Driving with the Devil

by Neal Thompson

  Even before the 150-mile event began, Red Vogt and Lloyd Seay were stirring up the kind of trouble that would become commonplace at nearly every subsequent race. As with France's Daytona races, this race was supposed to include only “strictly stock” cars—no tweaking of any kind was allowed, and certainly none of the performance-enhancing tricks that men such as Vogt regularly added to their whiskey cars. But folks knew of Vogt's reputation with engines, and rumors of illicit modifications began to fly. One racer complained that one of Vogt's cars—a 1926 Chrysler being driven by another redheaded Atlantan, the hotheaded Red Singleton—contained illegally milled cylinder heads.

  “Plus,” complained one protester, “it doesn't have fenders on it.”

  Vogt, who chaired the race's technical committee, denied violating his own rules. When the promoter threatened to replace him as technical chairman, he snapped. “My car has not been modified!” Vogt insisted. He offered to donate one thousand dollars to the “community chest fund” if anyone could prove that he was cheating.

  Prerace jitters and backbiting led another racer to publicly claim that Lloyd Seay—who had recently broken his arm, which now rested in a sling—”would be a hazard to the other drivers.” Seay countered that he was quite capable of driving his Ford one-handed, thank you.

  As it would turn out, one-handed driving was hardly the most hazardous threat amid a gathering of thirty V-8s on a mile-long converted horse track. Before the big race even began, one of the favorites—Bert “The Flying Dutchman” Hellmueller—was lying in a hospital bed. On a qualifying run a few days earlier, Hellmueller's front tire had blown and his car rolled into the grandstands. If fans had been sitting there, many would have been killed. But such risks didn't stanch the flow of eager fans on race day.

  At the time, only Indianapolis had been able to consistently draw thousands of Americans to a single racing stadium for an automobile race. Far more popular were baseball and horse racing. Ten days earlier, an overflow crowd of fifty thousand had watched Seabiscuit dethrone War Admiral at Pimlico racetrack in Baltimore. The 1938 baseball season drew more than ten million people to the games of the nation's sixteen, mostly northern teams. In the former Confederacy, word had just begun to spread about these so-called stock car races in Alabama, North and South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia.

  Leading up to the Armistice Day race, city officials had the foresight to offer special bus, streetcar, and taxi service to the track, to avoid clogged roads and a parking nightmare. Newspapers called it “a sporting event that is churning up the most interest since back in 1909,” referring to a popular open-wheel race held that year. Newsmen also touted the chance for potential carnage at Lakewood. “They'll spill speed and maybe some gore,” one newsman teased. It was not an empty promise. Racers considered Lakewood a treacherous track. Unlike most racetracks, it was flat, not banked, which made it difficult for cars to grip dirt in the turns. As a result, more than a few racers had lost their lives there over the years. A few slid off the track and into the lake, where they drowned still strapped in their cars. A few burned to death. Sometimes, they flipped into the grandstands, injuring or killing not only themselves but spectators.

  Nonetheless, the gates opened at 9:00 a.m., and while the main race wouldn't start until 2:00 p.m., fans poured into the grandstands from all over North Georgia. All morning there were warm-up races, preliminary heats, a consolation race, and stunt driving. The racetrack became an instant carnival, with fans picnicking on fried chicken and biscuits, drinking from flasks of corn liquor, hooting and hollering, and occasionally fighting.

  During the previous week's qualifying trials, two female racers had failed to qualify for the main race but were allowed to entertain the crowd with some prerace stunts. After “Captain” Frank performed some spins and what the newspaper called “hell driving,” Buddy Evans and his wife took turns plowing through a burning wall and the shapely Miss Birdie Draper drove her car through sixteen sticks of exploding dynamite.

  As the 2:00 p.m. main event approached, fans spilled out of the grandstands and stood alongside the flimsy rail fence surrounding the track. A field of thirty cars began rolling into their starting positions. Among the better-known drivers was Mexican movie star Ramon Cortez and a full-blooded Cherokee Indian stunt driver nicknamed “Chief Ride in the Storm.” A descendant of the tribe that had been shoved out of Georgia during the gold rush a century earlier, the Oklahoman raced with his pet fox terrier sitting in the passenger seat. A few rows back from the front, starting side by side, were the cars of Roy Hall, Lloyd Seay, and the stoic Alabama newcomer Red Byron, making his stock car racing debut. Hall and Seay were driving whiskey cars that had been “wrenched” by Red Vogt. Two rows behind them sat the car of Bill France. All four men—and all but two of the day's racers—were driving Fords.

