by Tom Wolfe
Junior worked his way up through the minor leagues, the Sportsman and Modified classifications, as they are called, winning championships in both, and won his first Grand National race, the big leagues, in 1955 at Hickory, on dirt. He was becoming known as “the hardest of the hard-chargers,” power sliding, rooting them out of the groove, raising hell, and already the Junior Johnson legend was beginning.
He kept hard-charging, power sliding, going after other drivers as though there wasn’t room on the track but for one, and became the most popular driver in stock-car racing by 1959. The presence of Detroit and Detroit’s big money had begun to calm the drivers down a little. Detroit was concerned about Image. The last great duel of the dying dog-eat-dog era of stock car racing came in 1959, when Junior and Lee Petty, who was then leading the league in points, had it out on the Charlotte raceway. Junior was in the lead, and Petty was right on his tail, but couldn’t get by Junior. Junior kept coming out of the curves faster. So every chance he got, Petty would get up right on Junior’s rear bumper and start banging it, gradually forcing the fender in to where the metal would cut Junior’s rear tire. With only a few laps to go, Junior had a blowout and spun out up against the guardrail. That is Junior’s version. Petty claimed Junior hit a pop bottle and spun out. The fans in Charlotte were always throwing pop bottles and other stuff onto the track late in the race, looking for blood. In any case, Junior eased back into the pits, had the tire changed, and charged out after Petty. He caught him on a curve and—well, whatever really happened, Petty was suddenly “up against the wall” and out of the race, and Junior won.
What a howl went up. The Charlotte chief of police charged out onto the track after the race, according to Petty, and offered to have Junior arrested for “assault with a dangerous weapon,” the hassling went on for weeks—
“Back then,” Junior tells me, “when you got into a guy and racked him up, you might as well get ready, because he’s coming back for you. H’it was dog eat dog. That straightened Lee Petty out right smart. They don’t do stuff like that anymore, though, because the guys don’t stand for it.”
Anyway, the Junior Johnson legend kept building up and building up, and in 1960 it got hotter than ever when Junior won the biggest race of the year, the Daytona 500, by discovering a new technique called “drafting.” That year stock car racing was full of big powerful Pontiacs manned by top drivers, and they would go like nothing else anybody ever saw. Junior went down to Daytona with a Chevrolet.
“My car was about ten miles an hour slower than the rest of the cars, the Pontiacs,” Junior tells me. “In the preliminary races, the warmups and stuff like that, they was smoking me off the track. Then I remember once I went out for a practice run, and Fireball Roberts was out there in a Pontiac and I got in right behind him on a curve, right on his bumper. I knew I couldn’t stay with him on the straightaway, but I came out of the curve fast, right in behind him, running flat out, and then I noticed a funny thing. As long as I stayed right in behind him, I noticed I picked up speed and stayed right with him and my car was going faster than it had ever gone before. I could tell on the tachometer. My car wasn’t turning no more than 6000 before, but when I got into this drafting position, I was turning 6800 to 7000. H’it felt like the car was plumb off the ground, floating along.”
“Drafting,” it was discovered at Daytona, created a vacuum behind the lead car and both cars would go faster than they normally would. Junior “hitched rides” on the Pontiacs most of the afternoon, but was still second to Bobby Johns, the lead Pontiac. Then, late in the race, Johns got into a drafting position with a fellow Pontiac that was actually one lap behind him and the vacuum got so intense that the rear window blew out of Johns’ car and he spun out and crashed and Junior won.
This made Junior the Lion Killer, the Little David of stock car racing, and his performance in the 1963 season made him even more so.
Junior raced for Chevrolet at Daytona in February, 1963, and set the all-time stock car speed record in a hundred-mile qualifying race, 164.083 miles an hour, twenty-one miles an hour faster than Parnelli Jones’s winning time at Indianapolis that year. Junior topped that at Daytona in July of 1963, qualifying at 166.005 miles per hour in a five-mile run, the fastest that anyone had ever averaged that distance in a racing car of any type. Junior’s Chevrolet lasted only twenty-six laps in the Daytona 500 in 1963, however. He went out with a broken push rod. Although Chevrolet announced they were pulling out of racing at this time, Junior took his car and started out on the wildest performance in the history of stock car racing. Chevrolet wouldn’t give him a cent of backing. They wouldn’t even speak to him on the telephone. Half the time he had to have his own parts made. Plymouth, Mercury, Dodge and Ford, meantime, were pouring more money than ever into stock car racing. Yet Junior won seven Grand National races out of the thirty-three he entered and led most others before mechanical trouble forced him out.
