October 24, 2023 • 27 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, long before NASCAR’s rampant commercialism lurks a distant history of dark secrets that have been carefully hidden from view—until now. Here to tell the true story behind NASCAR’s hardscrabble, moonshine-fueled origins is Neal Thompson, author of Driving with the Devil: Southern Moonshine, Detroit Wheels, and the Birth of NASCAR.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:10):
This is Lee Habib and this is Our American Stories,
the show where America is the star and the American people.
And to search for the Our American Stories podcast, go
to the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.
Long before NASCAR's rampant commercialism looks a distant history of
(00:30):
dark secrets that have been carefully hidden from view until
now here to tell the true story behind NASCAR's hard scrabble,
moonshine fueled origins is Neil Thompson, author of Driving with
the Devil, Southern Moonshine, Detroit Wheels, and the Birth of Nascar.
Speaker 2 (00:48):
Let's take a listen.
Speaker 3 (00:52):
The idea for the story of Driving with the Devil
started pretty soon after the attacks of nine to eleven.
Wife and I were living in Baltimore. At that time,
I was working for the Baltimore Sun newspaper. We were
ready for a change, We were ready to move somewhere
else and have a different kind of lifestyle. And at
that same time I found myself thinking a lot about
(01:13):
a new book idea. I just published my first book,
Biography of the astronaut Alan Shepherd, and found myself drawn
to NASCAR, but not Nascar per se Really, what I
wanted to explore was where did this come from? Where
did this fascination with cars spinning around an oval at
two hundred miles an hour?
Speaker 2 (01:33):
Where did this start? Where did it really start?
Speaker 3 (01:36):
Began digging into sort of the origins of the sport itself.
That led me to learn a little bit about Bill France,
whose family at that time owned the entire.
Speaker 2 (01:46):
Sport, which was a shock to me.
Speaker 3 (01:48):
But every version of the origin story of Nascar that
I came across started with Bill France in about nineteen
forty nineteen forty nine, But many of these histories are
and books started that year and didn't go back prior
to that and explain how did it get to that point.
It didn't just come into existence from nothing that year,
(02:10):
and it didn't come into existence surely because of this
one man, Bill France. So what I really wanted to
do was go back, go deep and find out who
were the other characters who played a role in creating
this sport before it was even known as Nascar. And
so my wife and I, after nine to eleven, about
a year afterwards, decided let's move south. Let's go live
(02:30):
in the South where this story takes place. So we
moved to North Carolina, to Asheville, North Carolina, and I
spent the next couple of years driving throughout the South
to Florida and Atlanta, Northern Georgia, and across North Carolina
to track down the true pioneers of NASCAR. Some of
them were still alive at that time. Thankfully, my research
(02:56):
led me, thankfully to one of the overlooked pioneers of
the entire sport, a guy named Raymond Parks, who was
living in Atlanta at that time.
Speaker 2 (03:04):
He was in his late eighties early nineties.
Speaker 3 (03:08):
Still showing up for work every day at the liquor
store that he owned in North Atlanta, still dressed in
his suit and tie with a dapper hat, and I
was pointed toward Raymond as the guy who was really
the overlooked hero of the early days of NASCAR, someone
who never fully got the credit he deserved for playing
(03:28):
a vital role in bringing that sport to life. When
I first got to know him, though, he didn't want
to talk about it, largely because the origins of this sport,
at least as far as he was concerned, were directly
tied to the moonshining business.
Speaker 2 (03:43):
Raymond was a successful moonshiner.
Speaker 3 (03:45):
He actually started moonshining at age fourteen, got to know
another North Georgia moonshiner who offered him a job. Raymond
grew up poor on a farm in North Georgia outside Dawsonville.
Speaker 2 (03:56):
His dad was a drunk.
Speaker 3 (03:58):
There were sixteen kids in the household, and Raymond, who
was one of the eldest, one day, just walked off
the farm at age fourteen and started working as a
moonshiner's apprentice. Spent a little time in jail after that,
but learned the ropes and over time became an incredibly
successful moonshiner himself, running moonshine making moonshine. Later, he was
(04:19):
so successful that he hired his cousins to do the
driving for him, and that whole enterprise of making and
delivering moonshine is what eventually led to stock car racing.
When I first met Raymond, though he didn't want to
talk about all that, he felt like that was part
of the past. He was, you know, kind of a modest,
(04:39):
quiet guy, at least at the age when I met him,
So I just kept showing up at his office saying, okay,
you don't want to talk about it, That's fine. I'll
come back next week and we'll just chat about other things.
Little by little, I kind of earned his confidence, and
little by little he started opening up to me and
started sharing with me the story of his role in creating.
Speaker 2 (04:59):
Now Car and it was just a remarkable story.
Speaker 3 (05:02):
Of poor North Georgia kids trying to find a better
life for themselves. You know, so many of them grew
up poor and their prospects were to continue working on
their family farm or maybe get a job at the
local mill for a few dollars more. But a lot
of these kids wanted more. They wanted adventure, they wanted
to escape. Once they got introduced to cars and moonshining,
(05:25):
they wanted speed and money and a different version of success.
And moonshining and then stock car racing gave them that.
It gave them something that they hadn't previously had access to.
And Raymond is a perfect example of that. But I'll
never forget being in his office one day when he
reluctantly pulls out a couple of old photo albums and
(05:48):
starts leafing through them, and I got shivers up my
spine because he starts showing me photos that really told
the story of early stock car racing in the early
days of NASCAR, and told the story of Raymond Parks'
role in creating that sport.
Speaker 2 (06:08):
So he's showing me pictures of old.
