REAL NASCAR

The Drivers – Post World War II

While most of the star drivers on the fledgling Piedmont stock car racing scene before World War II were involved in the illegal liquor business, if anything their numbers and influence increased after the war.  Indeed, if Bill France had a major advantage over rival promoters after the war, it was his ability to deliver those wild and crazy North Georgia liquor haulers—most banned by the City of Atlanta from Lakewood Speedway—to the growing number of tracks hosting stock car races in the Carolinas and Virginia.

Soon after the war, Fonty and Bob Flock took over from Lloyd Seay (murdered by his cousin) and Roy Hall (in the Georgia State Penitentiary for armed robbery) as the top stars in the sport.  Both Flocks gained their experience behind the wheel of a souped-up Ford hauling liquor for their uncle, Atlanta moonshine kingpin Peachtree Williams.  Many observers consider Bob one of the greatest talents in stock car racing history, but injuries and a dour disposition that led to frequent fights on and off the track limited his success and influence.  In one of the great stories of stock car racing’s early history, Bob defied the bootlegger ban and tried to sneak into a race at Lakewood in the late 40s and ended up fleeing from the police who tried to apprehend him, crashed through the track fence, and led them on a wild chase through the streets of Atlanta evading capture (although he later turned himself in).

While most observers credit war hero Red Byron as the biggest star in the early days of NASCAR and its predecessor series the National Championship Stock Car Circuit (NCSCC), Fonty Flock was the main draw.  Together he and Bob were billed as the “Mad Flocks” and with the dapper, charismatic Fonty as the top name on most race advertisements brought the fans in by the thousands.  Fonty remained the top draw in stock car racing into the early 1950s and is probably most remembered for winning the 1952 Southern 500 wearing Bermuda (or “Bamooda”, as he pronounced it) shorts and argyle socks and parking his car in front the grandstands after his victory, standing on the hood of his car, and leading the crowd in singing “Dixie.” 

Fonty is another one of those individuals who most NASCAR fans have never heard of who deserves early induction in the Hall of Fame.  He was the mustachioed face of NASCAR in its earliest days.

Other North Georgia trippers who starred in the late 40s and early 50’s included Crash Waller, Billy Carden, Glenn “Legs” Law, and Jack Smith.  Perhaps the biggest star—outside of the Flocks—was Ed Samples.  You won’t find much mention of Samples in the NASCAR record books, but he won the championship in Bill France’s NCSCC in 1946, finished second to Fonty Flock in 1947, and won championships in the late 40s and early 50s in the National Stock Car Racing Association (NSCRA) and the South Carolina Racing Association (SCRA), top rivals to Bill France’s NASCAR.

While the North Georgian bootleggers were the force to be reckoned with in early Piedmont stock car racing, they were soon challenged by liquor haulers from the Carolinas and Virginia.  North Carolinians Buddy Shuman, Glenn Dunnaway, and Jimmie Lewallen (subject of a new movie entitled “Red Dirt Rising”—see http://www.reddirtrising.com/new/ for more information) and South Carolinian Fred Mahon soon became top contenders.

The most notable addition to the stock car racing ranks in the period came when bootlegger Curtis Turner—the “Blond Blizzard” from Floyd, Virginia—burst on the scene in 1946.  “Pops” (a nickname Turner received for his propensity for “popping” his competitors to get them out of his way) was as flamboyant and charismatic as Fonty Flock.  There was never a dull moment with Turner on the track; he would either blow up, wreck, or win the race and then host the largest, loudest, and lewdest party anyone had ever seen afterwards.  He soon became one of the sport’s top draws and would remain so until the late 1960s.  In 1968, he became the first stock car racer to appear on the cover of Sports Illustrated with a feature article inside calling him the “Babe Ruth of Stock Car Racing.”  Turner is another who deserves early induction into the NASCAR HOF.

By the early 1950s, other trippers moved into the top ranks of the sport.  Joe Weatherly from Norfolk, Virginia soon became a top driver—he won two Grand National Championships in the early 60s--and Curtis Turner’s partner in leading NASCAR in practical jokes and partying.  South Carolina bootlegger, turned Charlotte bus driver, Buck Baker won the 1956 GN championship and Denton, North Carolina bootlegger Bob Welborn won the NASCAR Convertible Championships in 1956, 57, and 58.  Danville, Virginia liquor hauler Wendell Scott also began to make a splash on the local short track scene in southern Virginia and would go on to a long NASCAR career and become the only African American (to date) to win a race in NASCAR’s top division.

There has been a lot of controversy over the years about another of NASCAR’s top drivers and his relationship with moonshine; Lee Petty.  Petty always denied his involvement with illegal liquor, but recently even the Petty family has admitted that he had at least limited involvement.  When asked about Petty’s connection to moonshining by reporter Ed Hinton, Bob Welborn responded, “All I know is I used to take 50 gallons a week over to his house.  I don’t know—maybe he drank it all himself.”  In relatively recent years—most notably since Lee’s death—Richard Petty has admitted that his daddy probably had some minor involvement and grandson Kyle has provided some pretty strong evidence of Lee’s connections to the business as he shared the fact that two of Lee’s brothers were busted for counterfeiting sugar rationing stamps during World War II—a sure sign of illegal liquor involvement.

