I feel totally relaxed in the race car. I can tune everything else out.
In a way, it’s my retreat. It’s probably the place where I’m most at home.
-Dale Earnhardt, “the Intimidator”
EPILOGUE: This is what NASCAR has become…
Atlanta Motor Speedway, 2005
Half a century after the departure of Raymond Parks, Red Byron and Red Vogt, NASCAR has changed so much, and yet remains so much the same.
Lakewood is no longer a red and dusty racetrack. It’s an overgrown field near Atlanta’s Hartsfield Airport, which is named for the mayor who had banned bootleggers from racing in the 1940s. The old brick Ford factory that manufactured so many bootleggers’ cars during and after Prohibition still stands on Ponce de Leon Avenue. It’s now home to the east-side branch of Atlanta’s Police Department.
In place of Lakewood, race fans have Atlanta Motor Speedway, twenty miles south, built in 1960 and still owned by Bill France’s longtime combatant, Bruton Smith. Jimmy Carter once worked as a ticket vendor there, and later celebrated his election to the governor’s mansion by inviting NASCAR racers to a barbecue dinner. The huge speedway boasts Gone With the Wind-themed condos and office buildings such as Tara Place, the Tara Ballroom, and Tara Clubhouse.
#
To better understand where NASCAR came from, I have tried to grasp what it ultimately became, and in that exploration enlisted help from two able assistants. In a reprise of my somewhat reluctant childhood trips to races with my father, I have taken my two sons to Atlanta Motor Speedway for their first race, the Golden Corral 500, to get their perspective on NASCAR – and to gauge my own.
I had moved my family to the South in 2002, largely to be near the research for this book. Yet I sometimes worry that my two Yankee-born offspring, who know plenty about life north of D.C., still haven’t been sufficiently exposed to southern culture. As we walk toward the enormous racetrack, through a parking lot-sized pre-race carnival, my concerns seem justified. The boys walk gape-mouthed through it all and their questions and comments pop like popcorn beneath a late-winter Georgia sun.
Daddy, how come there are so many pickup trucks?
Yeah, and how come almost every car is American, except ours?
Seems like everyone is white.
Yeah, daddy, don’t black people like NASCAR?
Daddy, what’s Skoal?
Who’s Jack Daniels?
Can I get a T-shirt?
We’re two hours early for the race, but it seems like we’re latecomers to a party that’s been fermenting for quite awhile. Apparently we’ve all missed the point of NASCAR, which goes something like this: the actual race is an afterthought, just the icing on a big, beer-soaked, red-white-and-blue cake that’s been baking for three days.
Stock car races have grown too big to be contained in a Sunday afternoon. Fans start surging toward their Mecca, often drunkenly, mid week. They come by the busload – church groups and scout troops, bowling leagues and the Sons and Daughters of the Confederacy, husband-and-wife motorcyclists revving engines alongside packs of black-leathery bike gangs. By Thursday, the traveling circus has established its encampment. Gaggles of RVs, big as 18-wheelers, with satellite dishes and wooden viewing stands bolted on top, have crammed into the infield and fired up gas grills and generators to power their TVs. Blue tarps shade makeshift patios from the sun. As my observant assistants pointed out, most of those who came on four wheels did so in burly, American-made pickups, nearly every one bearing bumper stickers declaring their favorite driver as “8″ (Dale Earnhardt Jr.) or “24″ (Jeff Gordon). Or with that cartoon kid Calvin mischievously pissing on “Ford” or “Chevy” or “work” or “24.” NASCAR fans are patriots (“These colors don’t run”) and soldiers’ parents (“Bring the troops home”). And if you believe the bumper stickers, God and Jesus are hardcore NASCAR fans, too.
As we join the giddy crowd – nearly 200,000 strong, slowly jamming itself into a town-sized stadium – my sons take note of the dress code: cutoffs or jeans and a mostly white T-shirt colored loud with a racer’s name or number or some rowdy declaration like “Born with the Need for Speed.” We’re among the few families not pulling a wheeled cooler of beer. Confederate flags rival the American flags catching the breeze. As one magazine writer put it, after visiting a NASCAR race at Talladega, “It has not come to the attention of eastern Alabama that the Civil War ended.”
