The Last American
Hero
TEN O’CLOCK SUNDAY
MORNING IN THE HILLS OF NORTH Carolina. Cars, miles of cars, in
every direction, millions of cars, pastel cars, aqua green, aqua
blue, aqua beige, aqua buff, aqua dawn, aqua dusk, aqua Malacca,
Malacca lacquer, Cloud lavender, Assassin pink, Rake-a-cheek
raspberry, Nude Strand coral, Honest Thrill orange, and Baby Fawn
Lust cream-colored cars are all going to the stock car races, and
that old mothering North Carolina sun keeps exploding off the
windshields.
Seventeen thousand people, me included,
all of us driving out Route 421, out to the stock car races at the
North Wilkesboro Speedway, 17,000 going out to a five-eighths-mile
stock car track with a Coca-Cola sign out front. This is not to say
there is no preaching and shouting in the South this morning. There
is preaching and shouting. Any of us can turn on the old automobile
transistor radio and get all we want:
“They are greedy dogs. Yeah! They ride
around in big cars. Unnh-hunh! And chase women. Yeah! And drink
liquor. Unnh-hunh! And smoke cigars. Oh yes! And they are greedy
dogs. Yeah! Unh-hunh! Oh yes! Amen!”
There are also some commercials on the
radio for Aunt Jemima grits, which cost ten cents a pound. There
are also the Gospel Harmonettes, singing: “If you dig a ditch, you
better dig two … .”
There are also three fools in a panel
discussion on the New South, which they seem to conceive of as
General Lee running the new Dulcidreme Labial Cream factory down at
Griffin, Georgia.
And suddenly my car is stopped still on
Sunday morning in the middle of the biggest traffic jam in the
history of the world. It goes for ten miles in every direction from
the North Wilkesboro Speedway. And right there it dawns on me that
as far as this situation is concerned, anyway, all the conventional
notions about the South are confined to … the Sunday radio. The
South has preaching and shouting, the South has grits, the South
has country songs, old mimosa traditions, clay dust, Old Bigots,
New Liberals—and all of it, all of that old mental cholesterol, is
confined to the Sunday radio. What I was in the middle of—well, it
wasn’t anything one hears about in panels about the South today.
Miles and miles of eye-busting pastel cars on the expressway, which
roar right up into the hills, going to the stock car races. Fifteen
years of stock car racing, and baseball—and the state of North
Carolina alone used to have forty-four professional baseball
teams—baseball is all over with in the South. We were all in the
middle of a wild new thing, the Southern car world, and heading
down the road on my way to see a breed such as sports never saw
before, Southern stock car drivers, all lined up in these two-ton
mothers that go over 175 m.p.h., Fireball Roberts, Freddie
Lorenzen, Ned Jarrett, Richard Petty, and—the hardest of all the
hard chargers, one of the fastest automobile racing drivers in
history—yes! Junior Johnson.
THE LEGEND OF JUNIOR JOHNSON! IN THIS LEGEND,
HERE IS A country boy, Junior Johnson, who learns to drive by
running whiskey for his father, Johnson, Senior, one of the biggest
copperstill operators of all time, up in Ingle Hollow, near North
Wilkesboro, in northwestern North Carolina, and grows up to be a
famous stock car racing driver, rich, grossing $100,000 in 1963,
for example, respected, solid, idolized in his hometown and
throughout the rural South. There is all this about how good old
boys would wake up in the middle of the night in the apple shacks
and hear a supercharged Oldsmobile engine roaring over Brushy
Mountain and say, “Listen at him—there he goes!” although that part
is doubtful, since some nights there were so many good old boys
taking off down the road in supercharged automobiles out of Wilkes
County, and running loads to Charlotte, Salisbury, Greensboro,
Winston-Salem, High Point, or wherever, it would be pretty hard to
pick out one. It was Junior Johnson specifically, however, who was
famous for the “bootleg turn” or “about-face,” in which, if the
Alcohol Tax agents had a roadblock up for you or were too close
behind, you threw the car up into second gear, cocked the wheel,
stepped on the accelerator and made the car’s rear end skid around
in a complete 180-degree arc, a complete about-face, and tore on
back up the road exactly the way you came from. God! The Alcohol
Tax agents used to burn over Junior Johnson. Practically every good
old boy in town in Wilkesboro, the county seat, got to know the
agents by sight in a very short time. They would rag them
practically to their faces on the subject of Junior Johnson, so
that it got to be an obsession. Finally, one night they had Junior
trapped on the road up toward the bridge around Millersville,
there’s no way out of there, they had the barricades up and they
could hear this souped-up car roaring around the bend, and here it
comes—but suddenly they can hear a siren and see a red light
flashing in the grille, so they think it’s another agent, and boy,
they run out like ants and pull those barrels and boards and
sawhorses out of the way, and
then—Ggghhzzzzzzzhhhhhhggggggzzzzzzzeeeeeong! —gawdam! there he
goes again, it was him, Junior Johnson! with a gawdam agent’s
si-reen and a red light in his grille!