All the while, Junior was making record qualifying runs, year after year. In the usual type of qualifying run, a driver has the track to himself and makes two circuits, with the driver with the fastest average time getting the “pole” position for the start of the race. In a way this presents stock car danger in its purest form. Driving a stock car does not require much handling ability, at least not as compared to Grand Prix racing, because the tracks are simple banked ovals and there is almost no shifting of gears. So qualifying becomes a test of raw nerve—of how fast a man is willing to take a curve. Many of the top drivers in competition are poor at qualifying. In effect, they are willing to calculate their risks only against the risks the other drivers are taking. Junior takes the pure risk as no other driver has ever taken it.
“Pure” risk or total risk, whichever, Indianapolis and Grand Prix drivers have seldom been willing to face the challenge of Southern stock car drivers. A. J. Foyt, last year’s winner at Indianapolis, is one exception. He has raced against the Southerners and beaten them. Parnelli Jones has tried and fared badly. Driving “Southern style” has a quality that shakes a man up. The Southerners went on a tour of northern tracks last fall. They raced at Bridgehampton, New York, and went into the corners so hard the marshals stationed at each corner kept radioing frantically to the control booth: “They’re going off the track. They’re all going off the track!”
BUT THIS, JUNIOR Johnson’s last race in a dodge, was not his day, neither for qualifying nor racing. Lorenzen took the lead early and won the 250-mile race a lap ahead of the field. Junior finished third, but was never in contention for the lead.
“COME ON, JUNIOR, do my hand — ”
Two or three hundred people come out of the stands and up out of the infield and onto the track to be around Junior Johnson. Junior is signing autographs in a neat left-handed script he has. It looks like it came right out of the Locker book. The girls! Levi’s, stretch pants, sneaky shorts, stretch jeans, they press into the crowd with lively narbs and try to get their hands up in front of Junior and say:
“Come on, Junior, do my hand!”
In order to do a hand, Junior has to hold the girl’s hand in his right hand and then sign his name with a ball-point on the back of her hand.
“Junior, you got to do mine, too!”
“Put it on up here.”
All the girls break into … smiles. Junior Johnson does a hand. Ah, sweet little cigarette-ad blonde! She says:
“Junior, why don’t you ever call me up?”
“I ’spect you get plenty of calls ’thout me.”
“Oh, Junior! You call me up, you hear now?”
But also a great many older people crowd in, and they say:
“Junior, you’re doing a real good job out there, you’re driving real good.”
“Junior, when you get in that Ford, I want to see you pass that Freddie Lorenzen, you hear now?”
“Junior, you like that Ford better than that Dodge?” And:
“Junior, here’s a young man that’s been waiting some time and wanting to see y
ou—” and the man lifts up his little boy in the middle of the crowd and says: “I told you you’d see Junior Johnson. This here’s Junior Johnson!”
The boy has a souvenir racing helmet on his head. He stares at Junior through a buttery face. Junior signs the program he has in his hand, and then the boy’s mother says:
“Junior, I tell you right now, he’s beside you all the way. He can’t be moved.”
And then:
“Junior, I want you to meet the meanest little girl in Wilkes County.”
“She don’t look mean to me.”
Junior keeps signing autographs and over by the pits the other kids are all over his car, the Dodge. They start pulling off the decals, the ones saying Holly Farms Poultry and Autolite and God knows whatall. They fight over the strips, the shreds of decal, as if they were totems.
All this homage to Junior Johnson lasts about forty minutes. He must be signing about 250 autographs, but he is not a happy man. By and by the crowd is thinning out, the sun is going down, wind is blowing the Coca-Cola cups around, all one can hear, mostly, is a stock car engine starting up every now and then as somebody drives it up onto a truck or something, and Junior looks around and says:
“I’d rather lead one lap and fall out of the race than stroke it and finish in the money.”