Speaker 3 (06:10):
Races, terrible car wrecks, photos of the corpse of his cousin,
Lloyd c who was killed in a moonshining accident. Photos
of Red Vote, the foulmouth mechanic who worked on Raymond
Parks's cars, both his moonshine cars and later his stock
cars and his race cars. These photos were just a
thrilling sort of recapturing of that moment in time when
(06:34):
NASCAR didn't even exist. It was just sort of this
humble sport where these moonshiner kids were having fun on
the weekends, racing each other out of cow pastures, and
little by little, those raggedy races evolved into what we
later came to know as stock car racing and then NASCAR.
Speaker 1 (06:52):
And you've been listening to author Neil Thompson tell the
story of his own story. But what prompted him to
write this book, which was well with so many writers,
just a question, how did NASCAR really start? How did
the sports start before there was ever NASCAR and this
legend named Bill France. It all started with moonshiner kids
racing each.
Speaker 2 (07:13):
Other out in cowpastures.
Speaker 1 (07:16):
When we come back, more of the story of moonshine
runners and the birth of Nascar here on Our American Stories.
Lee Habib here the host of our American Stories. Every
day on this show, we're bringing inspiring stories from across
(07:38):
this great country, stories from our big cities and small towns.
But we truly can't do the show without you. Our
stories are free to listen to, but they're not free
to make. If you love what you hear, go to
Ouramericanstories dot com and click the donate button. Give a little,
give a lot. Go to Alamerican Stories dot com and
give and we continue with our American Stories. And Neil Thompson,
(08:13):
author of Driving with the Devil, Southern Moonshine, Detroit Wheels,
and the Birth of Nascar. Let's return to Neil with
more of the story.
Speaker 3 (08:24):
The moonshine that these guys were making and delivering was
essentially corn whiskey. It was a version of the whiskey
that had come to America from the Irish and Scots.
Irish immigrants who came here and then sort of gravitated
towards the South and ended up in the hills and
hollers of North Carolina and Georgia and other southern states,
(08:46):
where a lot of these farmers learned that by growing
corn and turning that corn into whiskey, they could make
more by selling the liquid product of that agricultural output
rather than just becoming straight up farmers. And so moonshine
became an important component of the economy of the South
going way back to the eighteen hundreds and then on
(09:08):
into the early nineteen hundreds.
Speaker 2 (09:10):
There were tax issues.
Speaker 3 (09:12):
You know, the US government over time kept making attempts
to tax this product, and obviously the moonshiners resisted that,
which is what led to sort of this cat and
mouse game that evolved between the moonshiners delivering their agricultural
product as they viewed it, to market or to their
customers in the cities for the most part, and then
(09:34):
the tax agents, the revenue agents, trying to track them
down and arrest them and charge them with tax fraud.
So the term moonshine came from the practice of making
this whiskey in the dead of night to avoid detection,
to avoid setting off any alarms by revenue agencyeing the
smoke rise from these stills that were mainly set up
(09:57):
and deep in the woods next to a street.
Speaker 2 (10:00):
They needed fresh water for these things, so.
Speaker 3 (10:02):
By operating in the middle of the night under the moonlight,
that's where the term moonshine evolved from. And then the
term bootlegger came from the concept that by one of
the ways that these guys would try and hide their
liquor would be in a flask that was hidden inside
their boot, and in time the term bootlegger evolved just
to sort of encompass all of the efforts to make
(10:24):
and sell illegal whiskey throughout.
Speaker 2 (10:27):
The South and elsewhere.
Speaker 3 (10:29):
In time, these moonshiners learned that the best means of
transporting their product the moonshine jars of moonshine packed tightly
into crates, was a Ford V eight coup sort of.
The explosion of the moonshining trade in the early decades
of the nineteen hundreds coincided with the evolution of the automobile,
(10:51):
so you see the Ford V eight's becoming more and
more sophisticated. The moonshiners realized This was the perfect car
for delivering moonshine because had a great suspension, it was fast,
and it was.
Speaker 2 (11:02):
Easy to work on.
Speaker 3 (11:03):
So you also see the beginnings of car mechanics who
later became race car mechanics, figuring out how to take
apart Fords engines and put them back together and add
modifications and bore out the cylinders and do these other
things to make them even faster than they were meant
to be and even more sort of solid and reliable
(11:26):
than they were designed to be. Through Raymond Parks got
to become acquainted with his trusted mechanic, Read Vote, who
had a garage in downtown Atlanta and was sort of
a mad scientist when it came to Fords in particular
other cars as well, but mainly Fords. You know, he
(11:47):
would try the little weird modifications that no one else
had thought of with the exhaust and the engine and the.
Speaker 2 (11:53):
Ratio of avative fuel.
Speaker 3 (11:55):
He was just a mad genius and learned to make
these cars go faster than they were ever meant to go.
He also, on the side, sometimes worked for the cops
and the revenue agents, but didn't put as much effort
into their cars as he did the moonshiners and those cars,
and so little by little these cars, the drivers are
learning to drive them faster, the mechanics are making them
(12:17):
go faster. And then on weekends a lot of these
moonshiners start getting together to race each other, see who
has the fastest moonshining car. Some of the early races
were incredibly modest. They were just at a cowfield somewhere,
or a field farmer's field, and one car would go
out and sort of tear up an oval in the grass.
Speaker 2 (12:37):
And that would be the racetrack. That was it.
Speaker 3 (12:39):
They'd line up, they'd race each other, and just for
bragging rights, they would see who had the fastest car.
In time, these races started to attract crowds. I mean,
there weren't any professional sports in the South at that time.
It would take years before the first professional sports team,
the Atlanta Braves, came to Atlanta in nineteen sixty five.
(12:59):
In the twenties, thirties and forties, there were college sports,
but not really the type of sport where you'd go
to an auditorium and watch a game, or a stadium
and watch a game. Once these stock car races started
getting up and underway and word spread and newspapers started
covering these events. Then they did start to tract crowds,
you know, they put up bleachers next to the oval track.
Speaker 2 (13:20):
They started, you.