I wasn’t in the South five minutes
before people started making oaths, having visions, telling these
hulking great stories, all on the subject of Junior Johnson. At the
Greensboro, North Carolina, Airport there was one good old boy who
vowed he would have eaten “a bucket of it” if that would have kept
Junior Johnson from switching from a Dodge racer to a Ford. Hell
yes, and after that—God-almighty, remember that 1963 Chevrolet of
Junior’s? Whatever happened to that car? A couple of more good old
boys join in. A good old boy, I ought to explain, is a generic term
in the rural South referring to a man, of any age, but more often
young than not, who fits in with the status system of the region.
It usually means he has a good sense of humor and enjoys ironic
jokes, is tolerant and easygoing enough to get along in long
conversations at places like on the corner, and has a reasonable
amount of physical courage. The term is usually heard in some such
form as: “Lud? He’s a good old boy from over at Crozet.” These good
old boys in the airport, by the way, were in their twenties, except
for one fellow who was a cabdriver and was about forty-five, I
would say. Except for the cabdriver, they all wore neo-Brummellian
clothes such as Lacoste tennis shirts, Slim Jim pants, windbreakers
with the collars turned up, “fast” shoes of the winkle-picker
genre, and so on. I mention these details just by way of pointing
out that very few grits, Iron Boy overalls, clodhoppers or hats
with ventilation holes up near the crown enter into this story.
Anyway, these good old boys are talking about Junior Johnson and
how he has switched to Ford. This they unanimously regard as some
kind of betrayal on Johnson’s part. Ford, it seems, they regard as
the car symbolizing the established power structure. Dodge is kind
of a middle ground. Dodge is at least a challenger, not a ruler.
But the Junior Johnson they like to remember is the Junior Johnson
of 1963, who took on the whole field of NASCAR (National
Association for Stock Car Auto Racing) Grand National racing with a
Chevrolet. All the other drivers, the drivers driving Fords,
Mercurys, Plymouths, Dodges, had millions, literally millions when
it is all added up, millions of dollars in backing from the Ford
and Chrysler Corporations. Junior Johnson took them all on in a
Chevrolet without one cent of backing from Detroit. Chevrolet had
pulled out of stock-car racing. Yet every race it was the same. It
was never a question of whether anybody was going to outrun Junior Johnson. It was just a question of whether
he was going to win or his car was going to break down, since, for
one thing, half the time he had to make his own racing parts. God!
Junior Johnson was like Robin Hood or Jesse James or Little David
or something. Every time that Chevrolet, No. 3, appeared on the
track, wild curdled yells, “Rebel” yells, they still have those,
would rise up. At Daytona, at Atlanta, at Charlotte, at Darlington,
South Carolina; Bristol, Tennessee; Martinsville, Virginia—Junior
Johnson!
And then the good old boys get to
talking about whatever happened to that Chevrolet of Junior’s, and
the cabdriver says he knows. He says Junior Johnson is using that
car to run liquor out of Wilkes County. What does he mean? For
Junior Johnson ever to go near another load of bootleg whiskey
again—he would have to be insane. He has this huge racing income.
