Driving with the Devil

by Neal Thompson

  Unlike baseball and football, which celebrate their pioneers and early heroes, most of the dirt-poor southerners who founded stock car racing have died or retired into obscurity. There is no Babe Ruth or Ty Cobb, not even an Abner Doubleday. A few NASCAR names from the 1950s and ′60s might still resonate among hard-cores: Junior Johnson, Curtis Turner, Fireball Roberts. It's occasionally noted that Richard Petty's father, Lee, and Dale Earnhardt's pop, Ralph, were aggressive, dirt-smeared racing pioneers. But, despite the many books that have proliferated during NASCAR's recent rise to nationwide popularity, the names of Raymond Parks, Red Byron, Red Vogt, Lloyd Seay, and Roy Hall rarely appear in print.

  Maybe that's because of NASCAR's dirty little secret: moonshine.

  The sport's distant, whiskey-fueled origins are usually wrapped into a neat, vague little clause—”… whose early racers were bootleggers…” —about as noncommittal to the deeper truth as crediting pigs for their contribution to football. Today, if the fans know anything about NASCAR's origins, they might know the name Bill France. The tall, megaphone-voiced racer/promoter from D.C. deftly managed to get himself named NASCAR's first president in 1947, then eventually bought out the organization's other top officers and stockholders to make himself sole proprietor of a sport that became his personal dynasty. France is often referred to as NASCAR's “founder,” which is oversimplification bordering on fiction. Largely forgotten from the NASCAR story is this: Bill France used to race for, borrow money, and seek advice from a moonshine baron and convicted felon from Atlanta named Raymond Parks.

  According to the minutes of the historic 1947 organizational meeting in Daytona Beach at which NASCAR was born, France envisioned an everyman's sport with “distinct possibilities for Sunday shows.… We don't know how big it can be if it's handled properly.” Many people over the years—including, right from the start, Raymond Parks and the two Reds—have argued that France did not handle things properly. NASCAR certainly succeeded far beyond anyone's wildest postwar expectations, thanks in large part to the moonshiners who were its first and best racers. But France held a deep disdain for the whiskey drivers who nurtured NASCAR's gestation and its early years. He worked hard to distance his sport from those roots and was not above blackballing any dissenters, as Parks and both of the Reds discovered.

  In striving to create squeaky-clean family entertainment, to the point of downplaying NASCAR's crime-tainted origins, France buried the more dramatic parts of NASCAR's story beneath the ail-American mythology he preferred. Efforts to portray stock car racing as a family sport continue to this day. In 2004, Dale Earnhardt Jr. was fined $10,000 for saying “shit” on national television; he declined to apologize, saying that anyone tuned in to a stock car race shouldn't be surprised by a four-letter word. And in 2006, just before the Daytona 500, NASCAR President Mike Helton told reporters in Washington (Bill France's hometown) that “the old Southeastern redneck heritage that we had is no longer in existence.” After a backlash from fans, Helton backpedaled, saying NASCAR was “proud of where we came from.” Despite the lip service, in its reach to a wider audience, NASCAR seems to be losing its vernacular and, in the words of The Washington Post, “shedding its past as if it were an embarrassing family secret.”

  Bill France, for better or worse, commandeered stock car racing, declared himself its king, appropriated its coffers and history, leaving the real but untidy story behind. He transformed an unruly hobby into a monopoly, then rewrote the past.

  This book, therefore, is the previously untold story of how Raymond Parks, his moonshining cousins, and their four-letter-word-using friends from the red-dirt hills of North Georgia helped create the sport that Bill France ultimately made his own.

  In the South, where the Great Depression infected deeper and festered longer than elsewhere, there were few escape routes. Folks couldn't venture into the city for a baseball game or a movie because there weren't enough cities, transportation was limited, and the smaller towns rarely had a theater. There were no big-time sports, either (the Braves wouldn't settle in Atlanta until 1965, and the Falcons a year later). It was all cotton fields, unemployed farmers, and Depression-silenced mills, mines, and factories. But if you were lucky enough to have a nearby fairgrounds or an enterprising farmer who'd turned his barren field into a racetrack, maybe you'd have had a chance to stand beside a chicken-wire fence and watch Lloyd Seay in his jacked-up Ford V-8 tearing around the oval, a symbol of power for the powerless. But Seay's racing career would get violently cut short by his moonshining career, and World War II would interrupt the entire sport's progression for nearly five years. It wasn't until after the war that southern racing, helped by an unlikely hero with a war-crippled leg, regained its footing and momentum. The rough, violent years of 1945 through 1950 would then unfold as the most outrageous years of NASCAR's colorful history.