Race time is still an hour away but the outer perimeter of the track rages, a pulsing festival of vices – music, food, sexuality, alcohol, tobacco – and marketing. Beautiful women strut beside display booths promoting Viagra, power tools, and Tide detergent. Fans dance inside the Skoal chewing tobacco tent, with its hard-rocking country band and free tins of tobacco. (Me, to Sean: “No, you can’t have one.”) At a booth promoting a muscle-building protein supplement, chubby men line up to take a shot at an arm wrestling pro. (Me, to Leo: “No, you can’t try it.”) The pressure to spend is intense and I finally cave, contributing $50 to the France family fortune: Sean gets a Dale Earnhardt Jr. T-shirt and Leo gets an Atlanta Motor Speedway hoodie.
We parade into the stadium and climb grandstands that rise behind thick cables and fencing that will separate us from the potential carnage of the steep-banked, 1.54-mile rectangular track. [In the 1990s, at least twenty-nine NASCAR spectators were killed by cars or debris.] We shuffle away from the more aggressive fans, like the guy in the $100 front-row seat sucking a Bud tallboy, wearing a Confederate flag T-shirt with the Faulkner-esque declaration, “It’s a Southern thang, y’all wouldn’t understand.” We reach the Petty “Family Section,” which doesn’t allow alcohol, but in a brilliant stroke of forethought I have brought along a flask of moonshine, compliments of Sean’s ex-teacher (procured from a source named One-Eyed Ronnie). It’s my tithe to the past, my offering up to the Roy Hall generation and NASCAR’s whiskey-making, whiskey-drinking forefathers. Plus, researching this book has required me to become an expert on moonshine and corn-based liquor in general. It’s just my job.
But surely not even the flashiest of Roy Hall-era whiskey trippers could have imagined a scene like this.
Of the scores of football and baseball games I’ve attended, not one has come close to the emotional intensity accompanying the start of a NASCAR race. Take the National Anthem, which ranks among Leo’s favorite songs (along with the theme from “Rocky”); he’s got a scratchy LP record version and I’ve seen him get beautifully teary-eyed at the crescendo. As a country music star starts singing “The Star Spangled Banner,” Leo looks up at me and screws up his face, like he’s just swallowed lemon juice. “Sounds weird,” he says. But then, at the anthem’s off-key climax, all heads tilt backwards as a military jet – now a staple of NASCAR races – screams overhead. The hairs on my neck stand up and I resist an unexpected reaction: I actually choke up. I’m helped by a nearby fan who screams back, “USA, yeah! Screw the rest of the world!”
The crowd quiets as a preacher thanks Jesus for the freedom to race in America. Then an announcer wails the real invocation of the day: “Gentlemen, start your engines!” Forty-three cars, most shaped like Chevy Monte Carlos, Ford Tauruses or a Dodge Intrepids or Chargers, blast to life and start their slow, gruff, phlegmy warm-up laps. When the green flag waves, each $150,000 car, about as “stock” as a thoroughbred on a carousel, accelerates to speeds twice as fast as I’ve ever driven, the angry symphony of 750-horsepower V-8 engines more deafening than the pre-race jet. Noise is an insufficient word. It’s inhuman and inhumane, painful and thrilling. It grinds into the chest, hammers the bones. The air fills with the warm stench of burning tires, burning oil, like the stink of a car fire. “God, I love that smell,” a nearby fan screams.
A high-pitched, mechanical whine precedes the pack as it approaches our section, and then the drone of the lead car’s engine suddenly drops in pitch as it passes with a “MEEEEE-OW” followed instantly by the staccato rush of forty-two others, “MEE-YOW, MYOW, MYOW, MYOW-YOW-YOW-YOW, YOW-YOW-OW-OW-OW…”
Sean and Leo hold their ears. A huge gust of hot, gritty wind follows the pack. Drivers call it “dirty air,” and that backdraft of dust, smoke and microscopic rubber swarms over us, forcing us to squint as the blast knocks off hats and sunglasses, topples cans. A kid in front of us decked out in Jeff Gordon gear turns around grinning; we learn it’s his first race, too. His dad, in Dale Earnhardt Jr. gear, puffs out his chest, like he’s absorbing the tsunami of debris-filled air into his very soul. Like it’s pure oxygen, the breath that sustains him. But its soon clear that my sons don’t quite get it.
“I’m getting a little bit bored,” Leo says a hundred miles into the race. “All it is is going around and around and around.” Adds Sean: “When are they going to go faster?”