He has two other businesses, a whole automated chicken farm with
42,000 chickens, a road-grading business—but the cabdriver says he
has this dream Junior is still roaring down from Wilkes County,
down through the clay cuts, with the Atlas Arc Lip jars full in the
back of that Chevrolet. It is in Junior’s blood—and then at this
point he puts his right hand up in front of him as if he is groping
through fog, and his eyeballs glaze over and he looks out in the
distance and he describes Junior Johnson roaring over the ridges of
Wilkes County as if it is the ghost of Zapata he is describing,
bounding over the Sierras on a white horse to rouse the
peasants.
A stubborn notion! A crazy notion! Yet
Junior Johnson has followers who need to keep him, symbolically,
riding through nighttime like a demon. Madness! But Junior Johnson
is one of the last of those sports stars who are not just aces at
the game itself, but heroes a whole people or class of people can
identify with. Other, older examples are the way Jack Dempsey
stirred up the Irish or the way Joe Louis stirred up the Negroes.
Junior Johnson is a modern figure. He is only thirty-three years
old and still racing. He should be compared to two other sports
heroes whose cultural impact is not too well known. One is Antonino
Rocca, the professional wrestler, whose triumphs mean so much to
New York City’s Puerto Ricans that he can fill Madison Square
Garden, despite the fact that everybody, the Puerto Ricans
included, knows that wrestling is nothing but a crude form of folk
theatre. The other is Ingemar Johansson, who had a tremendous
meaning to the Swedish masses—they were tired of that old king who
played tennis all the time and all his friends who keep on drinking
Cointreau behind the screen of socialism. Junior Johnson is a
modern hero, all involved with car culture and car symbolism in the
South. A wild new thing—
WILD—GONE WILD, FIREBALL ROBERTS’ FORD SPINS
OUT ON the first turn at the North Wilkesboro Speedway, spinning,
spinning, the spin seems almost like slow motion—and then it
smashes into the wooden guardrail. It lies up there with the frame
bent. Roberts is all right. There is a new layer of asphalt on the
track, it is like glass, the cars keep spinning off the first turn.
Ned Jarrett spins, smashes through the wood. “Now, boys, this ice
ain’t gonna get one goddamn bit better, so you can either line up
and qualify or pack up and go home—”
I had driven from the Greensboro
Airport up to Wilkes County to see Junior Johnson on the occasion
of one of the two yearly NASCAR Grand National stock car races at
the North Wilkesboro Speedway.
It is a long, very gradual climb from
Greensboro to Wilkes County. Wilkes County is all hills, ridges,
woods and underbrush, full of pin oaks, sweet-gum maples, ash,
birch, apple trees, rhododendron, rocks, vines, tin roofs, little
clapboard places like the Mount Olive Baptist Church, signs for
things like Double Cola, Sherrill’s Ice Cream, Eckard’s Grocery, Dr
Pepper, Diel’s Apples, Google’s Place, Suddith’s Place
and—yes!—cars. Up onto the highway, out of a side road from a
hollow, here comes a 1947 Hudson. To almost anybody it would look
like just some old piece of junk left over from God knows when,
rolling down a country road … the 1947 Hudson was one of the first
real “hot” cars made after the war. Some of the others were the
1946 Chrysler, which had a “kickdown” gear for sudden bursts of
speed, the 1955 Pontiac and a lot of the Fords. To a great many
good old boys a hot car was a symbol of heating up life itself. The
war! Money even for country boys! And the money bought cars. In
California they suddenly found kids of all sorts involved in vast
drag-racing orgies and couldn’t figure out what was going on. But
in the South the mania for cars was even more intense, although
much less publicized. To millions of good old boys, and girls, the
automobile represented not only liberation from what was still
pretty much a land-bound form of social organization but also a
great leap forward into twentieth-century glamor, an idea that was
being dinned in on the South like everywhere else. It got so that
one of the typical rural sights, in addition to the red rooster,
the gray split-rail fence, the Edgeworth Tobacco sign and the
rusted-out harrow, one of the typical rural sights would be … you
would be driving along the dirt roads and there beside the house
would be an automobile up on blocks or something, with a rope over
the tree for hoisting up the motor or some other heavy part, and a
couple of good old boys would be practically disappearing into its
innards, from below and from above, draped over the side under the
hood. It got so that on Sundays there wouldn’t be a safe straight
stretch of road in the county, because so many wild country boys
would be out racing or just raising hell on the roads. A lot of
