Driving with the Devil

by Neal Thompson

  James Brannon had worked as a sales manager at the local dairy company. The family had been looking forward to the race for weeks and arrived early to secure a spot up close. Brannon's seven-year-old son, Roy, sat on the hood of the family Ford, a few feet from the fence, loving every minute of the noisy race. But as Byron's Ford cut an awful swath through the crowd, Roy was looking in the opposite direction, away from the track. His father and mother were standing beside the car and must have seen Byron's car plowing in their direction but were unable to reach their son. Byron's speeding Ford slammed into a wooden post, the last potential obstruction between him and the child.

  The long, thick post just bent like a willow and, in the words of one fan, “head-popped” young Roy, who was knocked violently to the ground.

  When Byron's car finally came to a stop, scores of bodies lay scattered among the wreckage, beneath a cloud of thick, red dust. Byron, at first unable to get out of the car without assistance, sat there, uninjured but scared to death. What have I done? The race came to a halt as drivers and mechanics from pit road all sprinted to the scene of the carnage, frantically tending to the injured, some of them shrieking and terrified.

  James Brannon and his wife cradled the body of their unconscious son. Instead of waiting for an ambulance, they put Roy into the backseat of the family car and sped off. As ambulances arrived at the track, Byron seemed discomposed and in shock. He finally managed to get himself out of the car and began limping back toward the pits, dragging his bad leg through the dirt. Charlie Jenkins—who'd moved his wife back from the fence at the last moment—said Byron seemed heartbroken: “helpless… a sad sight.” Jenkins hadn't realized until that moment the extent of Byron's war injury and became fixated on Byron's lame left foot, which went “flopping” away from the devastation.

  Among the first of the victims to reach City Hospital was A. R. Bartram, a forty-six-year-old from nearby Phenix City, Alabama, who was admitted with a badly mangled right leg. The doctors determined they could not save the leg, which they amputated below the knee. A twenty-four-year-old woman was admitted with a broken pelvis; three people had broken legs; and a dozen others were treated for battlefieldlike injuries—broken ribs; deep cuts on the arms, legs, and faces; head injuries; bruised and scraped body parts; and shock. Injured worst of all was Roy Brannon. His skull had been pushed in, and he had slipped into a coma. His parents kept a vigil at his bedside, praying for their child to awaken. The next day, a newspaper headline announced Bill France's worst nightmare: “17 Injured When Racing Car Plunges into Throng.”

  A ghastly photo accompanied the headline. An AP photographer had remarkably captured the precise moment of Byron's car making contact with the frantic, scattering crowd. Roy Brannon, in black-and-white-checked overalls, seems almost to be looking up at the camera, naively unaware of the angry machine plowing toward him.

  Remarkably, NASCAR's first tragedy was just the start of Bill France's bad day.

  At that same moment, four hundred miles to the east, France was officiating his race at Greensboro, North Carolina. Near the end of that race, rookie driver Bill “Slick” Davis rolled his car and was ejected onto the track. Tim Flock and three other drivers slammed into Davis's car, which plowed into its driver's body. Davis died that night of serious head injuries. The next afternoon, seven-year-old Roy Brannon also died. And just like that, NASCAR's first season was marred by two terrible deaths.

  France rightly worried that two deaths on the same day—one of them a spectator, and just a child—might tarnish NASCAR right from the start, ruining the league before it had even truly begun. He quickly dispatched emissaries to Columbus to perform damage control, explaining to news writers and locals that the accident had been “strictly unavoidable,” that Byron had not been driving recklessly or out of control but that the flat tire simply made Byron's Ford “unmanageable.”

  Byron, meanwhile, felt enormous guilt for his role in the Brannons' loss and the injuries to the others. He would carry that burden the rest of his days.

  And Raymond Parks worried deeply for his sensitive driver. Could he sustain the championship race against Fonty? Could he return to a racetrack at all?

  * Some details of NASCAR's preincorporation would get lost to history, but a few relatives and friends of both Red Vogt and Raymond Parks would say years later that Vogt and Parks, along with South Carolina race promoter Joe Littlejohn, were initially supposed to have been listed on NASCAR's incorporation papers as either officers or, at least, shareholders. When NASCAR was incorporated in February of 1948, those names were not on any of the corporate documents.