My sons, with their Yankee-tinged ennui, are clearly part of an ever-shrinking minority. In living rooms across America, millions of men and, increasingly, women – drawn by studly youngsters like Earnhardt, Tony Stewart and Ryan Newman – are at this moment watching the same race, contributors to NASCAR’s $2.8 billion TV contract (which will jump to $4.8 billion in 2007), boosters to NASCAR TV ratings that are double those of baseball, basketball or hockey, and growing.
Though Sean and Leo aren’t yet converts, they can at least at some future date (say, while wooing some southern belle) claim to have personally partaken in the number two spectator sport in America, on its way to overtaking football as number one.
Back in 2001, NASCAR received an unintended boost from former wild child and high school drop-out, Dale Earnhardt, who had become a NASCAR legend and a multi-millionaire. He was modern NASCAR’s icon, its Babe Ruth.
Then, on the final lap of the 2001 Daytona 500, Earnhardt’s two teammates – snake-bit veteran Michael Waltrip and Earnhardt’s rising-star son, Dale Jr. – sped toward a one-two finish. While trying to block other cars and protect his teammates’ apparent victory, Earnhardt’s black #3 car – all 3,400 pounds, traveling at 180 miles an hour – got nicked in the butt, veered left toward the infield and then shot hard right, up the bank and straight into the concrete wall. A split second later, Waltrip took the checkered flag, the first of his career, followed a few feet later by Dale Jr.
Fans stood to see Dale Sr. emerge from his wrecked car and wave. Heck, he’d survived worse looking wrecks than this. Instead, they waited. As they watched a blue tarp being draped over the #3, they reluctantly, nervously shuffled toward the exits. Soon, the world learned he was dead. It was NASCAR’s most painful loss, and fans to this day will shed tears at the memory of Earnhardt’s death.
#
I’ve given a lot of thought to what sustains Earnhardt’s posthumous, perpetual legend. I’ve visited his home town and his former racing headquarters outside Charlotte. I’ve studied his squinting, Clint Eastwood-like photographs. The Man in Black and The Intimidator, they called him, and he remains – four years dead – NASCAR’s biggest star. But why? Even his son, who had a mediocre year in 2005, is one of the most popular drivers. A $10,000 fine for saying “shit” on national TV only improved his rock star image. My view is that the Earnhardt family, but especially The Intimidator, represents the outlaw spirit that helped create NASCAR in the first place. Dale Sr. was the modern incarnation of Lloyd Seay, Red Byron, Curtis Turner, and especially Roy Hall. Born and raised in the South, Earnhardt had dropped out of school to work at the local mill. But he managed to escape the drab life of his peers because he learned to tame the V-8 beast.
When he died – partly because he died, and NASCAR became national news – NASCAR continued its explosive growth as America’s sport. NASCAR fans are wildly attracted to their visceral, animal, sexual romp of power and noise, all oomph and brightly painted cars bumping, nudging and scraping in a high-speed dance. As one modern NASCAR observer said, “Fans get a few beers in ‘em, the Dixie comes out.”
One of the attendees at NASCAR’s 1947 organizational meeting once said that stock car racing was “kind of like country music. Nobody likes it except the public.” Maybe my sons are just too young, or too short on Dixie mojo. Whatever the reason, with a hundred miles left in the Golden Corral 500, they ask to leave. And we do.
In a sense, I feel I’ve failed to properly indoctrinate them into the sport whose roots I’ve spent three years exploring. I try a few statistics on them: the concussive wails pulsing from forty-three engines together equals more than 30,000 horsepower, enough to blast a rocket into space. Each car gets four to six miles a gallon. Inside, the temperatures reach 150 degrees and drivers are on their way to losing five to ten pounds. Each driver will grind through thirty to forty tires, each tire worth a dozen of those on our car (about $400). Then I explain how a NASCAR rookie named Kasey Kahne nearly won this race back in 2004, after he was hired to replace legendary Bill Elliott – “Awesome Bill from Dawsonville.” With his third-place finish in 2004′s Golden Corral 500, Kahne became one of the few drivers in NASCAR history to earn three top-five finishes in his first four races. The first to accomplish that feat was Red Byron in 1949.
My sons nod politely, wait to make sure I’m finished, then ask again if it’s time to leave. We extract ourselves from Atlanta Motor Speedway, passing an entire trailer dedicated to selling Dale Earnhardt memorabilia. I stop at the trailer selling Jack Daniels merchandise and pick up a T-shirt for my dad.