“Stroking it” is driving carefully in hopes of outlasting faster and more reckless cars. The opposite of stroking it is “hard-charging.” Then Junior says:
“I hate to get whipped up here in Wilkes County, North Carolina.”
Wilkes County, North Carolina! Who was it tried to pin the name on Wilkes County, “The bootleg capital of America”? This fellow Vance Packard. But just a minute….
The night after the race Junior and his fiancée, Flossie Clark, and myself went into North Wilkesboro to have dinner. Junior and Flossie came by Lowes Motel and picked us up in the dreamboat white Pontiac. Flossie is a bright, attractive woman, zaftig, well-organized. She and Junior have been going together since they were in high school. They are going to get married as soon as Junior gets his new house built. Flossie has been doing the decor. Junior Johnson, in the second-highest income bracket in the United States for the past five years, is moving out of his father’s white frame house in Ingle Hollow at last. About three hundred yards down the road. Overlooking a lot of good green land and Anderson’s grocery. Junior shows me through the house, it is almost finished, and when we get to the front door, I ask him, “How much of this land is yours?”
Junior looks around for a minute, and then back up the hill, up past his three automated chicken houses, and then down into the hollow over the pasture where his $3100 Santa Gertrudis bull is grazing, and then he says:
“Everything that’s green is mine.”
Junior Johnson’s house is going to be one of the handsomest homes in Wilkes County. Yes. And—such complicated problems of class and status. Junior is not only a legendary figure as a backwoods boy with guts who made good, he is also popular personally, he is still a good old boy, rich as he is. He is also respected for the sound and sober way he has invested his money. He also has one of the best business connections in town, Holly Farms Poultry. What complicates it is that half the county, anyway, reveres him as the greatest, most fabled night-road driver in the history of Southern bootlegging. There is hardly a living soul in the hollows who can conjure up two seconds’ honest moral indignation over “the whiskey business.” That is what they call it, “the whiskey business.” The fact is, it has some positive political overtones, sort of like the I.R.A. in Ireland. The other half of the county—well, North Wilkesboro itself is a prosperous, good-looking town of 5000, where a lot of hearty modern business burghers are making money the modern way, like everywhere else in the U.S.A., in things like banking, poultry processing, furniture, mirror, and carpet manufacture, apple growing, and so forth and so on. And one thing these men are tired of is Wilkes County’s reputation as a center of moonshining. The U.S. Alcohol and Tobacco Tax agents sit over there in Wilkesboro, right next to North Wilkesboro, year in and year out, and they have been there since God knows when, like an Institution in the land, and every day that they are there, it is like a sign saying, Moonshine County. And even that is not so bad—it has nothing to do with it being immoral and only a little to do with it being illegal. The real thing is, it is—raw and hillbilly. And one thing thriving modern Industry is not is hillbilly. And one thing the burghers of North Wilkesboro are not about to be is hillbilly. They have split-level homes that would knock your eyes out. Also swimming pools, white Buick Snatchwagons, flagstone terrasse-porches enclosed with louvered glass that opens wide in the summertime, and built-in brick barbecue pits and they give parties where they wear Bermuda shorts and Jax stretch pants and serve rum collins and play twist and bossa nova records on the hi-fi and tell Shaggy Dog jokes about strange people ordering martinis. Moonshining … just a minute—the truth is, North Wilkesboro.…
So we are all having dinner at one of the fine new restaurants in North Wilkesboro, a place of suburban plate-glass elegance. The manager knows Junior and gives us the best table in the place and comes over and talks to Junior a while about the race. A couple of men get up and come over and get Junior’s autograph to take home to their sons and so forth. Then toward the end of the meal a couple of North Wilkesboro businessmen come over (“Junior, how are you, Junior. You think you’re going to like that fast-backed Ford?”) and Junior introduces them to me.
“You’re not going to do like that fellow Vance Packard did, are you?”
“Vance Packard?”
“Yeah, I think it was Vance Packard wrote it. He wrote an article and called Wilkes County the bootleg capital of America. Don’t pull any of that stuff. I think it was in American magazine. The bootleg capital of America. Don’t pull any of that stuff on us.”
