January 30, 2025 • 27 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, long before NASCAR’s rampant commercialism lurks a not-so-distant history that has 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
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 a
(01:14):
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 4 (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 Frantz,
whose family at that time owned the entire.
Speaker 4 (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, articles
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.
Speaker 4 (02:15):
So what I really wanted to do was go back.
Speaker 3 (02:16):
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.
Speaker 4 (02:29):
Let's go live in the South where this story takes place.
Speaker 3 (02:34):
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 whom were still alive at that time. Thankfully,
(02:55):
my research 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 4 (03:04):
He was in his.
Speaker 3 (03:05):
Late eighties early nineties, 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
(03:27):
playing a vital role in bringing that sport to life.
Speaker 4 (03:32):
When I first got to know.
Speaker 3 (03:33):
Him, though, he didn't want to talk about it, largely
because the origins of the sport, at least as far
as he was concerned, were directly tied to the moonshining business.
Speaker 4 (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.
His dad was a drunk. 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
(04:08):
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 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,
(04:32):
though he didn't want to talk about all that, he
felt like that was part of the past. He was
kind of a modest, 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
(04:53):
he started opening up to me and started sharing with
me the story of his role in creating.
Speaker 4 (04:59):
NASCAR, 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 stock car racing in the early days
of NASCAR and told the story of Raymond Parks' role
in creating that sport.
Speaker 4 (06:08):
So he's showing me pictures of old races.
Speaker 3 (06:11):
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.
Speaker 4 (06:26):
Cars and his race cars.
Speaker 3 (06:28):
These photos were just a thrilling sort of recapturing of
that moment in time when 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
(06:50):
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?
Speaker 2 (07:05):
How did the sports start?
Speaker 1 (07:07):
Before there was ever Nascar and this legend named Bill France.
It all started with moonshiner kids racing each other out
in cowpastures. When we come back more of the story
of moonshine runners and the birth of Nascar here on
Our American Stories. Leehabib here the host of our American Stories.
(07:35):
Every day on this show, we're bringing inspiring stories from
across 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 Alamericanstories dot com and click the donate button. Give
a little, give a lot. Go to Alamerican Stories dot com.
Speaker 2 (07:58):
And give.
Speaker 1 (08:09):
And we continue with our American Stories. And Neil Thompson,
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.
Speaker 4 (08:29):
It was a version of.
Speaker 3 (08:31):
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, where a lot of these farmers learned that
by growing corn and turning that corn into whiskey, they
(08:52):
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 into the early nineteen hundreds.
Speaker 4 (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 agencying the
smoke rise from these stills that were mainly set up
(09:57):
and deep in the woods next to a stream. They
needed fresh water for these things, so 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,
(10:19):
and in time the term bootlegger evolved just to sort
of encompass all of the efforts to make and sell
illegal whiskey throughout the South and elsewhere. In time, these
moonshiners learned that the best means of transporting their product,
the moonshine jars of moonshine packed tightly into.
Speaker 4 (10:37):
Crates, was a Ford V eight coop sort of.
Speaker 3 (10:41):
The explosion of the moonshining trade in the early decades
of the nineteen hundreds coincided with the evolution of the automobile,
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 it had a great suspension, it
(11:01):
was fast, and it.
Speaker 4 (11:02):
Was 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.
Speaker 4 (11:46):
You know, he would.
Speaker 3 (11:47):
Try the little weird modifications that no one else had
thought of with the exhaust and the engine and the
ratio of airtive fuel. 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.
Speaker 4 (12:08):
Cars as he did. The moonshiners and those.
Speaker 3 (12:10):
Cars, and so little by little these cars, the drivers
are learning to drive them faster, the mechanics are making
them 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,
(12:31):
or a field farmer's field, and one car would go
out and sort of tear up an oval in the grass.
Speaker 4 (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.
Speaker 4 (12:45):
In time, these.
Speaker 3 (12:46):
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. So 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.
(13:09):
Once these stock car races started getting up and underway,
and words spread and newspapers started covering these events. Then
they did start to attract crowds. You know, they put
up bleachers next to the oval track. They started, you 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.
Speaker 4 (13:31):
So what these early races were.