other kids, who weren’t basically wild, would be driving like hell
every morning and every night, driving to jobs perhaps thirty or
forty miles away, jobs that were available only because of
automobiles. In the morning they would be driving through the
dapple shadows like madmen. In the hollows, sometimes one would
come upon the most incredible tarpaper hovels, down near the
stream, and out front would be an incredible automobile creation, a
late-model car with aerials, Continental kit overhangs in the back,
mudguards studded with reflectors, fender skirts, spotlights, God
knows what all, with a girl and perhaps a couple of good old boys
communing over it and giving you rotten looks as you drive by. On
Saturday night everybody would drive into town and park under the
lights on the main street and neck. Yes! There was something about
being right in there in town underneath the lights and having them
reflecting off the baked enamel on the hood. Then if a good old boy
insinuated his hands here and there on the front seat with a girl
and began … necking … somehow it was all more complete. After the war there was a great deal of
stout-burgher talk about people who lived in hovels and bought
big-yacht cars to park out front. This was one of the symbols of a
new, spendthrift age. But there was a great deal of unconscious
resentment buried in the talk. It was resentment against (a) the
fact that the good old boy had his money at all and (b) the fact
that the car symbolized freedom, a slightly wild, careening
emancipation from the old social order. Stock-car racing got
started about this time, right after the war, and it was
immediately regarded as some kind of manifestation of the animal
irresponsibility of the lower orders. It had a truly terrible
reputation. It was—well, it looked rowdy or
something. The cars were likely to be used cars, the tracks were
dirt, the stands were rickety wood, the drivers were country boys,
and they had regular feuds out there, putting each other “up
against the wall” and “cutting tires” and everything else. Those
country boys would drive into the curves full tilt, then slide
maniacally, sometimes coming around the curve sideways, with red
dirt showering up. Sometimes they would race at night, under those
weak-eyed yellow-ochre lights they have at small tracks and
baseball fields, and the clay dust would start showering up in the
air, where the evening dew would catch it, and all evening long you
would be sitting in the stands or standing out in the infield with
a fine clay-mud drizzle coming down on you, not that anybody gave a
damn—except for the Southern upper and middle classes, who never
attended in those days, but spoke of the “rowdiness.”
But mainly it was the fact that stock
car racing was something that was welling up out of the lower
orders. From somewhere these country boys and urban proles were
getting the money and starting this hellish sport.
Stock car racing was beginning all over
the country, at places like Allentown, Langhorne, and Lancaster,
Pennsylvania, and out in California and even out on Long Island,
but wherever it cropped up, the Establishment tried to wish it
away, largely, and stock car racing went on in a kind of
underground world of tracks built on cheap stretches of land well
out from the town or the city, a world of diners, drive-ins,
motels, gasoline stations, and the good burghers might drive by
from time to time, happen by on a Sunday or something, and see the
crowd gathered from out of nowhere, the cars coming in, crowding up
the highway a little, but Monday morning they would be all gone,
and all would be as it was.
Stock car racing was building up a
terrific following in the South during the early fifties. Here was
a sport not using any abstract devices, any bat and ball, but the same
automobile that was changing a man’s own life, his own symbol of
liberation, and it didn’t require size, strength and all that, all
it required was a taste for speed, and the guts. The newspapers in
the South didn’t seem to catch onto what was happening until late
in the game. Of course, newspapers all over the country have looked
backward over the tremendous rise in automobile sports, now the
second-biggest type of sport in the country in terms of attendance.
The sports pages generally have an inexorable lower-middle-class
outlook. The sportswriter’s “zest for life” usually amounts, in the
end, to some sort of gruff Mom’s Pie sentimentality at a hideously
cozy bar somewhere. The sportswriters caught onto Grand Prix racing
first because it had “tone,” a touch of defrocked European nobility
about it, what with a few counts racing here and there, although,
in fact, it is the least popular form of racing in the United
States. What finally put stock car racing onto the sports pages in
the South was the intervention of the Detroit automobile firms.