I looked over at Junior and Flossie. Neither one of them said anything. They didn’t even change their expressions.
THE NEXT MORNING I met Junior down in Ingle Hollow at Anderson’s Store. That’s about fifteen miles out of North Wilkesboro on County Road No. 2400. Junior is known in a lot of Southern newspapers as “the wild man from Ronda” or “the lead-footed chicken farmer from Ronda,” but Ronda is only his post-office-box address. His telephone exchange, with the Wilkes Telephone Membership Corporation, is Clingman, North Carolina, and that isn’t really where he lives either. Where he lives is just Ingle Hollow, and one of the communal centers of Ingle Hollow is Anderson’s Store. Anderson’s is not exactly a grocery store. Out front there are two gasoline pumps under an over-hanging roof. Inside there are a lot of things like a soda-pop cooler filled with ice, Coca-Colas, Nehi drinks, Dr Pepper, Double Cola, and a gumball machine, a lot of racks of Red Man chewing tobacco, Price’s potato chips, OKay peanuts, cloth hats for working outdoors in, dried sausages, cigarettes, canned goods, a little bit of meal and flour, fly swatters, and I don’t know what all. Inside and outside of Anderson’s there are good old boys. The young ones tend to be inside, talking, and the old ones tend to be outside, sitting under the roof by the gasoline pumps, talking. And on both sides, cars; most of them new and pastel.
Junior drives up and gets out and looks up over the door where there is a row of twelve coon tails. Junior says:
“Two of them gone, ain’t they?”
One of the good old boys says, “Yeah,” and sighs.
A pause, and the other one says, “Somebody stole ’em.”
Then the first one says, “Junior, that dog of yours ever come back?”
Junior says, “Not yet.”
The second good old boy says, “You looking for her to come back?”
Junior says, “I reckon she’ll come back.”
The good old boy says, “I had a coon dog went off like that. They don’t ever come back. I went out ’ere one day, back over yonder, and there he was, cut right from here to here. I swear if it don’t look like a coon got him. Something. H’it must of turned him every way but lo
ose.”
Junior goes inside and gets a Coca-Cola and rings up the till himself, like everybody who goes Into Anderson’s does, it seems like. It is dead quiet in the hollow except for every now and then a car grinds over the dirt road and down the way. One coon dog missing. But he still has a lot of the black and tans, named Rock….
… ROCK, WHITEY, RED, Buster are in the pen out back of the Johnson house, the old frame house. They have scars all over their faces from fighting coons. Gypsy has one huge gash in her back from fighting something. A red rooster crosses the lawn. That’s a big rooster. Shirley, one of Junior’s two younger sisters, pretty girls, is out by the fence in shorts, pulling weeds. Annie May is inside the house with Mrs. Johnson. Shirley has the radio outside on the porch aimed at her, The Four Seasons! “Dawn!—ahhhh, ahhhhh, ahhhhhh!” Then a lot of electronic wheeps and lulus and a screaming disc jockey, yessss! WTOB, the Vibrant Mothering Voice of Winston-Salem, North Carolina. It sounds like WABC in New York. Junior’s mother, Mrs. Johnson, is a big, good-natured woman. She comes out and says, “Did you ever see anything like that in your life? Pullin’ weeds listenin’ to the radio.” Junior’s father, Robert Glenn Johnson, Sr.—he built this frame house about thirty-five years ago, up here where the gravel road ends and the woods starts. The road just peters out into the woods up a hill. The house has a living room, four bedrooms and a big kitchen. The living room is full of Junior’s racing trophies, and so is the piano in Shirley’s room. Junior was born and raised here with his older brothers, L. P., the oldest, and Fred, and his older sister, Ruth. Over yonder, up by that house, there’s a man with a mule and a little plow. That’s L. P. The Johnsons still keep that old mule around to plow the vegetable gardens. And all around, on all sides, like a rim are the ridges and the woods. Well, what about those woods, where Vance Packard said the agents come stealing over the ridges and good old boys go crashing through the underbrush to get away from the still and the women start “calling the cows” up and down the hollows as the signal they were coming.…