Speaker 3 (13:21):
Know, building concessions, and savvy businessmen started to learn how
to make a little bit of money off these putting
a fence around the whole thing and charging admission fees.
So what these early races were, you know, we called
NASCAR stock car racing today, but at that time these
stock cars really were just off the rack cars that
(13:43):
anyone could buy at their local dealer, you know, that's
where the term came from stock. They were supposed to
be just the stock that came with the car, no modifications.
Of course, that concept of being quote strictly stocked was
thrown out the window, you know, right off the bat
because of the these modifications that the Moonshine mechanics started
making to the cars. Very quickly, these quote unquote stock
(14:07):
cars became highly modified, highly customized.
Speaker 2 (14:11):
Cars that bore, at least on the outside, some.
Speaker 3 (14:14):
Resemblance to the cars you'd see on the dealer's lot,
but on the inside were very different machines altogether. So
by looking exactly like any other car that your parents.
Speaker 2 (14:25):
Would drive to a church that Sunday.
Speaker 3 (14:27):
These cars were intended to look normal so that they
didn't attract the attention of the revenue agents, so that
they could fit in once they got to town. But again,
under the hood, that engine was way more powerful than
any regular stock car that anyone else in the neighborhood had.
Late eighteen thirties into nineteen forty, the sports progressing and
(14:49):
Raymond Parks is now becoming what in future years would
be described as the first team owner of stock car racing.
He kind of pulls together to of his cousins, Handsome
Roy Hall and quiet Lloyd c who are both moonshine
drivers for him, and they are just wonderful drivers because
they've learned how to drive on the back roads of
(15:11):
Georgia to escape the revenue agents. So those two are
part of Raymond Parks's team as is read vote the mechanic.
So together this team starts traveling through the South, visiting
other races and having enormous success as the sport is
getting up and running. Unfortunately, though Roy Hall's a bit
of a scamp, He's always getting in trouble, spends time
(15:33):
in jail and then Lloyd C, who is much quieter
and sort of a good kid, gets caught up in
this bizarre moonshining argument with one of his cousins who
shoots and kills him, and Lloyd C Is dead. Sometime
in nineteen forty and then a year later, the entire
sport comes grinding to a halt as America gets involved in.
Speaker 2 (15:53):
World War Two. A lot of the characters.
Speaker 3 (15:56):
In my book and in the story of the Evolution
of NASCAR time serving in World War Two. Raymond Parks
served at the Battle of the Bulge. But when these
guys come back home, most of them to the South
and start to pick up the pieces of socccar racing,
and they came back very hungry to get back on
the racetrack and take the sport to the next level.
(16:18):
At this time we get introduced to some of the
new characters on the scene, one of whom is named
Read Byron. There were two Reds in this book, Read
Vote and Read Byron. So Red Byron served in a
B twenty four airplane, mainly serving up on the Aleutian
Islands off the Alaskan coast. His plane gets shot down,
among many that were shot down at that time, and
(16:40):
they'd sort of crash land and read Byron ends up
with just a ruined left leg shrapnel. The doctors actually
wanted to amputate his leg, and he said, no, don't
touch it.
Speaker 2 (16:53):
I'm a race car driver. I need that leg.
Speaker 1 (16:55):
And you've been listening to Neil Thompson tell a heck
of a story. Moonshow was basically corn whiskey, he said.
And let's face it, the farmers could make more money
selling a liquefied version of their crop than the actual crop.
And moonshining explodes because well, automobile production explodes in this
country too, and leave it to men and their toys. Soon, well,
(17:17):
guys are modifying these cars well outrun federales, revenue agents,
and frankly to just outrun themselves and have fun. Pretty
soon they're competing in cow pastures and the next thing
you know, people are showing up. Because well, the South
had no professional sports. This became the sport of the South.
World War two comes, so many of these guys put
(17:39):
on a different suit and go and fight for their country,
only to come back hungrier for the action and for
the sport they created. When we come back, more of
this remarkable story, Moonshine, Runners and the Birth of Nascar.
Here on our American stories, and we continue with our
(18:10):
American stories and Neil Thompson, author of Driving with the Devil,
Southern Moonshine, Detroit Wheels, and the Birth of Nascar. Let's
continue with the story.
Speaker 3 (18:21):
So Red Byron, because he had this damaged leg, discovered
early on once he was back on the track that
he couldn't drive the way he was used to driving
because his left leg didn't have strength and he just
couldn't maneuver the clutch pedal the way he needed to
be competitive. So he talked to Red Vote about it
and they came up with a fix, which was for
(18:43):
Red Vote to weld two pins onto the clutch pedal
so that Red Byron, whose leg was often in a brace,
could lift up his left leg and put the boot
of his left leg into this space between these two
pins on the clutch pedal. And then when he needed
to change gears, instead of putting pressure on that leg,
(19:05):
which didn't have much strength to it, he would pivot
the bottom half of his body which will allow him
to depress and release the clutch pedal and change gears.
I don't think Red Vote or Raymond Parks thought it
would work. But in time Red Byron got used to
it and realized, you know this works, I can do it,
and he started to win race after race after race.
(19:26):
As we get into nineteen forty eight and stock car
racing is really up and running and NASCAR is a
formal organization now, Red Byron becomes the first champion of
that first year of NASCAR. Some people look at nineteen
forty nine as the more official first year of NASCAR
because that year they implemented new standards for these strictly
(19:50):
stock cars, but Red Byron wins that year as well,
So the first two years of NASCAR's existence were won
by this crippled war veteran with a bad leg that
was essentially strapped into his clutch pedal, could barely walk,
but could win race after race and become champion two
years in a row. The cast of characters at this
time is just super colorful and bizarre, you know, guys
(20:14):
with names like Goober and Soapy and Speedy and one eye.
Speaker 2 (20:18):
But read Byron was different from that.