  For those who were a part of it, who saw it and felt it, it was incredible.

  This is not a book about NASCAR. It's the story of what happened in Atlanta, in Daytona Beach, and a handful of smaller southern towns before and after World War II. It's the story of what happened when moonshine and the automobile collided, and how puritanical Henry Ford and the forces of Prohibition and war all inadvertently helped the southern moonshiners and their gnarly sport. NASCAR historians can tell you who led every lap of every race since the organization's first official contest was won in 1948 by a man named Red Byron. But they can't—or won't—say much about what happened in the decade before that. If Abner Doubleday allegedly invented baseball and James Naismith created basketball with peach baskets and soccer balls at a YMCA, then who created NASCAR?

  The answer: a bunch of motherless, dirt-poor southern teens driving with the devil in jacked-up Fords full of corn whiskey. Because long before there were stock cars, there were Ford V-8 whiskey cars—the best means of escape a southern boy could wish for.

  Well, between Scotch and nothin', I suppose I'd take Scotch.

  It's the nearest thing to good moonshine I can find.

  — WILLIAM FAULKNER

  2

  White lightning

  M ore than any of life's pleasures, Benjamin Parks Jr. loved hunting deer. Known to most as Uncle Benny, he stalked northern jGeorgia's mountains with the century-old muzzle loader he called “Long Susie” and a mule named Becky, in search of his prey. When he died in 1895, at an age estimated to be ninety-five, he'd bagged more than five hundred deer—including, once, two felled by the same bullet.

  “A striking figure… trim and well-knit” is how an Atlanta newspaper reporter once described Parks. “Evidently a good man yet.” Well into his eighties, Parks was able to entertain his many grandkids by walking on his hands. In his nineties, he still hunted deer, walking many miles alongside Becky.

  Uncle Benny Parks was born in Virginia, son of a Revolutionary War soldier. The family had come from Scotland and northern Ireland, and like many antiauthority Scots, Irish, and hybrid Scots-Irish of the 1700s and 1800s, Parks required some distance from the federal government in Washington and the puritans of the Northeast. When he was old enough, he left home, traveling farther south along the Philadelphia Wagon Road into western North Carolina, accompanied by a slave named Julius Caesar, a gift from his father. Later, in search of even more remove, Parks and Caesar relocated to the red-dirt hills of North Georgia, to live among the Cherokee Indians.

  Outsiders considered the isolated Appalachian mountain people to be “a fierce and uncouth race of men.” Men like Benny Parks, living incomprehensibly at the very edge of American civilization, with wild Indians as neighbors, were viewed as “ignorant, mean, worthless, beggarly Irish Presbyterians, the scum of the Earth.” But Parks found his neighbors in and around the towns of Dawsonville and Dahlonega (Cherokee for “golden color”) to be just like him: proudly self-sufficient, uneducated yet bold, living off the land, distrustful of outsiders and authority, and crazy for deer hunting.

  After considering wedlock to the daughter of a Cherokee ch
ief— “dear me, how beautiful she was,” Parks once said—he married the sensible Sally Henderson and embarked on a family of eleven children, ten of them boys. On his twenty-eighth birthday, October 27, 1828, Parks set off deer hunting with Becky and Long Susie. Wearing a birthday gift from his wife—a pair of new boots that were “not yet broke in”—he tripped on a rock. As he picked himself up, something about the color of the offending rock caught his eye. It looked, he later said, like “the yellow of an egg.”

  Word spread quickly of Uncle Benny's discovery, and the nation's first gold rush crashed upon the previously unspoiled land. Strangers came prospecting into North Georgia, “acting like crazy men,” Parks observed. “It seemed within a few days as if the whole world must have heard of it, for men came from every state I ever heard of.” The frenzy, combined with that fall's election of popular, anti-Indian Andrew Jackson, accelerated the displacement of the region's Cherokee tribe and put culpability for the region's rampant evolution squarely on Benny Parks's shoulders.