Detroit began putting so much money into the sport that it took on
a kind of massive economic respectability and thereby, in the
lower-middle-class brain, status.
What Detroit discovered was that
thousands of good old boys in the South were starting to form
allegiances to brands of automobiles, according to which were
hottest on the stock car circuits, the way they used to have them
for the hometown baseball team. The South was one of the hottest
car-buying areas in the country. Cars like Hudsons, Oldsmobiles and
Lincolns, not the cheapest automobiles by any means, were selling
in disproportionate numbers in the South, and a lot of young good
old boys were buying them. In 1955, Pontiac started easing into
stock car racing, and suddenly the big surge was on. Everybody
jumped into the sport to grab for themselves The Speed Image.
Suddenly, where a good old boy used to have to bring his gasoline
to the track in old filling-station pails and pour it into the tank
through a funnel when he made a pit stop, and change his tires with
a hand wrench, suddenly, now, he had these “gravity” tanks of
gasoline that you just jam into the gas pipe, and air wrenches to
take the wheels off, and whole crews of men in white coveralls to
leap all over a car when it came rolling into the pit, just like
they do at Indianapolis, as if they are mechanical apparati
merging with the machine as it rolls in,
forcing water into the radiator, jacking up the car, taking off
wheels, wiping off the windshield, handing the driver a cup of
orange juice, all in one synchronized operation. And now, today,
the big money starts descending on this
little place, the North Wilkesboro, North Carolina, Speedway, a
little five-eighths-of-a-mile stock car track with a Coca-Cola sign
out by the highway where the road in starts.
The private planes start landing out at
the Wilkesboro Airport. Freddie Lorenzen, the driver, the biggest
money winner last year in stock car racing, comes sailing in out of
the sky in a twin-engine Aero Commander, and there are a few good
old boys out there in the tall grass by the runway already with
their heads sticking up watching this hero of the modern age come
in and taxi up and get out of that twin-engine airplane with his
blond hair swept back as if by the mother internal combustion
engine of them all. And then Paul Goldsmith, the driver, comes in
in a 310 Cessna, and he gets out, all these
tall, lanky hard-boned Americans in their thirties with these great
profiles like a comic-strip hero or something, and then Glenn
(Fireball) Roberts—Fireball Roberts!—Fireball is hard—he comes in a Comanche 250, like a flying yacht,
and then Ray Nichels and Ray Fox, the chief mechanics, who run big
racing crews for the Chrysler Corporation, this being Fox’s last
race for Junior as his mechanic, before Junior switches over to
Ford, they come in in two-engine planes. And even old Buck
Baker—hell, Buck Baker is a middling driver for Dodge, but even he
comes rolling in down the landing strip at two hundred miles an
hour with his Southern-hero face at the window of the cockpit of a
twin-engine Apache, traveling first class in the big status boat
that has replaced the yacht in America, the private
plane.
And then the Firestone and Goodyear
vans pull in, huge mothers, bringing in huge stacks of racing tires
for the race, big wide ones, 8.20’s, with special treads, which are
like a lot of bumps on the tire instead of grooves. They even have
special tires for qualifying, soft tires, called “gumballs,” they
wouldn’t last more than ten times around the track in a race, but
for qualifying, which is generally three laps, one to pick up speed
and two to race against the clock, they are great, because they
hold tight on the corners. And on a hot day, when somebody like
Junior Johnson, one of the fastest qualifying runners in the
history of the sport, 170.777 m.p.h. in a one-hundred-mile
qualifying race at Daytona in 1964, when somebody like Junior
Johnson really pushes it on a qualifying run, there will be a ring
of blue smoke up over the whole goddamned track, a ring like an
oval halo over the whole thing from the gumballs burning, and some
good old boy will say, “Great smokin’ blue gumballs god almighty
dog! There goes Junior Johnson!”