Speaker 3 (20:21):
He was a little bit nerdy, He was thoughtful, he
was a big reader. He was quieter He wasn't a
big partier or a drinker like some of the other
guys were.
Speaker 2 (20:29):
He didn't get into fights like many of them did.
But behind the.
Speaker 3 (20:32):
Wheel he was again fearless and an incredible competitor. As
the sport continues to find its footing again after World
War Two, you get into a number of races through
nineteen forty six, but nineteen forty seven is when it
really starts to pick up speed again. The end of
nineteen forty seven is when a group of racers, Raymond
(20:56):
Parks Read Vote, Read Byron, and then Bill France, who
was based in Daytona Beach. They all get together down
in Daytona Beach, sort of called there by Bill Franz,
to have a meeting to figure out, how are we
going to organize this sport now that we're back up
and running. What are the rules, what's the points system?
(21:16):
Who's going to oversee these different races and kind of
make things a little bit more consistent and cohesive to
compete with other organizations that we're trying to oversee different
types of racing at that time, like the TRIPLEA. So
there's this famous meeting that occurs in December of nineteen
forty seven, and a lot of these drivers and Raymond Parks,
(21:38):
the moonshine runner turned businessman, they come up with a
system of rules and create an actual sport, National Association
for stock car auto racing. The name came from Red Vote,
the mechanic who never fully got credit for the role
he played in figuring out what the rules were and
coming up with that name and the acronym. But at
the end of that meeting December of nineteen forty seven, it.
Speaker 2 (22:02):
Was actually two days.
Speaker 3 (22:03):
At the end of the second day of the meeting,
Bill France had himself named President of NASCAR.
Speaker 2 (22:08):
A lot of the other guys said, yeah, go ahead, Bill,
you go ahead and run it. We're not interested. We
just want to race and make money and go fast.
Speaker 3 (22:15):
Bill France was a little bit more business minded and
also a little bit power hungry, and essentially had himself
named the president of NASCAR, and over the next couple
of years would end up becoming the full owner of
the entire sport, which subsequently would be owned by his
family for many decades moving forward, and I think a
lot of the early drivers and others who were involved
(22:37):
in the sport, including Raymond parks because I talked to
him about it, felt betrayed by France. They were all
in it together, but France kind of took over and
ran with it and pushed them all aside. And when
the sport started to become even more popular than any
of them could have imagined and started to make some
real money, none of the early pioneers and actual founders
(22:58):
of the sport saw any of that money or got
any benefit from the role they played. One dynamic that
was part of stock car racing from the very beginning
was trying to get racers to follow any kind of rules.
You know, one way to get a hillbilly to do
something is to tell him not to do it. And
(23:20):
that sort of unspoken rule applied to a lot of
the limits that NASCAR tried to place on what drivers
could and couldn't do. You know, if they told them
to drive with a seat belt, they would drive without
a seat belt. If they told them, you know, go
easy on the other guy's car, they would slam into
the other guy's car. It really was a wild and
often lawless period of time for stock car racing, and
(23:42):
this is something that Bill Frans over time tried to
clean up and get racers to toe the line and.
Speaker 2 (23:47):
To follow the rules.
Speaker 3 (23:49):
But because so many of the early racers were moonshiners
and were sort of these rebellious Southern boys, Bill Frands
had a really hard time keeping them in line.
Speaker 2 (23:58):
And I think over time.
Speaker 3 (23:59):
That became sort of a tension in the sport and
part of the dynamic part of what fans loved, which was,
you know, rebellious drivers breaking the rules, and then on
the other hand, you have the official NASCAR folks, led
by Bill Franz, trying to tighten things up and make
things cleaner and more formalized and more family friendly. And
(24:21):
I think that tension continued for decades to come, and
now probably that rebellious aspect of the sport is mostly gone.
Moving ahead to more recent times, NASCAR's fan base doubled
in nineteen nineties and continued to grow at ten or
more percent per year.
Speaker 2 (24:37):
For a period of time. It was the fastest.
Speaker 3 (24:39):
Growing sport in America, rising to the number two, and
so much of the sport became about marketing. Revenues averaged
three billion dollars a year and were on the rise.
NASCAR TV ratings or double those of baseball, basketball, and hockey.
Half of NASCAR's viewers are women today, and NASCAR the
(25:00):
races themselves are just wildly popular bacchanal's, you know, just
attendance of you know, one to two hundred thousand that
some of these races, mass of people showing up for
these races and staying there for five days in a row,
well beyond before and after, you know, a few hours
of the big Left turn during race day, primetime viewership
(25:23):
on not just ESPN but Network Sports. And the drivers
of today are millionaires. You know, they're living in mansions
and throughout the South. Their celebrities, they're superstars, They date supermodels,
walk up and down any supermarket and you see NASCAR
logos and ads emblazoned on just about every package you
(25:43):
can find. So it's just exploded, which to me is
remarkable that it started from such humble roots with just
these poor Southern boys trying to have some fun.
Speaker 1 (25:54):
And a terrific job on the production by Greg Hangler
and a special thanks to Neil Thompson, author of Driving
with the Devil, Southern Moonshine, Detroit Wheels, and the Birth
of Nascar, and boy we meet some real characters bred
Byron comes to mind. Injured in flight combat in the
Aleutian Islands in World War Two and nearly crippled, he
(26:15):
still manages to win the unofficial and first official NASCAR Championship,
and that meeting in nineteen forty seven, two days in
Daytona Beach, is where NASCAR gets formed. They were trying
to solve a problem getting the drivers to follow the rules,
no simple task when you're dealing with a bunch of wild,
(26:36):
rebellious Southern boy Bill Frantz managed to do that to some.
He's a hero. To others, well, sort of a goat.