  * This was the first attempt at a Memorial Day weekend Indy-NASCAR crossover. From the late 1990s through 2005, a handful of NASCAR drivers would race in the Indianapolis 500, then immediately fly to North Carolina for that afternoon's NASCAR event, the Coca-Cola 600.

  I could feel the road some twenty inches beneath me,

  unfurling and flying and hissing at incredible speeds.…

  When I closed my eyes all I could see was the road unwinding

  into me.… There was no escaping it.

  — JACK KEROUAC, On the Road

  14

  An “ambience” of death

  N ASCAR and its fans tried to shrug off the dark tragedies. Just a fluke, they told themselves. No one's fault, really. One of the dangers that inevitably accompany a risky spectator sport. But for Byron and some of the other more thoughtful racers, this wasn't so easy, even though the death of racing fans was hardly a new phenomenon, nor an ephemeral one.

  Fans had been getting slaughtered by high-speed racing machines ever since those machines had been invented. As early as 1911, a race car had plunged into a race crowd at Syracuse, New York, killing eleven. Over the years, Indianapolis had claimed numerous lives of drivers and fans, including the boy killed in his backyard by a flying tire. But World War II seemed to create a before-and-after demarcation in motorsports. Before the war, death was somehow understandable. Racing was still new and untested, and the death of drivers and fans was to be, somehow, tolerated.

  But after the war, death on the racetrack—thanks to safety measures for both drivers and fans—was a bit less frequent and, when it did occur, felt much more unseemly. Racing was becoming a family sport, and death and children didn't mix. The whiff of Roy Brannon's death would hang over NASCAR's entire first season.

  For racers—even sensitive ones such as Byron—death was not a sufficient disincentive. They certainly hated to see fans or friends get killed, especially by their cars. But they always came back to the track, either by rationalizing or by ignoring the question Why? Why would a grown man get back behind the wheel of a murder weapon? Knowing that his health was already at risk—Why? Knowing that the last place a crippled war veteran should be is inside a race car with the door strapped shut—Why?

  Similar questions had been asked of auto racers since Oldfield's day. Over time, drivers and nondrivers grappled for a reasonable explanation, none of them entirely satisfactory. The shortest and maybe best answer was: drivers just can't help it. They're compelled to do the one thing they know they shouldn't. Addiction is an oversimplification, and playing with fire is an insufficient cliche. It's more like dousing yourself and a few others around you with gasoline and then playing with matches.

  Buddy Shuman, the Carolina moonshiner/racer, once mangled his hand in a wreck. When it became infected, doctors suggested amputating it. Just as Byron had responded to doctors' plans to amputate his leg, Shuman said, No way. Shuman was a racer and would rather be maimed for life than handicapped behind the wheel.

  “I'll die with two hands rather than live with one,” Shuman told the doctor. Such logic made perfect sense to other racers.

  It had been no surprise to Byron, then, when Fonty Flock, after his near-death Daytona Beach crash in 1941, had returned to racing. It had been no surprise when Bob Flock, six months after breaking his back in 1947, returned—in a back brace, no less—to the
rutted raceways that could now snap his barely healed spine. Byron knew that Indy racers often drove the cars of their recently departed friends. The mechanics would just wash out the bloodstains, repaint the black burn marks, and pop in a new engine—no reason to scrap a good race car for sentimental reasons.

  After Roy Brannon's death, Byron simply kept on racing, far and wide, to prove to himself he still could. As far south as Florida, as far north as Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, even Rhode Island, in NASCAR and non-NASCAR races alike, Byron would disappear for days at a time, towing Raymond Parks's car behind. After three or four days with no word, Parks and Vogt would begin to worry they'd never see Byron again. Then he'd show up one morning, looking haggard and exhausted, filthy and grouchy. One morning, he pulled up to Vogt's garage, reached into the backseat, and pulled out a paper grocery bag. He handed it over to Vogt—full of cash.

  “Hold on to this for me,” he told Vogt, and then went home and collapsed.

  Byron was racing harder than ever. And he was eager to get back into the NASCAR fight. In August of 1948, he drove to Daytona for the 150-mile Buck Mathis Memorial, named for a popular driver killed a year earlier, in a race Byron had won.