By the time Junior Johnson arrived on the NASCAR scene at the Southern 500 in 1953, the era of the liquor hauling stock car racer was actually in decline.  Indeed,  increasingly the new breed of stars like Fireball Roberts, Paul Goldsmith, David Pearson, and Ned Jarrett had no direct involvement in hauling liquor.  Tim Flock did ride along on lots of moonshine hauling trips with his brothers, but they kept him out of the business at their mother’s request.

Junior was a late-comer for a bootlegger in the sport, but would have a huge impact as a driver in the late 1950s and early 60s.  His style was often reminiscent of Curtis Turner’s and as reporter Dick Thompson put it, Johnson “looks like a wrestler and drives like a maniac.”  As most NASCAR fans know, Johnson did spend much of 1957 in the federal penitentiary at Chillocothe, Ohio, but most don’t realize (unless you’ve read the Tom Higgins and Steve Waid classic biography Junior Johnson:  Brave in Life) that Johnson narrowly missed another prison sentence when he was arrested—along with his two brothers and his mother—on another moonshining charge in 1959.

By the 1960s the era of the moonshine tripper/stock car driver era was pretty much over as the moonshine business declined with the arrival of more factory jobs and improved rural employment opportunities with cattle and chicken raising .  A few drivers had had some involvement, but most came out of more legal—if not just as rough—backgrounds.  In the early 1970s when North Carolina passed a liquor-by-the-drink law that proponents argued would put the bootleggers out of business, Joe Littlejohn quipped, “Where will our race drivers get their early training?”

While the moonshine hauler/stock car racer era seems to be in the distant past, there are—fortunately, at least from the perspective of this historian--some vestiges of that bygone time left in the sport.  Morgan Shepherd, whose father was a Catawba County bootlegger, hauled liquor in his early days and at age 68 is still trying to make a living in the Nationwide Series.  The most notable presence in NASCAR with a bootlegging past is car owner Richard Childress.  Childress hauled moonshine in his late teens in the Winston-Salem area and made good money at it.  “I did it for a few years, and in 1962 or 1963, I bought a 1959 Chevy, and I can still hear people saying, ‘How in the devil does a kid working at a service station do that?’”  Ironically, Childress is now the owner not only of a top NASCAR Sprint Cup team, but the proud proprietor of Childress Vineyards, one of the largest wine operations in the Southeast.

So let’s have a toast—of whatever your favorite beverage may be (I’m personally a big Cheerwine fan)—to NASCAR’s colorful bootlegging drivers who laid the foundation for a great sporting enterprise.  May their spirit, love of fun, and ability to thrill a crowd live on.

 

Next week:  Part IV – Bootlegging, Early Car Owners, and Mechanics

 

***Let me put a plug in for a great event coming up on March 14 when  “Legends Helping Legends” will be holding its Fourth Annual fundraiser at the Memory Lane Museum in Mooresville, North Carolina.  The event runs from 11:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. and will include autograph signings by such NASCAR greats as Rex White (this year’s event is being held in his honor), Ned Jarrett, Bobby and Donnie Allison and many, many more.  All proceeds go to Living Legends Medical Fund to benefit former NASCAR drivers and crew members in need.

 

 

The Drivers - Pre-World War II

Bootlegging drivers in the sport’s early days are one aspect of the moonshine and NASCAR story that most folks—even NASCAR itself, in a limited fashion--agree on.  The extent of most folks’ knowledge about liquor haulers and NASCAR, however, is usually limited to one name:  Junior Johnson.  While Johnson is one of the most notable of the bootlegging stock car racers of the Piedmont and Mountain South—memorialized by Tom Wolfe in a legendary Esquire magazine article, by Hollywood in a couple of B movies, in an excellent biography by Tom Higgins and Steve Waid, and by his own appearances in numerous documentaries--, Johnson was actually one of the last of his ilk to power slide around a NASCAR dirt track.

The story of moonshine runners and stock car racing in the region goes way back to long before Johnson left his mule in the field to drive his brother L.P.’s 1940 Standard Ford liquor car at a race for local boys at the North Wilkesboro Speedway in 1949.  Indeed, the story goes back to the very beginnings of southern stock car racing, or at least to the second beach/road stock car race on Daytona Beach in 1937 when local bootlegger Smokey Purser showed up and won the race.

Purser should always be remembered as a key pioneer in the southern stock car racing that became NASCAR as the first of the great liquor haulers in the sport.  Purser had migrated to Daytona Beach as a teen to escape poverty in Lumber City, Georgia.  He became involved in the illegal liquor business during prohibition off-loading liquor shipped from the Caribbean and transporting it to thirsty customers as far away as St. Louis.  He told his children he was a “sea lawyer” handling “cases at sea.”  Purser did not always rely on a fast car to get the goods through, however, and used guile as well.  He sometimes disguised himself as a priest and often hauled the illegal hootch in a panel truck labeled “Fresh Florida Fish.”  “Yeah, I had to throw a few dead fish in the back of the van to stink it up real good.” 

A year after Purser won the Daytona race, the first of the bootleggers from the Piedmont South arrived on the beach; Spartanburg, South Carolina’s Joe Littlejohn.  Littlejohn is another of the great NASCAR pioneers who most folks have never heard of.  He did well in all the pre-World War II beach races and began promoting races himself in Spartanburg and at other Upstate South Carolina fairgrounds tracks.  Littlejohn did not race a lot after the war—although he was one of the fastest in the speed trials on Daytona Beach into the early 1950s—but was a key associate of Bill France’s in promoting races into the 1970s.