#
While driving north toward Atlanta, we learn that the race has been won by Carl Edwards, one of many up and comers trying to fill Earnhardt’s big shoes. Like many current racers, Edwards is handsome, toothy, charismatic, and well-spoken. He’s from Missouri, not the South. He won the previous day’s minor league “Busch” series race and does back flips off his car after victories. His team owner loves him: “He’s a hunk,” says Edwards’ team president, Geoff Smith. “They’re all good looking.”
Though I’m a bit disappointed to have missed Edwards’ back flip, I take comfort in the fact that he was driving a Ford. Although Chevys and Dodges outnumber them, Fords are solidly back in the NASCAR game. There’s the Sharpie Ford, the Viagra Ford, the UPS Ford, the Combos Ford, and my favorite, the Trex USG Sheetrock Ford – USG being the company that once employed Red Byron’s father. USG also co-hosts the annual USG Sheetrock 400 race at Chicagoland Speedway, not far from where Byron died.
I’m also partial to the Jack Daniels car – which today finished eighth – since that sponsor’s Tennessee Whiskey, which my dad favors, is basically charcoal-filtered corn liquor, and a descendant of the southern moonshine of Raymond Parks’s generation.
#
Southerners like Raymond Parks’s Uncle Benny had come to rural Georgia to be separate. As president of the Confederate States of America Jefferson Davis said, “All we ask is to be let alone.” In the hills and hollows of the Confederacy, Parkses and other hardy, independent, yet wary and distrustful Irish and Scots-Irish learned to fend for themselves, to live off the land, to build their own homes, to heal themselves with homemade salves and herb poultices, to make their own music – and their own whiskey, whose role in the history and culture of the South is more prominent than Davis’s.
But it has been more than thirty years since a known whiskey tripper spun around a NASCAR track. Except for the new Jack Daniels and Jim Beam cars, the ghosts of southern moonshine have been fully excised from today’s NASCAR.
In fact, NASCARconveniently overlooks (or flat-out denies) that it was created by moonshining men like Raymond Parks. When NASCAR President Mike Helton told reporters, just before the 2006 Daytona 500, that “the old Southeastern redneck heritage that we had is no longer in existence,” he was simply echoing similar revisionist efforts by Bill France – senior and junior. Helton was forced to explain his words, claiming that NASCAR wanted to keep its “roots intact.” “We’re proud of where we came from, we’re proud of how we got here,” he said, but in the same breath said NASCAR’s “heritage” dated to 1948, as if the timeline of stock car racing began ticking that year, as if the previous decade meant nothing.
This remains NASCAR’s consistent, official stance: the sport was created by Bill France in 1948. Period. NASCAR’s website says it was “formed in 1948,” and the narrator of the official “History of NASCAR” DVD says: “NASCAR’s entire existence in fact is due in large part to the determination and effort … of Big Bill France.”
If he had lived a bit longer, maybe Big Bill would have come around to defending the redneck heritage, to acknowledge that he did not single-handedly create NASCAR, that he had help, that he couldn’t have done it without Raymond Parks, Red Vogt and the other Atlanta bootleggers. But France is dead, and it’s not in the best interests of today’s NASCAR conglomerate to contradict France’s heroic image, nor to embrace the more accurate version of history – the one full of dirt-poor law breakers.
It’s not just moonshine that’s become a buried piece of NASCAR’s story. The sport’s southernness is disappearing, too. The famed Southern 500 at Darlington, the traditional Labor Day race for half a century, in 2003 was moved to mid-November to allow a California race to become NASCAR’s new Labor Day event. The Southern 500 was eliminated altogether in 2004 to make room in NASCAR’s schedule for a race in Texas. The racers are becoming less southern, too. Until 1988, when “Awesome Bill from Dawsonville” won the championship, every NASCAR champion except one came from Dixie. Since then, only seven of seventeen champions were southerners, including Dale Earnhardt – four times since 1989, and seven overall – and two Texans.
Even non-southern NASCAR champ Tony Stewart has noticed, “I don’t think anyone can call it just a Southern sport anymore … we’re covering all four corners of the United States now.” And some fans and old timers bristle against that. It’s like the Civil War diarist Mary Chestnut complained after Dixie’s defeat: “They are everywhere these Yankees, like red ants, like the locusts and frogs which were the plagues of Egypt.”
#
After leaving the Golden Corral 500, on a hunch, I drive into northeast Atlanta.