Either way, NASCAR has permanently changed, now one of the
top grossing sports in the country, and it routinely beats
in the ratings baseball and football. Who could have ever
imagined the story of NASCAR, moonshine, and so much more,
(27:00):
in a way the story of America. Here on our
American Stories
This is Lee Habib and this is Our American Stories,
the show where America is the star and the American people.
And to search for the Our American Stories podcast, go
to the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.
Long before NASCAR's rampant commercialism looks a distant history of
(00:30):
dark secrets that have been carefully hidden from view until
now here to tell the true story behind NASCAR's hard scrabble,
moonshine fueled origins is Neil Thompson, author of Driving with
the Devil, Southern Moonshine, Detroit Wheels, and the Birth of Nascar.
Speaker 2 (00:48):
Let's take a listen.
Speaker 3 (00:52):
The idea for the story of Driving with the Devil
started pretty soon after the attacks of nine to eleven.
Wife and I were living in Baltimore. At that time,
I was working for the Baltimore Sun newspaper. We were
ready for a change, We were ready to move somewhere
else and have a different kind of lifestyle. And at
that same time I found myself thinking a lot about
(01:13):
a new book idea. I just published my first book,
Biography of the astronaut Alan Shepherd, and found myself drawn
to NASCAR, but not Nascar per se Really, what I
wanted to explore was where did this come from? Where
did this fascination with cars spinning around an oval at
two hundred miles an hour?
Speaker 2 (01:33):
Where did this start? Where did it really start?
Speaker 3 (01:36):
Began digging into sort of the origins of the sport itself.
That led me to learn a little bit about Bill France,
whose family at that time owned the entire.
Speaker 2 (01:46):
Sport, which was a shock to me.
Speaker 3 (01:48):
But every version of the origin story of Nascar that
I came across started with Bill France in about nineteen
forty nineteen forty nine, But many of these histories are
and books started that year and didn't go back prior
to that and explain how did it get to that point.
It didn't just come into existence from nothing that year,
(02:10):
and it didn't come into existence surely because of this
one man, Bill France. So what I really wanted to
do was go back, go deep and find out who
were the other characters who played a role in creating
this sport before it was even known as Nascar. And
so my wife and I, after nine to eleven, about
a year afterwards, decided let's move south. Let's go live
(02:30):
in the South where this story takes place. So we
moved to North Carolina, to Asheville, North Carolina, and I
spent the next couple of years driving throughout the South
to Florida and Atlanta, Northern Georgia, and across North Carolina
to track down the true pioneers of NASCAR. Some of
them were still alive at that time. Thankfully, my research
(02:56):
led me, thankfully to one of the overlooked pioneers of
the entire sport, a guy named Raymond Parks, who was
living in Atlanta at that time.
Speaker 2 (03:04):
He was in his late eighties early nineties.
Speaker 3 (03:08):
Still showing up for work every day at the liquor
store that he owned in North Atlanta, still dressed in
his suit and tie with a dapper hat, and I
was pointed toward Raymond as the guy who was really
the overlooked hero of the early days of NASCAR, someone
who never fully got the credit he deserved for playing
(03:28):
a vital role in bringing that sport to life. When
I first got to know him, though, he didn't want
to talk about it, largely because the origins of this sport,
at least as far as he was concerned, were directly
tied to the moonshining business.
Speaker 2 (03:43):
Raymond was a successful moonshiner.
Speaker 3 (03:45):
He actually started moonshining at age fourteen, got to know
another North Georgia moonshiner who offered him a job. Raymond
grew up poor on a farm in North Georgia outside Dawsonville.
Speaker 2 (03:56):
His dad was a drunk.
Speaker 3 (03:58):
There were sixteen kids in the household, and Raymond, who
was one of the eldest, one day, just walked off
the farm at age fourteen and started working as a
moonshiner's apprentice. Spent a little time in jail after that,
but learned the ropes and over time became an incredibly
successful moonshiner himself, running moonshine making moonshine. Later, he was
(04:19):
so successful that he hired his cousins to do the
driving for him, and that whole enterprise of making and
delivering moonshine is what eventually led to stock car racing.
When I first met Raymond, though he didn't want to
talk about all that, he felt like that was part
of the past. He was, you know, kind of a modest,
(04:39):
quiet guy, at least at the age when I met him,
So I just kept showing up at his office saying, okay,
you don't want to talk about it, That's fine. I'll
come back next week and we'll just chat about other things.
Little by little, I kind of earned his confidence, and
little by little he started opening up to me and
started sharing with me the story of his role in creating.
Speaker 2 (04:59):
Now Car and it was just a remarkable story.
Speaker 3 (05:02):
Of poor North Georgia kids trying to find a better
life for themselves. You know, so many of them grew
up poor and their prospects were to continue working on
their family farm or maybe get a job at the
local mill for a few dollars more. But a lot
of these kids wanted more. They wanted adventure, they wanted
to escape. Once they got introduced to cars and moonshining,
(05:25):
they wanted speed and money and a different version of success.
And moonshining and then stock car racing gave them that.
It gave them something that they hadn't previously had access to.
And Raymond is a perfect example of that. But I'll
never forget being in his office one day when he
reluctantly pulls out a couple of old photo albums and
(05:48):
starts leafing through them, and I got shivers up my
spine because he starts showing me photos that really told
the story of early stock car racing in the early
days of NASCAR, and told the story of Raymond Parks'
role in creating that sport.
Speaker 2 (06:08):
So he's showing me pictures of old.
Speaker 3 (06:10):
Races, terrible car wrecks, photos of the corpse of his cousin,
Lloyd c who was killed in a moonshining accident. Photos
of Red Vote, the foulmouth mechanic who worked on Raymond
Parks's cars, both his moonshine cars and later his stock
cars and his race cars. These photos were just a
thrilling sort of recapturing of that moment in time when
(06:34):
NASCAR didn't even exist. It was just sort of this
humble sport where these moonshiner kids were having fun on
the weekends, racing each other out of cow pastures, and
little by little, those raggedy races evolved into what we
later came to know as stock car racing and then NASCAR.