The thing is, each one of these tires
costs fifty-five to sixty dollars, and on a track that is fast and
hard on tires, like Atlanta, one car might go through ten complete
tire changes, easily, forty tires, or almost $2500 worth of tires
just for one race. And he may even be out of the money. And then
the Ford van and the Dodge van and the Mercury van and the Plymouth
van roll in with new motors, a whole new motor every few races, a
427-cubic-inch stock-car racing motor, 600 horsepower, the largest
and most powerful allowed on the track, that probably costs the
company $1000 or more, when you consider that they are not mass
produced. And still the advertising appeal. You can buy the very
same car that these fabulous wild men drive every week at these
fabulous wild speeds, and some of their power and charisma is
yours. After every NASCAR Grand National stock car race, whichever
company has the car that wins, this company will put big ads in the
Southern papers, and papers all over the country if it is a very
big race, like the Daytona 500, the Daytona Firecracker 400 or the
Atlanta and Charlotte races. They sell a certain number of these
427-cubic-inch cars to the general public, a couple of hundred a
year, perhaps, at eight or nine thousand dollars apiece, but it is
no secret that these motors are specially reworked just for stock
car racing. Down at Charlotte there is a company called Holman
& Moody that is supposed to be the “garage” or
“automotive-engineering” concern that prepares automobiles for
Freddy Lorenzen and some of the other Ford drivers. But if you go
by Holman & Moody out by the airport and Charlotte, suddenly
you come upon a huge place that is a factory, for godsake, a big long thing, devoted mainly
to the business of turning out stock car racers. A whole lot of
other parts in stock car racers are heavier than the same parts on
a street automobile, although they are made to the same scale. The
shock absorbers are bigger, the wheels are wider and bulkier, the
swaybars and steering mechanisms are heavier, the axles are much
heavier, they have double sets of wheel bearings, and so forth and
so on. The bodies of the cars are pretty much the same, except that
they use lighter sheet metal, practically tinfoil. Inside, there is
only the driver’s seat and a heavy set of roll bars and diagonal
struts that turn the inside of the car into a rigid cage, actually.
That is why the drivers can walk away unhurt—most of the time—from
the most spectacular crackups. The gearshift is the floor kind,
although it doesn’t make much difference, as there is almost no
shifting gears in stock-car racing. You just get into high gear and
go. The dashboard has no speedometer, the main thing being the dial
for engine revolutions per minute. So, anyway, it costs about
$15,000 to prepare a stock car racer in the first place and another
three or four thousand for each new race and this does not even
count the costs of mechanics’ work and transportation. All in all,
Detroit will throw around a quarter of a million dollars into it
every week while the season is on, and the season runs, roughly,
from February to October, with a few big races after that. And all
this turns up even out at the North Wilkesboro Speedway in the
up-country of Wilkes County, North Carolina.
Sunday! Racing day! There is the
Coca-Cola sign out where the road leads in from the highway, and
hills and trees, but here are long concrete grandstands for about
17,000 and a paved five-eighths-mile oval. Practically all the
drivers are out there with their cars and their crews, a lot of
guys in white coveralls. The cars look huge … and curiously nude
and blind. All the chrome is stripped off, except for the grilles.
The headlights are blanked out. Most of the cars are in the pits.
The so-called pit is a paved cutoff on the edge of the infield. It
cuts off from the track itself like a service road off an
expressway at the shopping center. Every now and then a car
splutters, hacks, coughs, hocks a lunga, rumbles out onto the track
itself for a practice run. There is a lot of esoteric conversation
going on, speculation, worries, memoirs:
“What happened?”
“Mother—condensed on me. Al brought it
up here with him. Water in the line.”
“Better keep Al away from a stable,
he’ll fill you up with horse manure.”
“ … they told me to give him one, a
creampuff, so I give him one, a creampuff. One goddam race and the
son of a bitch, he melted it …
.”
“ … he’s down there right now pettin’
and rubbin’ and huggin’ that car just like those guys do a horse at
the Kentucky Derby … .”
“ … They’ll blow you right out of the
tub … .”
“ … No, the quarter inch, and go on
over and see if you can get Ned’s blowtorch … .”