 Littlejohn was just the first of a long line of bootlegger/trippers who made the trip south to the Daytona Beach races and became the first stars of stock car racing in the Piedmont region during the pre-war era.  J. Sam Rice from Martinsville, Virginia won the March 1939 beach race and Asheville, North Carolina bootlegger Arvel “Red” Sluder raced regularly.  The largest—and most successful--group of liquor-hauling racers came out of North Georgia and included Bob and Fonty Flock, Harley Taylor, Gober Sosebee, and Bernard Long who all raced regularly at Lakewood Speedway in Atlanta as well as at Daytona Beach.

The biggest stars of stock car racing on the beach and on any track where they showed up to race were Dawsonville, Georgia cousins Lloyd Seay and Roy Hall.  The two put on a show whenever they got behind the wheel of a car, whether hauling liquor down Highway 9 from Dawson County to Atlanta or powersliding around the turns at a fairgrounds track or through the north turn at Daytona.  The most amazing feat that the two accomplished—other than winning lots of races wherever they went—was two-wheeling through the north turn at Daytona on only the right side wheels (see Greg Fielden’s excellent book High Speed at Low Tide for a photograph of Seay performing this feat).  Big Bill France often said that Seay was the most talented driver he had ever seen race.

While the bootlegging/racers quickly became the major draws at the growing number of stock car races in the Piedmont region, billboarding such characters did have its draw backs and their activities caused stock car racing to gain a less than stellar image among respectable middle-class folks.  Red Sluder’s stock car racing career ended early when he shot and killed a man in an Asheville tavern and was sent to the state penitentiary.  Seay’s career was cut short when he was murdered by a cousin after an argument over a load of sugar—an essential liquor making ingredient—the day after he won a big Labor Day race at Lakewood Speedway in 1941.  Seay’s running mate, Roy Hall was arrested, convicted, and sentenced to six years in the state penitentiary for armed robbery in 1946.  Glen “Legs” Law was convicted for attempting to steal six tons of sugar from Atlanta’s Maryland Baking Company; a conviction later overturned on appeal.  As Smokey Yunick put it, stock car racers in the sports early days had the social status of a “’mon backer” on a garbage truck.

This outlaw image forever changed the course of southern stock car racing, and NASCAR itself, in the days immediately following World War II.  Prior to the war, the Atlanta area with its wealth of talented liquor-hauling racers was the acknowledged center of the stock car racing universe.  However, when Lakewood Speedway announced a big stock car racing show for the Labor Day immediately after V-J Day in 1945 and gave top billing to five convicted bootleggers, the forces of propriety in the city reacted immediately.  Led by the editor of the Atlanta Constitution and the Atlanta-area Baptist and Methodist ministerial associations, a campaign was begun to ban convicted liquor runners from the city-owned speedway.  While they were not able to prevent the Labor Day race from occurring—a race ironically won by Roy Hall—they were able to ban the racers from future events at Lakewood; a ban that would last until 1949.

The rest, as they say, is history as Big Bill France took advantage of the banning of bootlegger/racers at Lakewood to promote the Atlanta-area liquor haulers in events he organized in Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina.  While for most of the 1940s the star attractions in the stock car racing that evolved into NASCAR were North Georgia bootleggers like Fonty and Bob Flock, Ed Samples, Jack Smith, Gober Sosebee, Billy Carden, and Crash Waller, the center had now shifted to the North Carolina Piedmont.  While Atlanta would always be an important venue, it would never regain the status it lost when it banned the bootleggers.

 

Next Week: The REAL Story of Moonshine and NASCAR Part III – More on the bootlegger drivers who made NASCAR.

 

A Special Note:  The NASCAR world lost a giant last week when “Suitcase” Jake Elder passed away.  It was the likes of Elder—a man who had little education or social status, but who possessed a razor sharp mechanical mind--who made NASCAR what it is today.  Our condolences, thoughts, and prayers go out to the Elder family.  Rest in peace, Jake.

I’ve devoted about twelve years of my life to conducting in-depth research on southern stock car racing and NASCAR’s history from the mid-1930s up to the early 1970s.  The result of that research—fair warning here; this is a self-promoting advertisement—is a book entitled Real NASCAR:  White Lightning, Red Clay, and Big Bill France http://uncpress.unc.edu/browse/book_detail?title_id=1687.   The book, published by the University of North Carolina Press, just shipped from the warehouse last week so should be in (or at least available to) your favorite bookstore soon.  Amazon says it will have it February 25.

In doing that research, I’ve found that one of the most important and persistent stories handed down in almost every account of the early days of NASCAR is the alleged role of moonshiners and bootleggers in the origins of the sport. In the common mythology of NASCAR, the sport arose solely and directly from liquor-running drivers and their souped-up cars. According to "Humpy" Wheeler at “the average race in 1950, particularly in western North Carolina or maybe the Peach Bowl down in Georgia, maybe 25 to 30 percent of the participants had run or was running moonshine at the time.  And probably that many mechanics had either built or worked on moonshine cars.” Ned Jarrett estimates that “at least half the people I was racing against at Hickory and North Wilkesboro [in the early 1950s] were in bootlegging.”