  On a holiday intended to celebrate peace, the roar of thirty V-8 engines simultaneously accelerating was a sound unlike anything Atlantans had ever heard, as if hell itself had opened up and released the howls of its angry souls. Awesome and frightening sound waves pounded into the chest and head. It almost hurt. A tornado of red dirt immediately rose and swirled above the track. Racers at the rear of the pack found themselves in a sandstorm of red silt, barely able to see a car length in front of them. The smart ones wore glasses or goggles; others squinted to find the turns.

  Seay, in a ′38 Ford coupe, drove with his broken left arm propped in the window. Beneath the hood, the V-8 rumbled with who-knows-what kind of Red Vogt magic. Like Seay, many of the day's racers were driving whiskey cars, or at least cars that had been modified to perform beyond their factory-tuned abilities, and they weren't about to complain of the nonstock engines of others. In fact, Red Byron's car consisted of a ten-year-old Model A chassis, while under the hood purred a V-8 engine with so many aftermarket parts, including a Crager head, that his car could just barely be called a Ford.

  Complaints about Vogt's allegedly modified Chrysler were the exception that proved the rule, and the defining line between a “modified” stock car and a “strictly stock” car would remain squiggly and faint for many years to come.

  After a few laps, as the field spread out and the dust settled a bit, the real fun began. In the first turn, two racers (one from Atlanta and a Yankee from New Jersey) collided. The race proceeded slowly under a yellow caution flag while one of the damaged cars was driven away and the other, number 52, was shoved off to the side of the track.

  When the race resumed—as indicated by the wave of a green flag— an Atlanta moonshiner named Harley Taylor took the lead. Ernest Bush, behind him, then flipped in the first turn and slammed into the previously wrecked number 52 car, causing both cars to block part of the racetrack. As drivers swerved to avoid those two wrecked cars, Bush's car burst into flames. He was still trapped inside. Members of various pit crews sprinted across the track to try to rescue him. A crewman named Blackie Black got to Bush first and reached into the car to pull the injured man free. Bush and Black then ran arm in arm away from the wreckage just as the flames hit the gas tank, which exploded behind them—”just like the movies,” the next day's headline would declare.

  Harley Taylor held the lead for nearly seventy miles, until his car's steering arm cracked, and he was sidelined, along with growing numbers of others. Racers slipped in and out of first place as Seay, Hall, Byron, and France slowly worked their way through the field. Seay was twice forced to pull into the pits to change flat tires, but as cars continued to crash, burn, or pull off with mechanical woes, he was able to return to the race and continue picking off the slower drivers until he finally found himself leading.

  As darkness began to shroud the track, the weary, worried promoters decided to cut the race short. At the 135-mile mark, after nearly two and a half hours, Seay raced past the checkered flag and was declared “the world's stock car auto race champion.”

  Seay pocketed one hundred dollars—less than he'd earn in a typical night of whiskey tripping. His da
rk blond hair was pocked with red-dirt clumps, his white coveralls, teeth, ears, and corners of his smile all tinted red-orange. In all the confusion, scorers lost track of how many laps each driver had completed, so they fudged it: “Chief Ride in the Storm” was given second place; Dan Murphy (a Floridian who'd won at Daytona that summer) took third. Bill France took fourth and Roy Hall fifth. Debut racer Red Byron earned no mention in the next day's papers. He later insisted that he and his ′29 Model A roadster had really won. By his count, he only stopped once, for water, and had actually lapped Lloyd Seay. But scoring officials, either mixed-up or maybe biased in favor of a local driver, seemed to have overlooked Byron's allegedly winning performance.