“ … Rear end’s loose … .”
“ … I don’t reckon this right here’s
got nothing to do with it, do you? …”
“ … Aw, I don’t know, about yea big …
.”
“ … Who the hell stacked them gumballs
on the bottom? …”
“ … th’owing rocks … .” .
“ … won’t turn seven thousand …
.”
“ … strokin’ it … .”
“ … blistered … .”
“ … spun out … .”
“ … muvva … .”
Then, finally, here comes Junior
Johnson. How he does come on. He comes tooling across the infield
in a big white dreamboat, a brand-new white Pontiac Catalina
four-door hard-top sedan. He pulls up and as he gets out he seems
to get more and more huge. First his crew-cut head and then a big
jaw and then a bigger neck and then a huge torso, like a
wrestler’s, all done up rather modish and California modern, with a
red-and-white candy-striped sport shirt, white ducks and
loafers.
“How you doing?” says Junior Johnson,
shaking hands, and then he says, “Hot enough for
ye’uns?”
Junior is in an amiable mood. Like most
up-hollow people, it turns out, Junior is reserved. His face seldom
shows an emotion. He has three basic looks: amiable, amiable and a
little shy, and dead serious. To a lot of people, apparently,
Junior’s dead-serious look seems menacing. There are no cowards
left in stock car racing, but a couple of drivers tell me that one
of the things that can shake you up is to look into your rear-view
mirror going around a curve and see Junior Johnson’s car on your
tail trying to “root you out of the groove,” and then get a glimpse
of Junior’s dead-serious look. I think some of the sportswriters
are afraid of him. One of them tells me Junior is strong,
silent—and explosive. Junior will only give you three answers,
“Uh-huh,” “Uh-unh,” and “I don’t know,” and so forth and so on.
Actually, I found he handles questions easily. He has a great
technical knowledge of automobiles and the physics of speed,
including things he never fools with, such as Offenhauser engines.
What he never does offer, however, is small talk. This gives him a
built-in poise, since it deprives him of the chance to say anything
asinine. “Ye’uns,” “we’uns,” “H’it” for “it,” “growed” for “grew”
and a lot of other unusual past participles—Junior uses certain
older forms of English, not exactly “Elizabethan,” as they are
sometimes called, but older forms of English preserved up-country
in his territory, Ingle Hollow.
Kids keep coming up for Junior’s
autograph and others are just hanging around and one little old boy
comes up, he is about thirteen, and Junior says: “This boy here
goes coon hunting with me.”
One of the sportswriters is standing
around, saying: “What do you shoot a coon with?”
“Don’t shoot ’em. The dogs tree ’em and
then you flush ’em out and the dogs fight ’em.”
“Flush ’em out?”
“Yeah. This boy right here can flush
’em out better than anybody you ever did see. You go out at night
with the dogs, and soon as they get the scent, they start barking.
They go on out ahead of you and when they tree a coon, you can tell
it, by the way they sound. They all start baying up at that
coon—h’it sounds like, I don’t know, you hear it once and you not
likely to forget it. Then you send a little old boy up to flush him
out and he jumps down and the dogs fight him.”
“How does a boy flush him
out?”
“Aw, he just climbs up there to the
limb he’s on and starts shaking h’it and the coon’ll
jump.”
“What happens if the coon decides he’d
rather come back after the boy instead of jumping down to a bunch
of dogs?”
“He won’t do that. A coon’s afraid of a
person, but he can kill a dog. A coon can take any dog you set
against him if they’s just the two of them fighting. The coon jumps
down on the ground and he rolls right over on his back with his
feet up, and he’s got claws about like this.
All he has to do is get a dog once in the throat or in the belly,
and he can kill him, cut him wide open just like you took a knife
and did it. Won’t any dog even fight a coon except a coon
dog.”
“What kind of dogs are
they?”
“Coon dogs, I
guess. Black and tans they call ’em sometimes. They’s bred for it.
If his mammy and pappy wasn’t coon dogs, he ain’t likely to be one
either. After you got one, you got to train him. You trap a coon,
live, and then you put him in a pen and tie him to a post with a
rope on him and then you put your dog in there and he has to fight
him. Sometimes you get a dog just don’t have any fight in him and
he ain’t no good to you.”
