, Our Southern Highlanders: A Narrative of Adventure in the Southern Appalachians and a Study of Life among the Mountaineers (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1984).

  page 11, “A striking figure”: Mitchell, North Georgia Journal.

  page 12, “a fierce and uncouth race of men”: Kephart, Our Southern Highlanders, 11.

  page 12, “ignorant, mean… scum of the Earth”: James Webb, Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America (New York: Broadway Books, 2004), 157.