Speaker 3 (13:34):
You know, we called NASCAR stock car racing today, but
at that time these stock cars really were just off
the rack cars that 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
(13:55):
quote strictly stocked was thrown out the window, you know,
right off the bat, because of these modifications that the
Moonshine mechanics started making to the cars. Very quickly, these
quote unquote stock cars became highly modified, highly customized cars
that bore, at least on the outside, some resemblance to
the cars you'd see on the dealer's lot, but on
(14:17):
the inside were very different machines altogether. So by looking
exactly like any other car that your parents would drive
to church that Sunday. 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
(14:38):
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 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 his cousin's handsome Roy Hall and quiet
(15:02):
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 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
(15:23):
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 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
(15:44):
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 World War Two.
Speaker 4 (15:54):
A lot of the characters.
Speaker 3 (15:56):
In my book and in the story of the Evolution
of NASCAR spent 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 4 (16:52):
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.
Speaker 2 (16:59):
Moonshot was basically corn whiskey, he said.
Speaker 1 (17:02):
And let's face it, the farmers could make more money
selling a liquefied version of their crop than the actual crop.
Speaker 2 (17:09):
And moonshining explodes because.
Speaker 1 (17:11):
Well, automobile production explodes in this country too, and leave
it to men and their toys. Soon, well, guys are
modifying these cars to 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.
Speaker 2 (17:31):
Because well, the South had no professional sports. This became
the sport of the South.
Speaker 1 (17:36):
World War two comes, so many of these guys put
on a different suit and go and fight for their country,
only to come back hungrier for.
Speaker 2 (17:44):
The action and for the sport they created.
Speaker 1 (17:46):
When we come back, more of this remarkable story, Moonshine,
Runners and the Birth of Nascar. Here on our American stories,
(18:08):
and we continue with our American stories and Neil Thompson,
author of Driving with the Devil, Southern Moonshine, Detroit Wheels.
Speaker 2 (18:17):
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.
Speaker 4 (18:38):
So he talked to Red Vote.
Speaker 3 (18:40):
About it and they came up with a fix, which
was for 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. And then when
(19:01):
he needed to change gears, instead of putting pressure on
that leg, 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
(19:22):
can do it, and he started to win race after
race after race. 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
(19:44):
year of NASCAR because that year they implemented new standards
for these strictly 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 li leg that was essentially strapped into his clutch pedal,
could barely walk, but could win race after race and
(20:06):
become champion two years in a row. The cast of
characters at this time is just super colorful and bizarre,
you know, guys with names like Goober and Soapy and
Speedy and one eye. But read Byron was different from that.
Speaker 4 (20:20):
He was a little bit nerdy. He was thoughtful, he
was a big reader.
Speaker 3 (20:25):
He was quieter, He wasn't a big partier or a
drinker like some of the other guys were.
Speaker 4 (20:29):
He didn't get into fights like many of them did.
Speaker 3 (20:32):
But behind the wheel he was again fearless and an
incredible competitor.
Speaker 4 (20:39):
As the sport.
Speaker 3 (20:41):
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 Parks Read Vote,
Read Byron, and then Bill France, who was based in
(21:01):
Daytona Beach. They all get together down in Daytona Beach
sort of called there by Bill friends to have a
meeting to figure out, how are we going to organize
this sport now that we're back up and running.
Speaker 4 (21:14):
What are the rules, what's the points system?
Speaker 3 (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,
(22:01):
it was actually two days. At the end of the
second day of the meeting, Bill Franz had himself named
president of NASCAR.
Speaker 4 (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.
Speaker 4 (23:02):
The role they played.
Speaker 3 (23:06):
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 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,
(23:28):
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 this is something that Bill Frantz over
time tried to clean up and get racers to tow
the line and to follow the rules. But because so
(23:50):
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. And I think over
time 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
(24:10):
then on the other hand, you have the official NASCAR folks,
led by Bill France, trying to tighten things up and
make things cleaner and more formalized and more family friendly.
And 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
(24:32):
base doubled in nineteen nineties and continued to grow at
ten or more percent per year.
Speaker 4 (24:37):
For a period of time.
Speaker 3 (24:38):
It was the fastest growing sport in America, rising to
the number two, and so much of the sport became
about marketing.
Speaker 4 (24:46):
Revenues averaged three billion dollars a year and were on
the rise.
Speaker 3 (24:51):
NASCAR TV ratings or double those of baseball, basketball, and hockey.
Half of NASCAR's viewers are women today, and NASCAR ev
the 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
(25:12):
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 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,
(25:34):
They date supermodels, walk up and down any supermarket and
you see NASCAR logos and ads emblazoned on just about
every package you 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.
Speaker 2 (26:38):
Bill Frantz managed to do that to some. He's a hero.
Speaker 1 (26:42):
To others, well, sort of a goat. Either way, NASCAR
is 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, in a way
the story of America.