  Byron would get another chance and would soon find himself part of a duel that would continue for the next ten years as stock car racing experienced the complicated merging of two distinct influences: the authoritarian and puritanical Bill France crowd from Daytona Beach, and the lawless, moonshining men of Atlanta. France was intent on making Daytona Beach the home of stock car racing. Lloyd Seay and the other whiskey boys of Atlanta, along with their mechanics, were obstacles to France's goal. France would one day seek to kick bootleggers out of his sport, but in the beginning, the two factions needed each other. There weren't enough stock car races or drivers to sustain the sport together, let alone in factions. So it became a marriage of opposites: moralistic hucksters such as France and lawbreaking rednecks such as Seay, Parks, and Hall. It would take a few more years, plus a world war, for one man—Byron—to bring the two groups more closely together.

  Races such as Lakewood's Armistice Day contest immediately drew cultlike followings in the sport-starved South. In other small southern towns, at Saturday night jamborees or on Sunday afternoons after church, clouds of dust rose skyward above the booming roar of Ford V-8s kicking up rooster tails of copper-colored dirt, smashing and crunching into one another and, occasionally, into the crowds. Safety features such as hard-shell helmets and seat belts were for sissies. Real racers, when the windshield got mud-covered, just stuck their heads out the side window and chewed dirt.

  Of course, dirt and danger were part of the appeal. Southern stock car racing grew quickly into a rough sport that attracted tough, dangerous, lascivious men who bashed one another's cars on the track, then settled scores afterward. Some carried pistols; others wielded tire irons. After just a dozen races, these men were hardened veterans, wearing signs of their longevity with pride: missing teeth, scars and burns, unseen aches and pains, broken bones that healed into crooked limbs. One longtime racer chugged milk before each race to soothe bleeding stomach ulcers. Another was missing a kneecap. Many began to lose at least their hearing, if not their lives.

  And the fans loved it, the audacity of it all, sometimes displaying their revved-up emotions by hurling beer bottles onto the track. On one infamous Sunday afternoon at Lakewood, the father of six children was killed by a car that flipped into the grandstands. A short time later, policemen tried to arrest a rowdy fan, but as they dragged him out of the stands, they were pummeled by scores of rocks thrown by the crowd, which pinged off their squad cars and their heads. Such lawlessness prompted a letter of complaint to an Atlanta newspaper: “Automobile racing at the Lakewood track should be stopped.… [It] was never built for automobile racing in the first place.” And because many of the racers had criminal records, the writer argued, “the odor of the races has never been too good.”

  That, too, was part of the appeal. Fans considered stock car racing the cutting edge of the wild side to which they aspired, or at least admired. As Pete Daniel says in Lost Revolutions, “The fiercely competitive racing culture was characterized by a disrespect for authority that had been the underpinning of the bootlegger culture and of the worldview of the working class.” The racetrack was their place, their bacchanal, and fans “happily lost themselves in the orgy of dust, liquor and noise.”

  As 1938 came to a close, newspaper summaries of the year's sporting events included not only baseball, football, and basketball but also yacht races, speed skating, bait casting, bowling, polo, English Channel swimming, bicycle races, horseshoe pitching, tennis, archery, golf, billiards, even cricket. Seabiscuit's wild run that summer and Joe Louis's KO of Max Schmeling were the sports headlines of the year. Even the fifteen-foot, ten-inch record-breaking jump by “Zip” at the annual Calaveras County frog-jumping contest received more ink than did racing, Lakewood, or Lloyd Seay.

  If car racing was mentioned at all, it was the prestigious Vanderbilt Cup road race on Long Island or the Indianapolis 500 or the latest world speed record. Despite its growing southern fan base, stock car racing simply wasn't considered worthy of sports writers' attentions. Even the local press was inconsistent at best in its coverage of stock car races. That would begin to change in the thrilling and awful summer of 1941. Following his release from prison in 1937, Raymond Parks had delegated most of his moonshining operations to family members or trusted employees, and the “baron” began investing in relatively legitimate (though hardly wholesome) businesses, such as cigarette machines, jukeboxes, pinball and slot machines. As with his moonshine sales, Parks catered mostly to black customers in northwest Atlanta. He had even opened his new legal liquor store, the first of many stores he'd own throughout Atlanta.

