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Driving With The Devil (Part 3)

An excerpt from
DRIVING WITH THE DEVIL:
Southern Moonshiners, Detroit Wheels, and the Birth of NASCAR
By Neal Thompson
Crown Publishing

                                                
                                              (click book cover above to read Swampland's review)

From Chapter 4, "The Bootlegger Turn" (continued)
________________________________________


It was a thrilling, beguiling and purely Southern era. Then, in the late 1930s, a number of developments occurred in accidental cooperation, which changed the rules of the moonshining game: the ranks of revenue agents grew larger and smarter, forcing whiskey mechanics to get craftier. Cars got much, much faster, and the whiskey trippers grew more skillful. The Great Depression weakened, and southerners found a little extra money in their pockets. They wanted a place to spend it and to have some fun. These developments began to clear the way for the sport of stock car racing to bloom, and it all happened in Dawsonville or Atlanta, or on the byways that connected the two. The period in history, starting around 1938, was like a trough of calm between two swells. The Depression was ebbing and World War II would soon to rise up and consume the nation.

But first, moonshine and its sidekick - the Ford - began to morph into something else altogether. Leading the way were two moonshining cousins from Dawsonville named Roy and Lloyd, men skilled enough to drive with the devil and live to brag on it.

#

NASCAR pioneers later concurred that Lloyd Seay was "without a doubt the best automobile driver of [his] time," a revenuer once gushed. He was absolutely fearless. One revenue agent later claimed to have caught Seay eight times during his career, but admitted that he had only done so by shooting holes in Seay's tires. A popular story about Seay describes him being pulled over by police. There was whiskey aboard, but the officer fined him $10 for speeding. Seay handed over $20, explaining that he was paying in advance for his return trip. "Maybe you could let me go on through?" he said.

Revenuers liked Seay because he was mostly respectful, polite and even shy. He seemed like a good kid caught up in a dangerous game for which he had a genetic talent. If it had been football instead of bootlegging, Seay would be like the smart kid in class who suddenly found himself quarterback of the football team. Roy Hall, on the other hand, was a born linebacker, bolder and more reckless than angel-faced Lloyd.
Revenue agents came to admire Hall's driving talents as well - one would even call him a driving "genius." But they were also scared to death of the man.

#

For Hall, the trick was to make sure the whiskey was packed tightly in the back. The way he drove, too much sloshing and banging around and he might roll his top-heavy Ford into a ditch. For that very reason, glass fruit jars were not a good container for guys like Hall. Some trippers wrapped the jars tightly in netting or butcher paper but the way Hall drove there was still too much risk of splintered glass and loosed liquor. He preferred the tougher gallon-sized tin cans, packed six per canvas sleeve - an official six-gallon "case." Hall could stack at least twenty cases into his Ford's trunk and back seat.

From Dawsonville south to Cumming was an especially dangerous route. State Highway 9 was all dirt, twisted like a road-kill snake and "hot with law every night," one ex-tripper recalled. Drainage gulches of angry red dirt skulked beside the road; during heavy rains they filled with water and became rivers of orangey chocolate. Tall pines loomed on either side of switchbacks that cut jagged, dark-copper gouges into hillsides.

Hall's tactic was the straight-ahead, no-bullshit approach. At the southern outskirts of town, he mashed the accelerator and avoided the brake pedal. When the curves began, Hall chopped them in half. If a curve bore to the left, he first veered to the far right, just inches from where the roadway dropped off into the pines, then cut hard to the left, hugging tight against the inner arc. That's when the physics got tricky.

A gallon of whiskey, depending on its proof, weighed six pounds; the tin can another two pounds. Hauling 120 gallons was like having four fat guys crammed in the back seat. Do the math: a half ton of booze plus a 3,000-pound Ford plus 80 miles an hour on a 90-degree arcing road, banking left and down, plus an unstable surface of red dirt beneath four wheels ... well, it equaled a Ford that was going to slide into a ditch and explode, unless you knew what you were doing. But that's when Hall shined, and why moonshiners would soon prove themselves to be natural, intuitive racers.

With his hands on the bottom of the steering wheel, Hall would throw himself into the turn, spinning the wheel in toward the curve. When he felt the car begin to slip, he would hit the gas, not the brake, actually accelerating through the turn, with the car moving forward and sideways at the same time. When the rear end began to slide, he would torque the wheel in the same direction; to the right in a left-hand curve, with the rear end sliding to the right. If his split-second timing was dead-on, just before he reached the road's edge and the steep embankment beyond it, the mechanics and geometry and gravity of the moment would all converge in perfect synchronicity. Tires somehow found purchase on the dirt, the momentum of the slide yielded to the forward urging of the engine, and Hall and Ford and whiskey all straightened out and rocketed forward. Until the next curve. Hall burned through many sets of tires in this manner. Said one '30s-era Atlanta mechanic: "He never knew what a brake was." The revenuers simply couldn't keep up. And when they tried, they sometimes wished they hadn't.

One night, two revenue agents spotted a loaded '39 Ford coupe heading south from the town of Tate, toward Atlanta. The agents sped after the coupe, following it through the tight curves of Highway 5. It was a dark night and the coupe was beginning to pull away from the revenuers. The agent behind the wheel wasn't familiar enough with the road and took a sharp curve too fast and spun off the road. The car plowed into a jagged pile of scrap marble that'd been dumped there. One agent was thrown from the car and landed amidst the sharp rocks, one of which struck his head and knocked him out.. The other agent was injured, too, but managed to radio for help, then waited beside his unconscious partner. When backup agents arrived, they said their colleagues were so scratched, bloodied and scabbed that it "looked like they'd been sortin' wildcats."

Hall, meanwhile, crested a hill then plunged down the other side into more "esses," cranking the wheel left-right, left-right. Only after a couple of rolling straightaways gave way to a few road swizzles that dropped into the paved metropolitan reaches of Atlanta did he ease up on the throttle, making sure he'd lost all pursuers before catching his breath and driving more humanely.

The injured revenue agent lay unconscious for the next two days in his hospital bed. On the second day, a huge bouquet of flowers arrived. The accompanying card was simply signed, "The Coupe." They learned later that the flowers had come from their prey, Roy Hall.

#

Pavement and paved speedways were still years away; stock car racing on asphalt wouldn't begin until in 1950, three years after NASCAR's birth. In the late 1930s, the racetracks of the South - like the roads north of Atlanta - were red dirt. Not the loamy, coffee-colored soil typically thought of as "dirt." North Georgia soil was as unique as its citizens. It shined like the color of a new penny; ancient, Martian stuff, thick with clay and tinted deep orangey-red by iron deposits. Racetracks that would soon become moonshiners' stomping grounds were ovals of such redness: two red-dirt straightaways enclosed by four red-dirt turns, each a far lesser version of a Dawsonville-to-Cumming curve, which of course was handled only at night, with half a ton of liquor, and often a gun-toting revenuer close behind.

Future NASCAR racers who, like Hall and Seay, honed their driving skills as whiskey trippers, would later admit that high-speed races on paved ovals were fairly simple feats compared to midnight moonshine runs, that no racetrack could scare them like screaming at 120 miles an hour into the vortex of a red-rutted lane barely wider than a Ford. Men like Hall and Seay may have found peace on such lanes. But for all their innate skills, talent alone couldn't carry them into the racing world. For that, they needed machinery to match their driving abilities. They needed their Ford to perform as flawlessly as themselves. And for that, they needed a wizard.

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