  Bill France was still nervous about the death of a fan—and not just any fan, but a small boy—six months into his new organization's life. His response was to tout NASCAR's safety measures. Prior to the August 150-miler at Daytona, he announced that “extra barricades will be erected between the turns at the track and the spectators for the protection of all concerned.” It didn't help that, thanks to Red Vogt and others, the cars were getting faster by the day. Byron's Ford V-8 had recently been clocked at 121 miles an hour.

  Parks had been worried about Byron's ability to return competitively to NASCAR after Roy Brannon's death. The late-August Daytona race was the first Parks had attended since the incident, but Byron quickly eased Parks's fears. It seemed that Byron had resolved the accident in his mind. Now, it was either race hard or don't race at all.

  So when the 150-miler began, Byron did his Roy Hall imitation, jetting into the lead and staying there. Fonty moved into second place, but Byron loomed a full lap ahead, a seemingly insurmountable two miles, which he soon stretched to four. “Fans marveled at the power and speed Byron had stored under the hood,” a newswriter said.

  With just four laps to go, Byron bounced through the choppy north turn but wasn't willing to ease up, not even in the turns where fans stood in harm's way. The thick, grabby sand plucked and clawed at Byron's Ford, cloying and insistent, just as the red dirt had been at Columbus. This time, he managed to power through the angry red ruts, but not without injury to his car—a stone punctured a hole in his oil pan, and the black liquid quickly gurgled out. Before he'd even reached the south end of the paved backstretch, his V-8 was gasping and then finally died, ten miles short of victory.

  A full two and a half minutes later, Fonty roared past and won the race.

  Flock's win put him just ahead of Byron in NASCAR's points race. In victory lane, he complained about the beat-up and difficult turns but sympathized with Byron. “I'm glad I won,” he said. “But it was a tough break for Byron.”

  Byron's performance at Daytona was a message to the others that he was not going to let the tragedy at Columbus slow him down. Fonty's response was to switch teams (for the third time since 1947) and hire a new mechanic, named Joe Wolfe, from Reading, Pennsylvania. The tactic paid off, and Flock raced strongly through September and October. Byron struck back, winning two close races that put him ahead of Flock in the points race. He had amassed nearly three thousand points across the 1948 season but now led Flock by just twenty-five points. By late October, with the season winding down, NASCAR's standings stood: Red Byron, Fonty Flock, Tim Flock, Curtis Turner, Buddy Shuman.

  In a remarkable stroke of luck for Bill France, it appeared NASCAR's first championship would be determined on the final race of its first season. This time, France certainly wouldn't declare anyone the champ before the year's last race, as he had in 1947. The final NASCAR race of 1948 was now scheduled for November 7—at Columbus, Georgia, the same track where Byron's car had plowed into the crowd and killed.

  A boosterish sportswriter wrote before the race that fatalities such as Roy Brannon's were “very rare” and driver fatalities “almost unheard of.” He urged race fans to “get all the thrills and relax and know that the performers have only a minimum of danger,” which, of course, was hardly the truth.

  The writer failed to mention that a few weeks earlier, Indy racing star Ted Horn had been tossed from his car at a dirt track in Illinois and killed. A few days later, Atlanta racer Charles Marks was killed at a fairgrounds track in South Carolina. His car flipped, and Marks was trying to crawl from the wreckage when the other racers, who couldn't see him in the thick cloud of red dust, ran him over. A few months before that, during Red Byron's qualifying attempt at Indy, a veteran named Ralph Hepburn, who had been competing at Indy since 1925, died in a crash during practice. That same day, at a stock car track in Jefferson, Georgia, a rookie named Swayne Pritchett, who'd been inching up in NASCAR's standings and was ranked sixth at the time, took the checkered flag but then inexplicably drove past victory lane and straight into the railing of the first turn at full speed. He was thrown from his car, and his body was run over by the second- and third-place finishers. Pritchett was killed instantly.

  So to say that death was “very rare” and that racing carried a “minimum of danger” was hardly an accurate portrayal of the 1940s world of auto racing. Which is why Bill France had reason to be nervous about his final race of the year, where his first NASCAR champion would be determined. If only it weren't the track of Roy Brannon's death.