Speaker 1 (06:52):
And you've been listening to author Neil Thompson tell the
story of his own story. But what prompted him to
write this book, which was well with so many writers,
just a question, how did NASCAR really start? How did
the sports start before there was ever NASCAR and this
legend named Bill France. It all started with moonshiner kids
racing each.
Speaker 2 (07:13):
Other out in cowpastures.
Speaker 1 (07:16):
When we come back, more of the story of moonshine
runners and the birth of Nascar here on Our American Stories.
Lee Habib here the host of our American Stories. Every
day on this show, we're bringing inspiring stories from across
(07:38):
this great country, stories from our big cities and small towns.
But we truly can't do the show without you. Our
stories are free to listen to, but they're not free
to make. If you love what you hear, go to
Ouramericanstories dot com and click the donate button. Give a little,
give a lot. Go to Alamerican Stories dot com and
give and we continue with our American Stories. And Neil Thompson,
(08:13):
author of Driving with the Devil, Southern Moonshine, Detroit Wheels,
and the Birth of Nascar. Let's return to Neil with
more of the story.
Speaker 3 (08:24):
The moonshine that these guys were making and delivering was
essentially corn whiskey. It was a version of the whiskey
that had come to America from the Irish and Scots.
Irish immigrants who came here and then sort of gravitated
towards the South and ended up in the hills and
hollers of North Carolina and Georgia and other southern states,
(08:46):
where a lot of these farmers learned that by growing
corn and turning that corn into whiskey, they could make
more by selling the liquid product of that agricultural output
rather than just becoming straight up farmers. And so moonshine
became an important component of the economy of the South
going way back to the eighteen hundreds and then on
(09:08):
into the early nineteen hundreds.
Speaker 2 (09:10):
There were tax issues.
Speaker 3 (09:12):
You know, the US government over time kept making attempts
to tax this product, and obviously the moonshiners resisted that,
which is what led to sort of this cat and
mouse game that evolved between the moonshiners delivering their agricultural
product as they viewed it, to market or to their
customers in the cities for the most part, and then
(09:34):
the tax agents, the revenue agents, trying to track them
down and arrest them and charge them with tax fraud.
So the term moonshine came from the practice of making
this whiskey in the dead of night to avoid detection,
to avoid setting off any alarms by revenue agencyeing the
smoke rise from these stills that were mainly set up
(09:57):
and deep in the woods next to a street.
Speaker 2 (10:00):
They needed fresh water for these things, so.
Speaker 3 (10:02):
By operating in the middle of the night under the moonlight,
that's where the term moonshine evolved from. And then the
term bootlegger came from the concept that by one of
the ways that these guys would try and hide their
liquor would be in a flask that was hidden inside
their boot, and in time the term bootlegger evolved just
to sort of encompass all of the efforts to make
(10:24):
and sell illegal whiskey throughout.
Speaker 2 (10:27):
The South and elsewhere.
Speaker 3 (10:29):
In time, these moonshiners learned that the best means of
transporting their product the moonshine jars of moonshine packed tightly
into crates, was a Ford V eight coup sort of.
The explosion of the moonshining trade in the early decades
of the nineteen hundreds coincided with the evolution of the automobile,
(10:51):
so you see the Ford V eight's becoming more and
more sophisticated. The moonshiners realized This was the perfect car
for delivering moonshine because had a great suspension, it was fast,
and it was.
Speaker 2 (11:02):
Easy to work on.
Speaker 3 (11:03):
So you also see the beginnings of car mechanics who
later became race car mechanics, figuring out how to take
apart Fords engines and put them back together and add
modifications and bore out the cylinders and do these other
things to make them even faster than they were meant
to be and even more sort of solid and reliable
(11:26):
than they were designed to be. Through Raymond Parks got
to become acquainted with his trusted mechanic, Read Vote, who
had a garage in downtown Atlanta and was sort of
a mad scientist when it came to Fords in particular
other cars as well, but mainly Fords. You know, he
(11:47):
would try the little weird modifications that no one else
had thought of with the exhaust and the engine and the.
Speaker 2 (11:53):
Ratio of avative fuel.
Speaker 3 (11:55):
He was just a mad genius and learned to make
these cars go faster than they were ever meant to go.
He also, on the side, sometimes worked for the cops
and the revenue agents, but didn't put as much effort
into their cars as he did the moonshiners and those cars,
and so little by little these cars, the drivers are
learning to drive them faster, the mechanics are making them
(12:17):
go faster. And then on weekends a lot of these
moonshiners start getting together to race each other, see who
has the fastest moonshining car. Some of the early races
were incredibly modest. They were just at a cowfield somewhere,
or a field farmer's field, and one car would go
out and sort of tear up an oval in the grass.
Speaker 2 (12:37):
And that would be the racetrack. That was it.
Speaker 3 (12:39):
They'd line up, they'd race each other, and just for
bragging rights, they would see who had the fastest car.
In time, these races started to attract crowds. I mean,
there weren't any professional sports in the South at that time.
It would take years before the first professional sports team,
the Atlanta Braves, came to Atlanta in nineteen sixty five.
(12:59):
In the twenties, thirties and forties, there were college sports,
but not really the type of sport where you'd go
to an auditorium and watch a game, or a stadium
and watch a game. Once these stock car races started
getting up and underway and word spread and newspapers started
covering these events. Then they did start to tract crowds,
you know, they put up bleachers next to the oval track.
Speaker 2 (13:20):
They started, you.
Speaker 3 (13:21):
Know, building concessions, and savvy businessmen started to learn how
to make a little bit of money off these putting
a fence around the whole thing and charging admission fees.