Most folks who have written about NASCAR’s history have recounted Tim Flock’s account of how the bootleggers started the sport. This version is from Sylvia Wilkinson’s fine 1983 book Dirt Tracks to Glory:

 “I know exactly how racing got started. . . . In the mid-thirties, in a cow pasture in Georgia, that’s where racing [of the NASCAR variety] began.  We didn’t have no tickets, no safety equipment, no fences, no nothing.  Just a bunch of bootleggers who’d been arguing all week about who had the fastest car would get together to prove it.

. . . Thirty or forty of these bootleggers showed up in this cow pasture at Stockbridge, which is about fifteen miles outside Atlanta.  They made a track by running around and digging their wheels in the ground in about a half-mile circle.  These guys would run and bet against their own cars, betting who had the fastest car.  That night they’d be hauling liquor in the same car.  About fifty people saw this dust cloud and came up trying to see what was causing it.  Next time, a hundred would show up.  Then three or four hundred would show up.

. . . Pretty soon, they raced every Sunday.  Five and six thousand people started showing up.  Then Bill France came along and he started putting up fences, the whole bit.  He made stock car racing what it is today.”

Some observers, however, dispute this standard version of NASCAR history.  Geographer Richard Pillsbury asserts, “it seems questionable that moonshining has been a significant force in the development of stock car racing as we know it today.”  Sociologist Jim Wright offers no qualifiers when he argues, “The idea that NASCAR was created by or was at least a tolerant, much less congenial, home for a gang of wild-eyed whiskey-runners is nonsense.”

NASCAR founder, Bill France, Sr. regularly downplayed any alleged moonshine connection to NASCAR’s founding.  Some observers have contended that France did not like bootleggers, tried to run them out of stock car racing, and that his motivation may have been due to a “puritanical” streak. France himself dismissed questions about any purported relationship between him and bootleggers.  As Sylvia Wilkinson observed after interviewing France in the 1980s, “Thunder Road [the general name for highways where trippers hauled liquor], the path that excites the legend-seekers, is a road he never drove down, and one he is tired of hearing about.”

The NASCAR party line continues in this vein, admitting that there were bootleggers around in the early days—Junior Johnson’s name regularly comes up here--; they were a quaint and curious part of the sport’s beginnings but their influence was limited.  Of course the subject has come up recently as NASCAR has had to look at its past in terms of deciding what stories it will tell in its brand new, state-of-the-art museum and hall of fame. 

In a recent interview the NASCAR Hall of Fame’s historian Buz McKim gave an early indication of how the museum will deal with bootlegging/moonshining in its exhibits. “We're going to touch on that a little bit. NASCAR didn't beget moonshine, and moonshine didn't beget NASCAR -- it's just something that came along at the same time. NASCAR was never involved in moonshine; some of its earliest competitors were. So you had an association from the outside. There were developments in the stock car that came about from what the whiskey haulers learned from trying to outrun the federal guys.”  In other words, the narrative will follow the traditional line, acknowledging the existence of bootleggers—indeed, rumor has it that the HOF commissioned Junior Johnson to build a still for the museum—but downplaying their role in the sport’s formation and early history.

Early on in my research, I tended to agree with Big Bill France, NASCAR, most of the academics who have written on the subject, and with Buz McKim that writers and participants in NASCAR, more interested in titillation than accuracy, vastly exaggerated the role of moonshining and bootlegging in the sport's origins and early years.  However, on much closer inspection, I have discovered that if anything NASCAR's connection to the manufacturing, transportation, and sale of illegal alcohol has been both underestimated and misunderstood.  Indeed, the deeper I have looked into southern stock car racing’s early history, the more liquor I have found. 

Indeed, there is no disputing the fact that significant numbers of the early drivers in stock car racing—especially the most successful ones--had their initial high-speed driving experiences evading the law at the wheel of a souped-up 1939 or 40 Ford V-8 loaded with 120 gallons of illegal whiskey.  What most historians of stock car racing and NASCAR have failed to note, however, is that a large percentage of the early mechanics, car owners, promoters, and track owners had deep ties to the illegal alcohol business.  Indeed, the very foundations of the sport were built on the proceeds of the manufacture, transport and sale of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of cases of white liquor, and legally produced/illegally sold bootleg “red” liquor, in the Piedmont region of the South and its adjacent foothills.

In the coming weeks I’ll give you more specifics about the fascinating history of how Big Bill France partnered with these purveyors of illegal alcohol to take NASCAR from the back roads of the Piedmont South to the main street of American professional sports.

 

Next week: The REAL Story of Moonshine and NASCAR - Part II - The Bootlegger Drivers

 

On Sunday I watched the “Great American Race” with a group of friends that I have shared this event with for the past fifteen years.  We get together at my friend Larry Ward’s house for way too much food, great fellowship, and for making fun of the Tony Stewart fans.  There have been some moments at our Daytona party over the years that I’ll never forget:  1998 when we all piled on Daniel Hinson (the lone Earnhardt fan in the bunch) when the Intimidator finally won the 500; 2001 when for the first time Mike Kellis did not place a Mark Martin diecast on top of the television set because his (former) favorite driver had switched to the Viagra sponsorship (I don’t think he’s forgiven him yet); that same day when the phone started to ring an hour or so after everyone had gone home to share the shock and bereavement of Earnhardt’s death; 2008 when Larry distributed black wrist bands to everyone to honor the memory of Dale Ammons, one of our Daytona buddies who had died of cancer the previous year at far too young an age.  It’s always a great time and has become a great tradition for all of us. 

