Appalachian History

Neal Thompson, author of Driving with the Devil: Southern Moonshine, Detroit Wheels, and the Birth of NASCAR, read at the 2008 Carolina Literary Festival over in Burnsville, NC this past weekend. We caught up with Neal to get a quick overview of the wild world of early moonshiners and stock car drivers.

Appalachian History: Could stock car racing as we understand it have emerged from, say, New England, the Midwest, or California, or is there some specific Southern cultural attribute(s) that is indelibly connected with it?

Neal Thompson: I'd argue strongly that the varied mix of elements that led to the creation of stock car racing could only have occurred in the South. Just one example is the lack of professional sports and spectator sports in the South, which didn't get it's first true professional sports team until the Braves moved to Atlanta in the 1960s. That meant people were hungry for a sport like stock car racing to attend on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon, to root for their favorite driver, a sport to call their own.

Also, the deep roots of the southern moonshining culture are directly responsible for the sport, since so many of the early racers (and mechanics, and financial backers) were moonshiners. As I explore in the book, the Northeast and Midwest and West Coast had their own forms of racing, mainly open-wheel, Indy-style racing. But stock car racing was a truly southern creation, and that's why it remained a 'southern sport' for so long.

AH: During Prohibition, moonshiners were using souped up cars to outrun police. When do we first see a transition from that use to organized races?

NT: It's hard to pin down an exact transition point, but I've focused in the book on the period of the mid-1930s. That's when bootleggers began racing each other on makeshift racetracks, to see who had the fastest whiskey car. And that's when stock car racing as a spectator sport began to emerge and to spread, a phenomenon that coincides with the advent and spread of Ford V-8s (introduced by Ford in 1932), which became the favorite car of both the moonshine runners and the first twenty years of stock car racers.

The V-8 coupe, for example, was a big, sturdy, reliable car with a roomy trunk to hold plenty of liquor, but it was also relatively easy for mechanics to tinker with - and to make it run faster than Henry Ford intended it to. When fans then got a look at those V-8s roaring around a dusty track, a new sport was born.

AH: Raymond Parks was neither a driver nor a mechanic. What was his role in promoting stock car racing?

NT: Raymond's role in the creation of the sport that became NASCAR is so crucial that it has always amazed me that more has not been written about the man. Although, I've recently learning that when the new NASCAR hall of fame opens in 2010, there will be a special display that honors the sport's five founding fathers, including Raymond and two other characters in the book - Red Byron and Red Vogt. Each of them (and, of course, Bill France) played an important role during those critical early years. But Raymond's role was hugely important.

Not only did he create the first stock car racing "team" before WWII (with two moonshining cousins driving, and Red Vogt as the mechanic, and Raymond as the financier), but he replicated that successful "team" approach after WWII and put together the threesome that won NASCAR's first championship in 1948 (and again in 1949). He also let Bill France drive his cars now and then, and a few times loaned Big Bill money when he needed cash to pay drivers at the end of a poorly attended race.

AH: Early stock cars were all Fords: Ford Model As, then Ford Model Ts, then Ford V-8s. That changed after WWII. What happened?

NT: After the war the nation's automakers got back up and running and Ford's competitors finally began to produce cars that could compete - on the road and on the racetrack - with Ford's V-8s. Within just a few years after the war, the Ford would lose its long-running dominance.

AH: How did 'Big Bill' France outmaneuver Parks & Red Vogt (who coined the name NASCAR) for control of the organization?

NT: A lot of people would argue that Bill Bill "stole" NASCAR from the other co-founders. And it's true that he did nudge aside his friends, including Raymond Parks and Red Vogt, and took control of the organization - and it's shares - right from the start. At the same time, however, no one else was really interested in taking over the business side of the sport - the book keeping and money managing, etc. Mainly, they just wanted to race. So Big Bill, in many views, did what had to be done for the sport to survive, even if he was a bit of a bully about it.

AH: What competition did the NASCAR organization face from other racing leagues?

NT: I found it fascinating that AAA, the organization that now does roadside assistance and promotes safety, was once a race promotion organization. But they got out of the business in the 1950s, as did other groups that were vying for dominance of stock car racing, and ever since around 1955 NASCAR has been the dominant force in the sport.