  Two thousand fans arrived early for that November 7 race at Columbus, but AAA and Sam Nunis almost trashed France's season-finale dream race. Besides Byron and Flock, only four other drivers showed up at France's race. France had flown up from Daytona that morning expecting to have a full lineup of seventeen cars, those whose drivers had submitted entry forms the previous week. France was furious to learn that many of those drivers, knowing they weren't in the running for a NASCAR championship, chose instead to race that day at Atlanta's Lakewood Speedway, where Nunis was hosting a AAA race with a larger winner's purse. Scheduling a race on the same day as a competitor was a common and often effective tactic among rival promoters.

  Then France's bad day got worse. During a ten-lap warm-up race, Fonty blew his engine, which meant Byron would be racing in the thirty-lap feature race—and for the NASCAR championship—against a field of just four lesser racers.

  France decided to call off the race. He grabbed a microphone and lied to the crowd, telling them there must have been a “misunderstanding” about the schedule by the other drivers. He asked fans if they wanted to see the race or postpone it, hoping they'd agree to wait a week. But a majority of fans raised their hands and voted to go ahead with the day's race. France ignored the vote and said he had decided to reschedule the race for the following Sunday and to allow fans to return for free, earning a loud round of “boos.”

  On the new race day, November 14, twenty drivers arrived, to France's great relief. Byron qualified for the pole position, but Fonty— who had repaired his car during the previous week—lost a wheel during his qualifying race and started seven cars back.

  Byron started on the pole and for the first half of the race easily held the lead. Flock started far back in the field but skillfully picked and passed his way through them all. By the eighteenth lap, Flock was right on Byron's tail, and when Byron hesitated in a turn, Flock took advantage and squeezed through a narrow gap and took the lead.

  Nell had told Red to be careful, but to win. How could he explain to her that it was often impossible to do both? The memory of Roy Brannon would never leave him, but Byron knew he had to get young Roy out of his head, to race his race, do his job, and win. Isn't that what the fans came for? They were once again pushed against the chic
ken wire fence, right at the edge of the track, as if the little boy's death had never happened.

  Six laps later, Byron found the opening he needed. On the very same turn where his tire had exploded, where everything had changed, he accelerated, and his car leaned up against its two right wheels, sliding and churning, surfing and slicing a crooked line through the red ruts. He weaseled safely past Flock and back into the lead.

  Byron stayed there for the last six laps, pushing as hard as possible on every turn of every lap. He couldn't shake Fonty, who drove so close to Byron's rear end, it looked as if the two cars were attached. But Byron found the perfect high-speed groove and thwarted Fonty's every attempt to pass. He finished a scant fifteen feet ahead of Flock.

  Afterward, when France tallied up his numbers, he announced that Byron had finished the season thirty-two points ahead of Fonty Flock and would be named NASCAR's first champion. Despite the great cost, the loss of life, he had won a historic championship. And yet, the heavy price he paid would linger. Friends remarked years later that Byron “sort of lost heart after that.” Said another, “I truly think the death of that little boy never left him.” Charles Jenkins, who was a spectator at the track the day Roy Brannon was killed, said the track forever after carried the “ambience” of death.

  Six weeks later, on December 29, Byron's own son was born. They named him Robert Jr. In the days before the birth, Nell had been telling Red it was maybe time to slow down. He'd soon be a father. She knew racing was still his passion, but she reminded him of his less-than-perfect health and their less-than-healthy finances.

  “Maybe think about a less spectacular profession,” she said, reminding him of the promise he'd made when they first met: to build her a home in Florida.

  With an infant son, Red knew Nell would no longer be able to sit by his side as they drove throughout the Southeast in search of races. He'd now have to travel alone. And she was right about his health. Although he rarely talked about it, Byron had come to accept pain as sort of an evil sidekick, the relentless shadow of his professional life. He never went anywhere without his bottle of aspirin, which he popped like candy. Some days were better, and he'd manage to be chatty and upbeat. On his darker days, deep lines would furrow into his face, and he'd appear drawn, gloomy, and prematurely ancient. He'd be in no mood for small talk on those days, which usually occurred after a lengthy race, whose bumps and ruts would terrorize the small shard of shrapnel still lodged deep in his thigh. Even with the help of Red Vogt's specialized clutch pedal, the aftermath of a race involved days of pronounced limping and a sour disposition.