Indeed, our Daytona party reminds me that kicking off the racing season at Daytona Beach is not only an important part of a very short tradition of a group of old friends, but one of the greatest—and one of the longest running--traditions in American sports history; one that for much of its history—up until 1958--was at least partially run on the beach itself.

 While most folks think of Daytona Beach in conjunction with the stock car racing that has taken place there for seventy-plus years, the area began its love affair with the automobile and auto racing in 1902, a full nine years before Indianapolis Motor Speedway opened its gates. The earliest events were held directly on the beach and centered on the massive Hotel Ormond, an elite resort intent on attracting even more elites.  In March, the managers of the hotel linked up with New York promoter William J. Morgan to organize a Winter Speed Carnival for automobile time trials and match races.  Over the years the Carnival attracted auto racing pioneers such as Ransom Olds, Alexander Winton, Willie K. Vanderbilt, Barney Oldfield, Louis Chevrolet, Vincenzo Lancia and Victor Hemery.

 The early competitions featured a wide variety of automobiles including steam-powered and electric vehicles.  Exotic names like Darracq, De Dietrich, Peerless, Napier, Christie, Winton, and Autocar competed alongside more familiar models made by Ford, Mercedes, Renault, and Fiat.  By 1905 the fastest cars were topping the 100 mph barrier with Arthur McDonald becoming the first man to do so in a Napier.  By the end of the so-called “beach tournaments” in 1910, drivers like Barney Oldfield were topping 130 mph and annually setting world speed records.

 Those early Daytona events also began traditions—some not so appealing to modern sensibilities--that fans would talk about for years afterward.  Many a race on the beach began with a scattering of sea gulls and other beach birds and the occasional splattering of the same on wind shields.  Besides the visual impairment of seagull entrails on windshields, the sand combined with the salt water often scoured them and blinded the drivers.  This created the common feature of racing on the beach at Daytona of cars ending up in the surf; a rarely fatal occurrence, but one the fans always enjoyed.  Perhaps the most amazing thing, given the proximity of fans—who often stood right on the edge of the race course--to the action and the visual hazards for drivers, is that a race car did not take out a huge number of fans.

 Although the Winter Speed Carnival died as the interest of its millionaire clientele waned and with the onset of World War I, speed trials resumed after the war with record runs by Ralph De Palma in 1919 and Sig Haugdahl in 1922.  In the late 1920s, the rivalry of Englishmen Henry Seagrave and Malcolm Campbell put Daytona on the international racing map, especially after Seagrave broke the 200 m.p.h. barrier on Daytona’s beach in 1927.  Although, Seagrave died in 1929 in a speedboat accident, Campbell and his famous Bluebird returned winter after winter to attempt a new record.  By 1935, Campbell made runs on the beach at well over 300 m.p.h. and attracted large crowds to Daytona Beach even in the midst of the Great Depression.  However, close brushes with disaster in 1935 convinced Campbell that he needed a smoother surface for his record runs, and in 1936 he took his act to the Bonneville Salt Flats of Utah.

 Campbell’s move to Utah opened the door for a new era of racing at Daytona Beach in 1936 featuring stock cars that would last up until the present day.  In February 1936, Daytona Beach city fathers, in order to continue to attract auto buffs to the area during the winter tourism lull the City of Daytona--with the advice of former land speed record holder, now Daytona Beach garage owner, Sig Haughdahl--decided to sponsor a 250-mile stock car race.  The organizers created a 3.2 mile track using the beach and the adjacent U.S. Highway A1A with turns cut through the dunes to connect the two straightaways. The race drew a total of 27 entrants, including local mechanic Bill France.

 Although, the race attracted a solid field of entries, was well promoted, and drew an estimated crowd of 20,000, serious difficulties arose almost from the start. The race was a handicap race with the cars starting one at a time in reverse order from their qualifying speed in order to avoid a huge pileup as cars raced into the first turn.  The complicated nature of the race and the inexperience of race officials turned it into a scoring disaster as neither officials nor spectators knew who led the race at any given time.   The most serious problems developed as the race progressed and the course began to deteriorate and the heavy racers began to bog down in the soft sand of the turns.  Every car in the event had to be towed out of the deep sand at least once and a reporter for United Press International, asserted that the south turn “was a hog wallow.”  Officials finally ended the fiasco three laps short of the finish when the north turn became impassable as cars suffering mechanical failure or stuck in the soft sand blocked the track.

 The problems only worsened as the race ended.  The lack of a proper scoring system soon came to light as apparent winner Tommy Elmore of Jacksonville pulled his Ford convertible onto the beach to accept the championship trophy and $1700 prize.  Officials, however, declared “Mad” Milt Marion the winner, Ben Shaw second, and Elmore third.  Elmore filed a protest, but to no avail and the results stood.  City officials soon discovered that in addition to a chaotic and confusing end to the race, they had lost an estimated $22,000 on the venture.  Big time stock car racing in the South had gotten off to a less than auspicious beginning, indeed it appeared that it might have died aborning.