  President Jackson, whose parents had emigrated from northern Ireland, supported treaties to remove the Cherokee—whom he considered “savage hunters”—from their land. That land would then be divvied up among a more “civilized population” of white settlers, who would plunder northern Georgia in search of more gold. Jackson's aggressive efforts to rid Georgia of its Native Americans were an insult to the Cherokee warriors who'd fought alongside U.S. soldiers and who had actually saved Jackson's life during an 1814 battle against Creek Indians. But in 1838, at gunpoint, the Cherokee of Georgia, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Alabama were shunted off to a settlement in Oklahoma. On the thousand-mile trek westward, one-third of the seventeen thousand natives died of disease, starvation, and exposure—including, quite possibly, Parks's former fiancee. That journey became known as the Trail of Tears. In later years, Parks would regret the role his golden discovery played in so many deaths.

  Parks also hated that the gold frenzy displaced the quiet life he'd sought. And he was especially miffed that the profits eluded its own instigator. That's because Parks had impetuously sold his lease to the parcel where he'd discovered the gold, thinking it was a fair enough price at the time. The buyer—a South Carolina senator and future vice president, John Calhoun—went on to unearth many pounds of gold there (fortunes that later allowed his son-in-law, Thomas Clemson, to create Clemson University).

  Parks lived to see his gold rush peak, then die, which plunged his homeland into economic depression. With its mountains, waterfalls, and forests, northern Georgia briefly reinvented itself as a tourist destination for wealthy travelers. But then came the Civil War, and the destructive wrath of Union general William Tecumseh Sherman, who marched down from Chattanooga on his way to Atlanta, trouncing and torching everything in his path. North Georgia devolved into an embittered land of impoverished people. It would take many years for the economy and its people to recover.

  Thirty years after General Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox Courthouse (not far from Parks's Virginia birthplace), Parks died facedown in a creek, not far from where he'd found gold. One of his sons found him there, Becky the mule by his side.

  Uncle Benny was memorialized as a pioneering North Georgia settler and the man who established Parks as one of the region's founding family names. But his historical influence went beyond that. His discovery of gold created the false but lasting impression that salvation was just a happy accident away, that riches could come as easily as tripping over a yolk-colored rock. That attitude resonated among many Georgians: God, they believed, will provide. Many, including those of the extended Parks family, would spend a lifetime waiting for such a miracle, for a touch from the hand of God.

  Twenty years after Benny Parks's death, his brother's great-grandson welcomed the first of his own sixteen children, a son. Raymond Parks grew into a tall, lean, handsome, and eager young man but had little in common with his great-great-uncle, Benny Parks.

  Raymond may have inherited some of the attributes of the typical rural Georgian: conflicted by Civil War-inspired inferiority, distrusting of authority, confined by poverty to a narrow worldview, and shackled to the dusty acreage that provided his sustenance and income. But Raymond aspired to much more than befriending mules and shooting deer, and he had little patience for the quiet life of a struggling North Georgia farmer.

  When Uncle Benny Parks and others had settled in the Cherokee's homeland, they assumed the tall pines and dense forests were signs of a fertile soil. They soon discovered the red, iron-rich clay earth was difficult to farm. In fact, it wasn't good for growing much, except cotton— and (thankfully, it would turn out) corn. In Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell wrote of northern Georgia's “savagely red land” full of “savage red gulches.” Savage also accurately described Raymond Parks's extended family and their desperately wanting lives.

  Raymond was born just outside the gold-mining town of Dawsonville, into a clan whose drunk-and-dangerous factions contributed numerous misdeeds to the Dawson County Superior Court docket books, whose pages read like a William Faulkner novel.