So what these early races were, you know, we called
NASCAR stock car racing today, but at that time these
stock cars really were just off the rack cars that
(13:43):
anyone could buy at their local dealer, you know, that's
where the term came from stock. They were supposed to
be just the stock that came with the car, no modifications.
Of course, that concept of being quote strictly stocked was
thrown out the window, you know, right off the bat
because of the these modifications that the Moonshine mechanics started
making to the cars. Very quickly, these quote unquote stock
(14:07):
cars became highly modified, highly customized.
Speaker 2 (14:11):
Cars that bore, at least on the outside, some.
Speaker 3 (14:14):
Resemblance to the cars you'd see on the dealer's lot,
but on the inside were very different machines altogether. So
by looking exactly like any other car that your parents.
Speaker 2 (14:25):
Would drive to a church that Sunday.
Speaker 3 (14:27):
These cars were intended to look normal so that they
didn't attract the attention of the revenue agents, so that
they could fit in once they got to town. But again,
under the hood, that engine was way more powerful than
any regular stock car that anyone else in the neighborhood had.
Late eighteen thirties into nineteen forty, the sports progressing and
(14:49):
Raymond Parks is now becoming what in future years would
be described as the first team owner of stock car racing.
He kind of pulls together to of his cousins, Handsome
Roy Hall and quiet Lloyd c who are both moonshine
drivers for him, and they are just wonderful drivers because
they've learned how to drive on the back roads of
(15:11):
Georgia to escape the revenue agents. So those two are
part of Raymond Parks's team as is read vote the mechanic.
So together this team starts traveling through the South, visiting
other races and having enormous success as the sport is
getting up and running. Unfortunately, though Roy Hall's a bit
of a scamp, He's always getting in trouble, spends time
(15:33):
in jail and then Lloyd C, who is much quieter
and sort of a good kid, gets caught up in
this bizarre moonshining argument with one of his cousins who
shoots and kills him, and Lloyd C Is dead. Sometime
in nineteen forty and then a year later, the entire
sport comes grinding to a halt as America gets involved in.
Speaker 2 (15:53):
World War Two. A lot of the characters.
Speaker 3 (15:56):
In my book and in the story of the Evolution
of NASCAR time serving in World War Two. Raymond Parks
served at the Battle of the Bulge. But when these
guys come back home, most of them to the South
and start to pick up the pieces of socccar racing,
and they came back very hungry to get back on
the racetrack and take the sport to the next level.
(16:18):
At this time we get introduced to some of the
new characters on the scene, one of whom is named
Read Byron. There were two Reds in this book, Read
Vote and Read Byron. So Red Byron served in a
B twenty four airplane, mainly serving up on the Aleutian
Islands off the Alaskan coast. His plane gets shot down,
among many that were shot down at that time, and
(16:40):
they'd sort of crash land and read Byron ends up
with just a ruined left leg shrapnel. The doctors actually
wanted to amputate his leg, and he said, no, don't
touch it.
Speaker 2 (16:53):
I'm a race car driver. I need that leg.
Speaker 1 (16:55):
And you've been listening to Neil Thompson tell a heck
of a story. Moonshow was basically corn whiskey, he said.
And let's face it, the farmers could make more money
selling a liquefied version of their crop than the actual crop.
And moonshining explodes because well, automobile production explodes in this
country too, and leave it to men and their toys. Soon, well,
(17:17):
guys are modifying these cars well outrun federales, revenue agents,
and frankly to just outrun themselves and have fun. Pretty
soon they're competing in cow pastures and the next thing
you know, people are showing up. Because well, the South
had no professional sports. This became the sport of the South.
World War two comes, so many of these guys put
(17:39):
on a different suit and go and fight for their country,
only to come back hungrier for the action and for
the sport they created. When we come back, more of
this remarkable story, Moonshine, Runners and the Birth of Nascar.
Here on our American stories, and we continue with our
(18:10):
American stories and Neil Thompson, author of Driving with the Devil,
Southern Moonshine, Detroit Wheels, and the Birth of Nascar. Let's
continue with the story.
Speaker 3 (18:21):
So Red Byron, because he had this damaged leg, discovered
early on once he was back on the track that
he couldn't drive the way he was used to driving
because his left leg didn't have strength and he just
couldn't maneuver the clutch pedal the way he needed to
be competitive. So he talked to Red Vote about it
and they came up with a fix, which was for
(18:43):
Red Vote to weld two pins onto the clutch pedal
so that Red Byron, whose leg was often in a brace,
could lift up his left leg and put the boot
of his left leg into this space between these two
pins on the clutch pedal. And then when he needed
to change gears, instead of putting pressure on that leg,
(19:05):
which didn't have much strength to it, he would pivot
the bottom half of his body which will allow him
to depress and release the clutch pedal and change gears.
I don't think Red Vote or Raymond Parks thought it
would work. But in time Red Byron got used to
it and realized, you know this works, I can do it,
and he started to win race after race after race.
(19:26):
As we get into nineteen forty eight and stock car
racing is really up and running and NASCAR is a
formal organization now, Red Byron becomes the first champion of
that first year of NASCAR. Some people look at nineteen
forty nine as the more official first year of NASCAR
because that year they implemented new standards for these strictly
(19:50):
stock cars, but Red Byron wins that year as well,
So the first two years of NASCAR's existence were won
by this crippled war veteran with a bad leg that
was essentially strapped into his clutch pedal, could barely walk,
but could win race after race and become champion two
years in a row. The cast of characters at this
time is just super colorful and bizarre, you know, guys
(20:14):
with names like Goober and Soapy and Speedy and one eye.
Speaker 2 (20:18):
But read Byron was different from that.
Speaker 3 (20:21):
He was a little bit nerdy, He was thoughtful, he
was a big reader. He was quieter He wasn't a
big partier or a drinker like some of the other
guys were.