 Fortunately, however, the fifth-place finish of Bill France provided the one major bright spot in the race. After the first beach/road race France stepped in to try to save stock car racing on the beach and with the Haugdahl’s help staged a second race on Labor Day 1937.  The organizers of the event made one major improvement that might have indirectly saved auto racing on the beach; they added marl—a mixture of clay, calcium carbonate, magnesium, and sea shells traditionally used as a fertilizer—to the turns creating a much harder and durable racing surface.  While on a much smaller scale than the first race, the event itself went off without major incident and local bar owner/bootlegger/gambler Smokey Purser taking the checkered flag.

 Purser’s victory may have been one of the most important events in the early history of stock car racing as he helped shape the fledgling sport in important ways.  He opened the door for a new type of driver--flamboyant, hard-charging, full-of-braggadocio, often-on-the-wrong-side-of-the-law, and ambitious--whose exploits gave working class fans such a vicarious thrill.  Smokey Purser became the first of such men who would come to dominate stock car racing in the pre-World War II era and helped to turn the beach/road races into regular events with two or more races—now solely promoted by Big Bill France--every year until the start of World War II.

 In September 1938, another important pioneer showed up at Daytona; Spartanburg, South Carolina bootlegger Joe Littlejohn.  Littlejohn’s early success at the beach/road course helped spark a regular pilgrimage of bootlegger racers from the Piedmont South to Florida’s Atlantic coast.  Fans flocked in to see such lamboyant trippers such as Sam Rice, Bob and Fonty Flock, Jap Brogdon, Harley Taylor, and the most talented and outrageous of them all cousins Lloyd Seay and Roy Hall challenge local favorites Smokey Purser and Bill France.  Dawsonville, Georgia bootleggers Seay and Hall had a special talent for putting on a show as well as winning races and regularly sped through the north turn on two wheels.

 While the war put stock car racing on the beach on hiatus, it resumed with a vengeance after V-J Day.  Bill France increasingly put his personal racing career aside and focused more on more on promotion combining his Daytona mechanic’s business with stock car management at Daytona and in the Carolinas and southern Virginia.  The relationships he had developed with the Piedmont bootleggers formed the foundation of his enterprises and helped him become the most successful stock car racing promoter in the nation soon after the war ended.  The races at Daytona—particularly the ones in the winter—were a mainstay and helped keep him at the top. 

 1948 brought two important changes to the beach/road race; a move of the course to Ponce Inlet because of increasing development and beach erosion and the first official race sanctioned by Bill France’s new sanctioning body, NASCAR.  Racing on the beach/road course had a great eleven-year run under NASCAR sanction with the winter races—most often now in February—often attracting more than seventy-five entrants.  Those races were often wild as Daytona sportswriter Bernard Kahn recalled, “spins, flips and chaos were so frequent . . . that the scorekeepers had difficulty keeping check on the(leaders and) laps.”

 One of my favorite stories about the beach/road race, however comes from a very boring race in the early 1950s.  Experienced race promoters knew that a fan's experience could be influenced almost as much by the way the announcer described the race as by the race itself.  It was all a part of the "con" that was an important part of racing promotion and Economaki learned this lesson well.  Announcing the Daytona beach/road race in the north turn for Bill France in the early 1950s, Economaki found himself in the midst of a boring race, a virtual parade with little passing.  Because of the long straightaways, fans could not see the action at the far end of the track. 

 Economaki, perched on a high tower armed with binoculars, decided the race action needed some livening up.  He announced to the fans in the north turn as the leaders sped out of sight, "I've got 'em in my glasses and entering the south turn Fonty Flock is passing Curtis Turner--we have a new leader."  Of course nothing had happened, but the fans didn't know that.  Economaki proceeded to describe the exciting racing going on just outside the fans' field of vision--"Turner's right-hand wheels are in the Atlantic Ocean; he's regained the lead."  All he had to do was "to get them back where they belong before they came into sight again."  After the race, he overheard one fan telling another how much he enjoyed the race, but "next year I'm going to sit in the south turn.  That's where all the passing is."

 In 1958, NASCAR held its last race at the beach/road course as Big Bill had begun construction on the awe-inspiringly massive 2.5-mile Daytona International Speedway.  Over 35,000 fans came out to see driver Paul Goldsmith drive to victory in mechanic Smokey Yunick’s—of Daytona’s “Best Damn Garage in Town” fame—1958 Pontiac.  It was a bittersweet ending to a great race venue.  But as the old saying goes, “time and tide wait for no man” and the tide had obviously run out for the old beach course.

 

Next week:  The beginning of a series on “The REAL History of Bootlegging and NASCAR.”

By the early 1960s NASCAR had rebounded vigorously from the precipitous decline that began in 1957.  New speedways at Daytona, Atlanta, Charlotte, and Bristol; a stable full of talented and charismatic drivers—although Curtis Turner had been “banned for life” for attempting to unionize drivers--; and the return of the auto manufacturers and their money—first through the back door and then openly in 1962 when Henry Ford II publicly announced Ford’s return—helped pack the stands once again and brought newfound credibility to the sport.