My assistants and I pass the old Ford factory on Ponce de Leon and Red Vogt’s old shop on Spring Street and the site of Raymond Parks’s first service station on Hemphill Avenue, as I tell the boys bits of the NASCAR story. We finally pull up at the Northside Avenue liquor store and, next to that, I knock on the thick-glass front door.
The lock unclicks, the door opens, and there stands Raymond Parks, can of Coke in hand, looking regal and nowhere near his ninety-one years. I have known him three years now, and have been looking forward to introducing my sons to NASCAR’s patron saint. Parks is still tall, thin and, while a bit frail and forgetful, looks sharp in his narrow tie and pressed white shirt; the grey fedora and tan sports jacket hang on a nearby hook.
Almost as if he’s been waiting for us, Parks dutifully shows my boys the black-and-white photographs and the pre-World War II loving cups, and lets them run their small fingers over the engraved words “Roy Hall” and “Lloyd Seay.” He lets them each hold a replica of the 1949 Oldsmobile Rocket 88 that Red Byron drove enroute to becoming NASCAR’s first strictly stock car champ. After awhile, as he shakes their hands and we begin to leave, a handsome glitter comes to his eye.
“Come back and see us, now,” he says.
“Okay,” says Leo.
“Okay,” says Sean.
Before getting back in the car, we stop in the adjacent liquor store. While my boys run dangerously among aisles of bottles I chat with Parks’s brother-in-law, “Bad Eye” Shirley’s brother, Marion. [Bad Eye died in early 2005, taking with him one more of the dwindling pieces of the story NASCAR.] After Marion and I talk about his own moonshine memories, I buy a bottle of bourbon and say goodbye. The bourbon isn’t moonshine, exactly, but corn liquor at least. On the drive home to North Carolina I explain to Sean and Leo how they have just met the only person alive today who witnessed the full history of NASCAR. And I explain the lineage that ties our own Irish ancestry to moonshine and NASCAR, to Atlanta and bourbon, to Parks himself.
“Cool,” says Leo.
“Cool,” says Sean.
#
I visit Raymond Parks a few more times after that. I see him at the birthday party held each year at a racing museum near Greenville-Pickens Speedway outside Greenville, South Carolina. I see him at Dawsonville’s Moonshine Festival, where a few NASCAR fans recognize him and ask for his autograph, where Raymond’s sister and Billy Watson and Ed Samples’ son and Gober Sosebee’s son all tell me wonderful old stories, where I walk over to Lloyd Seay’s grave and touch his photograph and the cool granite. Whether its modesty or southern decorum, Parks never talks freely about his moonshining days. I’ve met with him at least a dozen times across three years, but he’d still sometimes say, “I ain’t gonna talk about that,” and I’d have to rely on others to fill in some of the blanks.
Still, my most enjoyable moments have been one-on-one with Parks in his office.
I’ve found myself mesmerized watching him flip through his photo albums, his long, thin, wrinkled fingers turning pages and pointing at long-dead faces and friends, at black-and-white images of his younger self. I’ve seen his eyes mist up at some unspoken memory. For me to look at those images and then look up into his face and realize he was there … I mean, he’s old but he doesn’t look nearly old enough to be seventy years removed from the events in the fading photographs. Over time it became moving for me, visiting his office time and again, to see how infatuated he still is with it all.
As if the naïve early days of stock cars had been his first true love.
And each time I visit Parks I see something new, something I missed. On my final visit, just before Christmas of 2005, I’m about to walk out the office door when I notice a framed letter with NASCAR letterhead hanging on the wall. It was sent to Parks on his eighty-fifth birthday and praised his 1948 and 1949 championships as “an amazing and historical accomplishment.” The letter said, “Your place in NASCAR history is unique and enduring.” It is signed by Bill France Jr., who closed the letter with this:
“We thank you for being a leading pioneer of NASCAR competitors.”
As I drive back home toward the mountains of western North Carolina, I wonder whether the France family knew to be grateful to Parks after all. Maybe the long-ago relationship between Big Bill and Raymond Parks was just a private matter that didn’t need to go into the history books. As I drive past the Dawsonville exit off Highway 400, I also find myself wondering – as I have many times during my time in the South – if maybe a New Jersey boy can’t ever fully understand all the deeper truths beneath NASCAR’s creation and its enduring popularity. Maybe its like Faulkner said long ago, before there was a NASCAR: You can’t understand it. You would have to be born there.