AH: Thanks so much for joining us today!



appalachia Bill+France NASCAR Neal+Thompson Raymond+Parks stock+car+racing moonshining appalachian+history appalachian+mountains+history

During the July 27, 1941 race at the Daytona Beach-Road Course he suffered a crushed chest, broken pelvis, head and back injuries, and severe shock. He raced his two brothers and his sister in the July 10, 1949 race at the same course, the only NASCAR event to feature four siblings. And years later, after all the track dust settled, he died on July 15, 1972. You could say July tended to be an eventful month for NASCAR pioneer Truman Fontell "Fonty" Flock.

The Ft. Payne, AL native delivered moonshine as a teenager on his bicycle, and a few years later he was making trips in his car from Atlanta to Dawsonville, GA hauling moonshine. Fonty once said that he would seek out the sheriff and get him on a chase because he had a faster car. Fonty would send off to California and get the best parts for his car and the sheriff couldn't keep up with him and loved to tease him. The sheriff didn't have the sources to get the parts to make his car keep up with Fonty's.

He ran some of the semi-organized races before World War II broke out, winning a 100-mile race at Lakewood Park in Atlanta in 1940. By the time he was 20 in 1941, Flock was regarded as one of stock car racing's best drivers. After running the dirt tracks in Georgia for a couple of years he made his way to Daytona Beach, Florida searching for the high speed excitement of the Beach-Road courses.

He got plenty of it and more in the July 27, 1941 race mentioned above, where he landed the pole position alongside Roy Hall. Flock took a narrow lead in the opening lap, but the relentless Hall was nipping at his heel all the way down the long but narrow blacktop backstretch. As the pair wheeled into the South turn, the cars banged together. Flock's Ford darted to the high side of the corner, climbed the outer edge of the track and spiraled end-over-end and side-over-side into a clump of palmetto bushes. The seat belt had snapped in one of the early turnovers and Flock's limp body was flopping around inside the car. Flock was rushed by ambulance, to the Medical Center in Daytona Beach. He lived, barely.

Five months after Fonty's wreck the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and auto racing was banned until 1945. Fonty missed the 1945 and 1946 seasons because of his injuries and the '47 season was well under way when he was healed enough to race again. Despite the late start he was crowned the champion of the 1947 National Championship Stock Car Circuit, the forerunner to NASCAR. He finished second in the 1948 NASCAR standings and won the 1949 Modified title. Flock won 34 races in a few more than 100 starts.

During the early 1950s, Flock drove mostly in Grand National events. He finished second in the point standings in 1951, fourth in 1952, fifth in 1953, and tenth in 1955. Fonty quit NASCAR early in the 1954 season and campaigned in a Midwestern stock car series. He returned to NASCAR in 1955 and won three races, including a March 26, 1955 event that gave Chevrolet its first NASCAR Winston Cup victory in a 200-lap, 100-mile dirt-track race at Columbia (S.C.) Speedway.

He had established an insurance agency in Nashville and raced only part-time beginning in 1954.

In 1957 he entered only the beach-road race at Daytona, though he also drove in the Darlington 500 as relief for Herb Thomas, who'd been injured in a practice crash. The car was in bad shape: it blew a tire on the sixth lap and got hit by two other cars. On the 28th lap, the car escaped his control and spun at the entrance of turn three. Split seconds later, Bobby Myers and Paul Goldsmith smashed full-bore into the idle Flock. Flock and Goldsmith were seriously hurt. Bobby Myers was killed instantly. Flock announced his retirement from a hospital bed.

Fonty Flock was inducted into both the Georgia Automobile Racing Hall of Fame Association and the Talladega-Texaco Walk of Fame in 2004.


Sources: www.gonascargo.com/drivers/fonty-flock.php
www.decadesofracing.net/FontyFlock.htm
http://entertainment.howstuffworks.com/fonty-flock.htm
www.legendsofnascar.com/Fonty_Flock.htm
www.livinglegendsofautoracing.com/drivers_pages/drivers_flock.html


Fonty+Flock NASCAR Ft.+Payne+AL appalachia appalachian+history appalachian+mountains+history