By 1964, however, clouds—once again at least partly produced by the auto manufacturers—loomed over NASCAR.  This time the issue was not a united walkout by automakers, but the intense battle between Chrysler and Ford over dominance on the track and Big Bill France’s desire to keep the playing field relatively level between the manufacturers.

Chrysler upset that competitive balance in 1964 when it introduced the Hemi engine and dominated the season.   The Hemis “KO’d much of the opposition” at the ’64 Daytona 500 with Richard Petty leading a 1-2-3 Plymouth sweep.  Petty went on to win eight more races and win the first of his seven championships in NASCAR’s top division.  David Pearson was not far behind winning eight races in a Cotton Owens Dodge.  Hemi-powered cars also won almost all of the major races that year with Jim Paschal winning the World 600, A.J. Foyt taking the checkers at the Firecracker 400, and Buck Baker cruising to his third career victory in the Southern 500.

In late 1964, under pressure from Ford and from fans who were tired of seeing a Plymouth/Dodge parade, Bill France announced that the Hemi would be banned for the 1965 season.  Not long afterward, Chrysler head honcho Ronnie Householder announced that the make would boycott NASCAR.  Under contract with Plymouth, Richard Petty took to the drag strips of the Southeast racing the #43/Jr. Hemi-powered Barracuda with the words “Outlawed” emblazoned on the side.

The boycott did not work out well for Chrysler, Richard Petty, or NASCAR and Bill France.  Chrysler officials and fans had to stand by and watch a Ford parade dominate the 1965 season.  Richard Petty’s drag racing career was tragically punctuated by a horrible accident when his out-of-control car flew into the crowd at Dallas, Georgia, injuring eight people and killing an eight-year-old boy.  Bill France faced a precipitous drop in attendance at races and a virtual mutiny from track owners who had trouble selling tickets to the Ford-dominated races. 

Finally, France reached an accord with Chrysler to allow Hemi-powered, shorter wheelbase cars on tracks “of one mile or less” and by late July the factory-backed Plymouths and Dodges—along with drivers Richard Petty, Bobby Isaac, and David Pearson—were back on NASCAR’s tracks.  In order to spark publicity and fan interest, France even lifted his “lifetime ban” on Curtis Turner.  Chrysler’s return and Curtis Turner’s victory in American 500 at Rockingham’s brand new North Carolina Motor Speedway caused many to believe that NASCAR was back on track to becoming a major American professional sport.

Those thoughts were premature, to say the least, however, when Ford decided to boycott NASCAR after the hemi-powered Plymouths and Dodges took seven of the top ten spots in the Daytona 500 and NASCAR’s subsequent announcement that it would not allow Ford teams to run the new 427-cubic-inch single overhead cam engine (SOHC) without a punitive weight penalty.  The 1966 season was a sad repeat of 1965 with the manufacturers’ roles reversed.  Attendance once again plummeted at NASCAR races.  Indeed, the spring Rebel 400 at Darlington attracted only 12,000 fans with 5,000 of those being Boy Scouts who were given complimentary tickets.  A sidelined Ned Jarrett lamented:  “We just can’t keep treating the spectators the way we have the last couple of seasons.”

In the midst of the boycott chaos, NASCAR also experienced one of its worst periods ever in terms of driver safety.  The death of top stars Joe Weatherly and Fireball Roberts in 1964 ushered in a period when NASCAR, in the words of Buck Baker, became “a pretty jumpy game” where “they might just as well just give ‘em all a shot of whiskey and drop the flag.”  The deaths of Jimmy Pardue, Billy Wade, Buren Skeen, and Harold Kite caused many drivers to question their future in the sport.

The constant wrangling with auto manufacturers combined with safety issues led to what Richard Petty termed, “the first mass exodus of top drivers in NASCAR history.”  In late 1966 and early 1967, Marvin Panch, Junior Johnson, Ned Jarrett, and Fred Lorenzen all retired as drivers.  As Ned Jarrett observed:  “I got to looking at the security, or lack of security really, that this sport offered and I wanted to spend more time with the family, the kids were growing up, so I made my decision to retire at the end of the 1966 season.”

NASCAR entered the 1967 season at as low a point as it had ever experienced in its almost twenty-year history.  Indeed, the year was very reminiscent of 1957. 

Like 1957, however, the sport bounced back.  While he had lost some of his most recognizable stars, Big Bill France had established stars Richard Petty, David Pearson, and—on occasion—Curtis Turner who he could billboard at his promotions.  The retirements had also opened the door of opportunity for probably the greatest generation of drivers in NASCAR history.  The group—including Cale Yarborough, Bobby Allison, LeeRoy Yarbrough, Bobby Isaac, and Buddy Baker—were drivers who not only could handle the close, door-to-door beating and banging of the short tracks but who had no fear of the high backs and harrowing speeds of the new superspeedways.  In addition, all of these guys had come up poor and working-class fans could identify with them and their struggles to make it in the sport.

At a time when NASCAR most needed it, 1967 also brought a story which captured the nation’s attention and imagination; Richard Petty’s dramatic ten-race win streak from Bowman Gray Stadium on August 12 to North Wilkesboro on October 1.  While some observers have downplayed Petty’s accomplishment and contend that he faced little real competition—especially on the short tracks that most owners of factory-backed cars shunned—the streak included the Southern 500 and races at Martinsville and North Wilkesboro against the top factory-backed Fords and Plymouths and Dodges.  Indeed, Ford became obsessed with Petty’s streak and threw everything they had at stopping him.  In addition, anyone who has ever followed racing closely knows that the odds of going through such a stretch of races without a wreck, mechanical failure, or human error of some kind are tremendously long.