Speaker 2 (27:01):
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
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 a
(01:14):
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 4 (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 Frantz,
whose family at that time owned the entire.
Speaker 4 (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, articles
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.
Speaker 4 (02:15):
So what I really wanted to do was go back.
Speaker 3 (02:16):
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.
Speaker 4 (02:29):
Let's go live in the South where this story takes place.
Speaker 3 (02:34):
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 whom were still alive at that time. Thankfully,
(02:55):
my research 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 4 (03:04):
He was in his.
Speaker 3 (03:05):
Late eighties early nineties, 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
(03:27):
playing a vital role in bringing that sport to life.
Speaker 4 (03:32):
When I first got to know.
Speaker 3 (03:33):
Him, though, he didn't want to talk about it, largely
because the origins of the sport, at least as far
as he was concerned, were directly tied to the moonshining business.
Speaker 4 (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.
His dad was a drunk. 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
(04:08):
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 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,
(04:32):
though he didn't want to talk about all that, he
felt like that was part of the past. He was
kind of a modest, 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
(04:53):
he started opening up to me and started sharing with
me the story of his role in creating.
Speaker 4 (04:59):
NASCAR, 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 stock car racing in the early days
of NASCAR and told the story of Raymond Parks' role
in creating that sport.
Speaker 4 (06:08):
So he's showing me pictures of old races.
Speaker 3 (06:11):
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.
Speaker 4 (06:26):
Cars and his race cars.
Speaker 3 (06:28):
These photos were just a thrilling sort of recapturing of
that moment in time when 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
(06:50):
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?
Speaker 2 (07:05):
How did the sports start?
Speaker 1 (07:07):
Before there was ever Nascar and this legend named Bill France.
It all started with moonshiner kids racing each other out
in cowpastures. When we come back more of the story
of moonshine runners and the birth of Nascar here on
Our American Stories. Leehabib here the host of our American Stories.
(07:35):
Every day on this show, we're bringing inspiring stories from
across 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 Alamericanstories dot com and click the donate button. Give
a little, give a lot. Go to Alamerican Stories dot com.
Speaker 2 (07:58):
And give.
Speaker 1 (08:09):
And we continue with our American Stories. And Neil Thompson,
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.
Speaker 4 (08:29):
It was a version of.
Speaker 3 (08:31):
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, where a lot of these farmers learned that
by growing corn and turning that corn into whiskey, they
(08:52):
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 into the early nineteen hundreds.
Speaker 4 (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 agencying the
smoke rise from these stills that were mainly set up
(09:57):
and deep in the woods next to a stream. They
needed fresh water for these things, so 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,
(10:19):
and in time the term bootlegger evolved just to sort
of encompass all of the efforts to make and sell
illegal whiskey throughout the South and elsewhere. In time, these
moonshiners learned that the best means of transporting their product,
the moonshine jars of moonshine packed tightly into.
Speaker 4 (10:37):
Crates, was a Ford V eight coop sort of.
Speaker 3 (10:41):
The explosion of the moonshining trade in the early decades
of the nineteen hundreds coincided with the evolution of the automobile,
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 it had a great suspension, it
(11:01):
was fast, and it.
Speaker 4 (11:02):
Was 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.
Speaker 4 (11:46):
You know, he would.
Speaker 3 (11:47):
Try the little weird modifications that no one else had
thought of with the exhaust and the engine and the
ratio of airtive fuel. 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.
Speaker 4 (12:08):
Cars as he did. The moonshiners and those.
Speaker 3 (12:10):
Cars, and so little by little these cars, the drivers
are learning to drive them faster, the mechanics are making
them 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,
(12:31):
or a field farmer's field, and one car would go
out and sort of tear up an oval in the grass.
Speaker 4 (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.
Speaker 4 (12:45):
In time, these.
Speaker 3 (12:46):
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. So 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.
(13:09):
Once these stock car races started getting up and underway,
and words spread and newspapers started covering these events. Then
they did start to attract crowds. You know, they put
up bleachers next to the oval track. They started, you 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.
Speaker 4 (13:31):
So what these early races were.
Speaker 3 (13:34):
You know, we called NASCAR stock car racing today, but
at that time these stock cars really were just off
the rack cars that 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
(13:55):
quote strictly stocked was thrown out the window, you know,
right off the bat, because of these modifications that the
Moonshine mechanics started making to the cars. Very quickly, these
quote unquote stock cars became highly modified, highly customized cars
that bore, at least on the outside, some resemblance to
the cars you'd see on the dealer's lot, but on
(14:17):
the inside were very different machines altogether. So by looking
exactly like any other car that your parents would drive
to church that Sunday. 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
(14:38):
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 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 his cousin's handsome Roy Hall and quiet
(15:02):
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 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
(15:23):
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 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
(15:44):
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 World War Two.