Speaker 2 (20:29):
He didn't get into fights like many of them did.
But behind the.
Speaker 3 (20:32):
Wheel he was again fearless and an incredible competitor. As
the sport continues to find its footing again after World
War Two, you get into a number of races through
nineteen forty six, but nineteen forty seven is when it
really starts to pick up speed again. The end of
nineteen forty seven is when a group of racers, Raymond
(20:56):
Parks Read Vote, Read Byron, and then Bill France, who
was based in Daytona Beach. They all get together down
in Daytona Beach, sort of called there by Bill Franz,
to have a meeting to figure out, how are we
going to organize this sport now that we're back up
and running. What are the rules, what's the points system?
(21:16):
Who's going to oversee these different races and kind of
make things a little bit more consistent and cohesive to
compete with other organizations that we're trying to oversee different
types of racing at that time, like the TRIPLEA. So
there's this famous meeting that occurs in December of nineteen
forty seven, and a lot of these drivers and Raymond Parks,
(21:38):
the moonshine runner turned businessman, they come up with a
system of rules and create an actual sport, National Association
for stock car auto racing. The name came from Red Vote,
the mechanic who never fully got credit for the role
he played in figuring out what the rules were and
coming up with that name and the acronym. But at
the end of that meeting December of nineteen forty seven, it.
Speaker 2 (22:02):
Was actually two days.
Speaker 3 (22:03):
At the end of the second day of the meeting,
Bill France had himself named President of NASCAR.
Speaker 2 (22:08):
A lot of the other guys said, yeah, go ahead, Bill,
you go ahead and run it. We're not interested. We
just want to race and make money and go fast.
Speaker 3 (22:15):
Bill France was a little bit more business minded and
also a little bit power hungry, and essentially had himself
named the president of NASCAR, and over the next couple
of years would end up becoming the full owner of
the entire sport, which subsequently would be owned by his
family for many decades moving forward, and I think a
lot of the early drivers and others who were involved
(22:37):
in the sport, including Raymond parks because I talked to
him about it, felt betrayed by France. They were all
in it together, but France kind of took over and
ran with it and pushed them all aside. And when
the sport started to become even more popular than any
of them could have imagined and started to make some
real money, none of the early pioneers and actual founders
(22:58):
of the sport saw any of that money or got
any benefit from the role they played. One dynamic that
was part of stock car racing from the very beginning
was trying to get racers to follow any kind of rules.
You know, one way to get a hillbilly to do
something is to tell him not to do it. And
(23:20):
that sort of unspoken rule applied to a lot of
the limits that NASCAR tried to place on what drivers
could and couldn't do. You know, if they told them
to drive with a seat belt, they would drive without
a seat belt. If they told them, you know, go
easy on the other guy's car, they would slam into
the other guy's car. It really was a wild and
often lawless period of time for stock car racing, and
(23:42):
this is something that Bill Frans over time tried to
clean up and get racers to toe the line and.
Speaker 2 (23:47):
To follow the rules.
Speaker 3 (23:49):
But because so many of the early racers were moonshiners
and were sort of these rebellious Southern boys, Bill Frands
had a really hard time keeping them in line.
Speaker 2 (23:58):
And I think over time.
Speaker 3 (23:59):
That became sort of a tension in the sport and
part of the dynamic part of what fans loved, which was,
you know, rebellious drivers breaking the rules, and then on
the other hand, you have the official NASCAR folks, led
by Bill Franz, trying to tighten things up and make
things cleaner and more formalized and more family friendly. And
(24:21):
I think that tension continued for decades to come, and
now probably that rebellious aspect of the sport is mostly gone.
Moving ahead to more recent times, NASCAR's fan base doubled
in nineteen nineties and continued to grow at ten or
more percent per year.
Speaker 2 (24:37):
For a period of time. It was the fastest.
Speaker 3 (24:39):
Growing sport in America, rising to the number two, and
so much of the sport became about marketing. Revenues averaged
three billion dollars a year and were on the rise.
NASCAR TV ratings or double those of baseball, basketball, and hockey.
Half of NASCAR's viewers are women today, and NASCAR the
(25:00):
races themselves are just wildly popular bacchanal's, you know, just
attendance of you know, one to two hundred thousand that
some of these races, mass of people showing up for
these races and staying there for five days in a row,
well beyond before and after, you know, a few hours
of the big Left turn during race day, primetime viewership
(25:23):
on not just ESPN but Network Sports. And the drivers
of today are millionaires. You know, they're living in mansions
and throughout the South. Their celebrities, they're superstars, They date supermodels,
walk up and down any supermarket and you see NASCAR
logos and ads emblazoned on just about every package you
(25:43):
can find. So it's just exploded, which to me is
remarkable that it started from such humble roots with just
these poor Southern boys trying to have some fun.
Speaker 1 (25:54):
And a terrific job on the production by Greg Hangler
and a special thanks to Neil Thompson, author of Driving
with the Devil, Southern Moonshine, Detroit Wheels, and the Birth
of Nascar, and boy we meet some real characters bred
Byron comes to mind. Injured in flight combat in the
Aleutian Islands in World War Two and nearly crippled, he
(26:15):
still manages to win the unofficial and first official NASCAR Championship,
and that meeting in nineteen forty seven, two days in
Daytona Beach, is where NASCAR gets formed. They were trying
to solve a problem getting the drivers to follow the rules,
no simple task when you're dealing with a bunch of wild,
(26:36):
rebellious Southern boy Bill Frantz managed to do that to some.
He's a hero. To others, well, sort of a goat.
Either way, NASCAR has permanently changed, now one of the
top grossing sports in the country, and it routinely beats
in the ratings baseball and football. Who could have ever
imagined the story of NASCAR, moonshine, and so much more,
(27:00):
in a way the story of America. Here on our
American Stories
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