It was during the 1967 season that many people began to refer to Richard Petty as simply “The King.”  With a presidential election coming up bumper stickers popped up all over the Piedmont South reading “Richard Petty For President!”  But it was not just Petty’s talent that drew the fans, it was also his charisma, particularly a unique ability to make people feel like they knew him and that he cared about them personally. 

NASCAR, and Petty, also benefitted from the fact that there were plenty of rivals out there at the time ready to challenge his dominance at every race.  The late 1960s brought one of NASCAR’s great rivalries—one that would last for more than a decade—between two of the sport’s all-time greatest; Richard Petty and David Pearson.  Many forget that while Petty won the championship in 1967, Pearson dominated the late 60s winning the title in 1966, ‘68, and ‘69, the only three years he ever ran what would be considered a full schedule.

Rivalries are great for a sport, but feuds can be even better at fueling fan interest and the late 1960s brought one of the most intense and bitter ones in the sport’s history; Richard Petty vs. Bobby Allison.  Allison burst on the NASCAR scene in 1966 mostly piloting a Chevrolet Chevelle without any factory backing.  As his brother Eddie recalled:  “To take a car out the backyard in Hueytown, Alabama and go beat that [Petty] Plymouth was unreal.  It was so neat, because Bobby scared them hot-dog racers to death.  This hick from Alabama [by way of Miami, Florida] could come come out and beat them with this race car that they thought couldn’t outrun a kiddie car.”

The feud began in November 1967 at Asheville-Weaverville Speedway with Petty bumping Allison up the track to take the lead and Allison returning the favor to take the win.  The incident sparked hard feelings that boiled over the next July at Islip [NY] Speedway when after another bumping/blocking incident (as usual, each side asserted that it was the other’s fault) Petty crew members Maurice Petty and Dale Inman went after Bobby after the race, knocking him down and piling on top until pulled off by bystanders.  From then on, whenever the two appeared on the track together (especially on the short tracks) fans flocked in and the tension was palatable.

NASCAR also came out of the doldrums in the late 1960s by not only relying on a tried and true formula of good old boy drivers and beating and banging on the racetrack, but by new innovations that injected excitement into the racing.  Most importantly was the construction of new tracks at Michigan and Talladega which, combined with ever more powerful engines and aerodynamic cars from Ford and Chrysler, produced a literal race to see who would crack the 200 mph barrier—a race Buddy Baker would win in March 1970 at Talladega.

As a historian I try to avoid offering advice to people or predicting the future based on the past.  At the same time, I do believe we can learn some lessons from the ways NASCAR bounced back from severe downturns in its past:

1.  Downturns can be good – In the aftermath of both 1957 and 1967 the sport came back even stronger.  This can partly be explained by the need for creative thinking and for economic efficiencies that such downturns naturally produce.  The lower costs of getting in to the top ranks of NASCAR in both cases opened the door for new drivers to display their considerable talents.

2.  Remember your core audience – Downturns also remind the folks in charge of any business to remember your core constituents.  Big Bill France always came back to his base in the Piedmont South when times got rough and was rewarded for remembering where his money came from.

3.  Stars are important – Most notably in the case of NASCAR, it was Richard Petty’s rise to superstardom that boosted the sport dramatically in 1967.  Fireball Roberts and Junior Johnson did much the same in the late 1950s and early 1960s.  It should also be remembered that it iss not only what stars do on the track, but the connection they build with fans off the track that is important.

4.  Contrasts are important – As Humpy Wheeler once observed about local short track racing, “For every race car, at least thirty people were gonna come to see it race.  Fifteen to see it be successful . . . and fifteen to see the guy get beat.”  NASCAR in both periods benefitted from contrasting (and often conflicting) personalities; good guys and bad guys; quiet guys and outgoing guys; Ford guys, Chevy guys, and Mopar guys.  Interest in racing is stimulated by not only having someone to cheer for, but having someone to cheer against.  I’ll never forget the guy right in front of me at Bristol in 1994 who stood up every lap and shot Dale Earnhardt the bird.  Looked like he was having a great time.

5.  Feuds are important – Classic feuds—Curtis Turner vs. Lee Petty, Bobby Allison vs. Richard Petty, Darrell Waltrip vs. Cale Yarborough, Dale Earnhardt vs. Jeff Gordon—have always packed the fans in.

6.  Creativity/Innovation is important – The worst thing a business or sport can do in the midst of a downturn in pull inward, stop innovating, and play it safe.  Downturns are a time for critical self-evaluation, a time to try new things, and quit doing old things “just because we’ve always done them this way.”  NASCAR came out of earlier downturns by taking some big gambles that ended up paying huge dividends.

As we enter a new NASCAR season here’s hoping that another annus horribilis (2009) fades quickly into the past.  I believe that can happen much quicker if the powers that be in Daytona and Charlotte look to the lessons of the past.

 

Next week:  “Racin’ on the Beach (Or How Daytona got to be Daytona)”