Speaker 4 (15:54):
A lot of the characters.
Speaker 3 (15:56):
In my book and in the story of the Evolution
of NASCAR spent 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 4 (16:52):
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.
Speaker 2 (16:59):
Moonshot was basically corn whiskey, he said.
Speaker 1 (17:02):
And let's face it, the farmers could make more money
selling a liquefied version of their crop than the actual crop.
Speaker 2 (17:09):
And moonshining explodes because.
Speaker 1 (17:11):
Well, automobile production explodes in this country too, and leave
it to men and their toys. Soon, well, guys are
modifying these cars to 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.
Speaker 2 (17:31):
Because well, the South had no professional sports. This became
the sport of the South.
Speaker 1 (17:36):
World War two comes, so many of these guys put
on a different suit and go and fight for their country,
only to come back hungrier for.
Speaker 2 (17:44):
The action and for the sport they created.
Speaker 1 (17:46):
When we come back, more of this remarkable story, Moonshine,
Runners and the Birth of Nascar. Here on our American stories,
(18:08):
and we continue with our American stories and Neil Thompson,
author of Driving with the Devil, Southern Moonshine, Detroit Wheels.
Speaker 2 (18:17):
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.
Speaker 4 (18:38):
So he talked to Red Vote.
Speaker 3 (18:40):
About it and they came up with a fix, which
was for 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. And then when
(19:01):
he needed to change gears, instead of putting pressure on
that leg, 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
(19:22):
can do it, and he started to win race after
race after race. 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
(19:44):
year of NASCAR because that year they implemented new standards
for these strictly 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 li leg that was essentially strapped into his clutch pedal,
could barely walk, but could win race after race and
(20:06):
become champion two years in a row. The cast of
characters at this time is just super colorful and bizarre,
you know, guys with names like Goober and Soapy and
Speedy and one eye. But read Byron was different from that.
Speaker 4 (20:20):
He was a little bit nerdy. He was thoughtful, he
was a big reader.
Speaker 3 (20:25):
He was quieter, He wasn't a big partier or a
drinker like some of the other guys were.
Speaker 4 (20:29):
He didn't get into fights like many of them did.
Speaker 3 (20:32):
But behind the wheel he was again fearless and an
incredible competitor.
Speaker 4 (20:39):
As the sport.
Speaker 3 (20:41):
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 Parks Read Vote,
Read Byron, and then Bill France, who was based in
(21:01):
Daytona Beach. They all get together down in Daytona Beach
sort of called there by Bill friends to have a
meeting to figure out, how are we going to organize
this sport now that we're back up and running.
Speaker 4 (21:14):
What are the rules, what's the points system?
Speaker 3 (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,
(22:01):
it was actually two days. At the end of the
second day of the meeting, Bill Franz had himself named
president of NASCAR.
Speaker 4 (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.
Speaker 4 (23:02):
The role they played.
Speaker 3 (23:06):
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 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,
(23:28):
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 this is something that Bill Frantz over
time tried to clean up and get racers to tow
the line and to follow the rules. But because so
(23:50):
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. And I think over
time 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
(24:10):
then on the other hand, you have the official NASCAR folks,
led by Bill France, trying to tighten things up and
make things cleaner and more formalized and more family friendly.
And 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
(24:32):
base doubled in nineteen nineties and continued to grow at
ten or more percent per year.
Speaker 4 (24:37):
For a period of time.
Speaker 3 (24:38):
It was the fastest growing sport in America, rising to
the number two, and so much of the sport became
about marketing.
Speaker 4 (24:46):
Revenues averaged three billion dollars a year and were on
the rise.
Speaker 3 (24:51):
NASCAR TV ratings or double those of baseball, basketball, and hockey.
Half of NASCAR's viewers are women today, and NASCAR ev
the 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
(25:12):
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 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,
(25:34):
They date supermodels, walk up and down any supermarket and
you see NASCAR logos and ads emblazoned on just about
every package you 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.
Speaker 2 (26:38):
Bill Frantz managed to do that to some. He's a hero.
Speaker 1 (26:42):
To others, well, sort of a goat. Either way, NASCAR
is 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, in a way
the story of America.
Speaker 2 (27:01):
Here on our American Stories
Host
Lee Habeeb
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