  The list of Parks family lawbreaking is long and, frequently, comical. They were fornicators, arsonists, assaulters, moonshine makers, moonshine drinkers, disturbers of the peace, and masters of using “opprobrious words” (that is, profanity and threats). Here's Leman Parks, drunkenly waving his pistol at Ola Martin, yelling, “By God, what will you take for a piece? I'll give you a dollar—a dollar and a half!” (The indictment helpfully explains: “meaning, would she allow him to have sexual intercourse with her.”) Leman Parks was also known to set fire to the occasional storefront or church. Here's Rufus Parks threatening Clifton Burt's life: “I'll go get my gun and shoot your damn heart out, you goddam son of a bitch, you damn liar.” That's the same Rufus Parks who “willfully and ridiculously” set fire to the Dawson County jailhouse; who once tried to “cut, stab and wound” a neighbor; who tried to “run over and squish” another; and who was regularly caught delivering whiskey in his old Dodge or driving said Dodge wildly through downtown Dawsonville “under the influence of intoxicating liquor.”

  And then there was the infamous 1924 murder of Dawson County's sheriff, Will Orr—”a man of violent character”—who was shot three times in the chest. Orr was Raymond Parks's maternal grandfather. The man who fired the fatal pistol shots (allegedly in self-defense, though a jury found otherwise) was a well-known Dawsonville moonshiner named Etna Parks, Raymond's paternal uncle.

  Raymond's father, Alfred, was an educated man and, after a few years of farming, saved enough money to buy a small store, called the Five-Mile Store because it was five miles from town. When Raymond was ten, his mother, Leila, died of leukemia, and his father became a sloppy drunk and lost the store. Raymond and his siblings moved in with their grandparents, who raised sheep and mules and grew corn on a steep, rocky hillside.

  As the oldest of six kids, most of the chores fell to Raymond, who hated shearing the sheep, tending the corn. Life only got worse when Raymond's father married his dead wife's sister, Ila, who soon gave birth to twin girls, followed a year later by another set of twin girls. She would eventually bear ten children, to join her dead sister's six children. All of them moved into a small farmhouse, but poverty forced the family to move every year to a smaller house, none of them with running water or electricity. Raymond didn't get along with his stepmother/aunt, and his father remained a beaten, drunken shell of a man. Parks had no interest in being part of such a household, tending to a flock of hungry siblings and a besotted father. Even as a young teen, Parks knew this much: “The mountains didn't have much to offer.” Staying in North Georgia was as good as choosing death, for he almost surely would have ended up—like more than a few kin—drunk, imprisoned, or dead.

  Like most southern farm boys, Parks rarely traveled more than a few miles from his farm. What he dreamed of most was making his way to the sparkling, automobile-filled city of Atlanta. So, in 1928, exactly one hundred years
after Uncle Benny had tripped over gold, Parks did his usual predawn chores. He built the fire in the kitchen stove, milked the cows, and fed the other animals. Then he set off with a scythe over his shoulder, telling the family that he was going to cut briars down by the creek. When he was certain no one was watching or following, he ran across the cornfield to a waiting car and climbed inside. The man at the wheel would introduce him to a whole new world.

  Parks had met Walter Day a few months earlier, after getting his first, bitter taste of the criminal's life. His father had sent him down the road to buy a bottle of whiskey from a family friend, as he'd done many times before. Parks fired up the family's beat-up 1926 Model T Ford, which he'd taught himself to drive. The repeal of Prohibition was still five years off, but the locals looked out for one another, and it was always possible to buy a jar of corn liquor. This time, though, a sheriff's deputy was watching and stopped Parks as he drove home. The judge, wanting to inflict a strong message that teens and whiskey don't mix, sent Parks to the county jail, which had exactly the opposite effect than the judge had hoped. During his three months of incarceration, Parks met Walter Day, who'd been sentenced for making “illicit… untaxed whiskey.” Day told Parks to come work for him after his release. The job—working at Day's backwoods moonshine stills, east of Atlanta—would pay far better than farmwork, Day told him.

  The morning Parks jumped into the front seat of Day's Ford was his last on the farm. He was fourteen.

  Raymond Parks's escape from his myopic, impoverished, farm-shackled life was not an uncommon route. Many southern boys were lured from their homes into the lucrative moonshining business. In time, that same desire to break free and see more of the world would inspire young southern men to enlist to fight overseas, in World War II, in far greater numbers than their northern counterparts. Such sentiments could be traced to a previous war. Southern culture had been deeply influenced by the lingering effects of the South's humiliating defeat and physical destruction in the Civil War.