  Not everything was legit. Parks was still making whiskey and still heavily involved in the illegal lottery business. The slot machines weren't quite legal, either. Atlanta police once staged a raid on an illegal gambling site and discovered that most of the machines belonged to Parks, who rented them out to the proprietor. They called Parks and said he could have the confiscated machines back if he came down to headquarters to pick them up. “I'm no fool,” he said, ignoring their kind offer. “I guess they melted ‘em.”

  Still, the legitimate half of Parks Novelty Machine Co. was very profitable. Feeling good about all his financial success, Parks was ready for yet another investment.

  Lakewood's Armistice Day race had given Parks his first glimpse of Fords doing something more interesting and exciting than delivering whiskey and fleeing cops. Watching from the stands that day as Seay took the checkered flag gave Parks an idea. The race—and its twenty thousand spectators—seemed proof that stock cars promised more thrills than even the snooty, conservative, law-abiding open-wheel racers from places outside of Dixie. He was smitten by the noise and dust and danger of Lakewood. And, like France, he smelled opportunity.

  “I've got the fever,” Parks told Seay.

  Seay and cousin Roy Hall stoked his fever, pestering Parks to buy them each one of the new 1939 Ford V-8 models that were just rolling off the assembly line at downtown Atlanta's Ford factory and, at the time, were designed to be one of the fastest passenger cars ever produced. Parks finally agreed and came up with a plan: he would buy and finance the cars and cover travel costs and mechanical expenses for “the team.” Seay and Hall would give him two-thirds of all their winnings. Parks's scheme for “sponsoring” Seay and Hall meant painting the name of his legitimate business interests on the sides of their cars: “Hemphill Service Station,” “Northside Auto Service,” and “Parks Novelty Machine Co., Atlanta, Ga.” Parks asked Vogt to be his official mechanic, in exchange for free advertising, an occasional “Red Vogt Garage” on a race car's roof.

  When Parks's younger cousins hungrily agreed to the plan, he drove down to Beaudry Ford Co. in downtown Atlanta to purchase two shiny black 1939 Ford coupes from the back lot. Thus began Parks's career as owner of a racing team, considered the first such team in stock car racing. In time, other racers would join Parks's team, including other whiskey trippers and even Big Bill France.

  Parks's investment satisfied his cousins, but Parks primarily had moneymaking in mind. Profit was the whole point of the thing. Just good for business. Free advertising.

  At least that's what he told himself at the start of 1939.

  If Henry Ford's unveiling of the first V-8 in 1932 had endeared him to southern moonshine
rs, the 1939 model, with a V-8 engine crammed inside the light, small frame of a coupe, made him a bootlegger's hero. The ′39 Ford would become the most famous whiskey car of all, and quite possibly the best stock car racing machine ever.

  It's doubtful that Ford—now an aging eccentric—knew much about how southerners used his cars.* It's a good thing, for he surely would have been horrified.

  Red Vogt, for one, was more impressed than ever. He became even more singularly focused on Ford V-8s—and more dysfunctionally antisocial—after losing one of his few friends. His sister's husband, Joe, died one afternoon while driving a motorcycle out of Vogt's shop. He flew so fast out the garage doors, he failed to turn onto Spring Street and slammed into a brick wall. Vogt began to spend most of his days and nights at the shop, casting spells on Ford V-8s in his secret back room. His marriage to his first wife, Ruth, already an embittered, accusatory shambles, devolved even further. But Ruth did offer a prescient warning. As the brains behind the business side of Vogt's twenty-four-hour garage, she had an extra sense when it came to matters of finance—and bullshit.

  “I don't trust that man,” she told her husband one night, speaking of Bill France.

  Vogt dismissed Ruth with a wave of his hand.

  “I know Bill,” he snarled. “And I trust him.”

  He should have listened to his wife.

  * According to Red Vogt's son, Tom, Vogt's renown and his specialization in Fords did reach Detroit and the offices of Henry Ford, who reportedly sent emissaries to meet with Vogt. Henry Ford himself allegedly once paid a brief visit to Vogt's garage, a story recounted in a diary kept by Tom's mother, Ruth, discovered after her death in 1994. Researchers at the Benton Ford Research Center at the Henry Ford Museum in Detroit, however, have no record of such a visit.