Junior is in the pit area, standing
around with his brother Fred, who is part of his crew, and Ray Fox
and some other good old boys, in a general atmosphere of big stock
car money, a big ramp truck for his car, a white Dodge, number 3, a
big crew in white coveralls, huge stacks of racing tires, a Dodge
P.R. man, big portable cans of gasoline, compressed air hoses,
compressed water hoses, the whole business. Herb Nab, Freddie
Lorenzen’s chief mechanic, comes over and sits down on his haunches
and Junior sits down on his haunches and Nab says:
“So Junior Johnson’s going to drive a
Ford.”
Junior is switching from Dodge to Ford
mainly because he hasn’t been winning with the Dodge. Lorenzen
drives a Ford, too, and the last year, when Junior was driving the
Chevrolet, their duels were the biggest excitement in stock car
racing.
“Well,” says Nab, “I’ll tell you,
Junior. My ambition is going to be to outrun your ass every
goddamned time we go out.”
“That was your ambition last year,”
says Junior.
“I know it was,” says Nab, “and you
took all the money, didn’t you? You know what my strategy was. I
was going to outrun everybody else and outlast Junior, that was my
strategy.”
Setting off his California modern sport
shirt and white ducks Junior has on a pair of twenty-dollar rimless
sunglasses and a big gold Timex watch, and Flossie, his fiancée, is
out there in the infield somewhere with the white Pontiac, and the
white Dodge that Dodge gave Junior is parked up near the pit
area—and then a little thing happens that brings the whole thing
right back there to Wilkes County, North Carolina, to Ingle Hollow
and to hard muscle in the clay gulches. A couple of good old boys
come down to the front of the stands with the screen and the width
of the track between them and Junior, and one of the good old boys
comes down and yells out in the age-old baritone raw-curdle yell of
the Southern hills:
“Hey! Hog jaw!”
Everybody gets quiet. They know he’s
yelling at Junior, but nobody says a thing. Junior doesn’t even
turn around.
“Hey, hog jaw! …”
Junior, he does nothing.
“Hey, hog jaw, I’m gonna get me one of
them fastback roosters, too, and come down there and get
you!”
Fastback rooster refers to the Ford—it
has a “fastback” design—Junior is switching to.
“Hey, hog jaw, I’m gonna get me one of
them fastback roosters and run you right out of here, you hear me,
hog jaw!”
One of the good old boys alongside
Junior says, “Junior, go on up there and clear out those
stands.”
Then everybody stares at Junior to see
what he’s gonna do. Junior, he don’t even look around. He just
looks a bit dead serious.
“Hey, hog jaw, you got six cases of
whiskey in the back of that car you want to let me
have?”
“What you hauling in that car, hog
jaw!”
“Tell him you’re out of that business,
Junior,” one of the good old boys says.
“Go on up there and clean house,
Junior,” says another good old boy.
Then Junior looks up, without looking
at the stands, and smiles a little and says, “You flush him down
here out of that tree—and I’ll take keer of him.”
Such a howl goes up from the good old
boys! It is almost a blood curdle—
“Goddam, he will, too!”
“Lord, he better know how to do an
about-face hissef if he comes down
here!”
“Goddam, get him, Junior!”
“Whooeeee!”
“Mother dog!”
—a kind of orgy of reminiscence of the
old Junior before the Detroit money started flowing, wild
combats d’honneur up-hollow—and, suddenly,
when he heard that unearthly baying coming up from the good old
boys in the pits, the good old boy retreated from the edge of the
stands and never came back.
Later on Junior told me, sort of
apologetically, “H’it used to be, if a fellow crowded me just a
little bit, I was ready to crawl him. I reckon that was one good
thing about Chillicothe.
“I don’t want to pull any more time,”
Junior tells me, “but I wouldn’t take anything in the world for the
experience I had in prison. If a man needed to change, that was the
place to change. H‘it’s not a waste of time there, h’it’s good
experience.
“H‘it’s that they’s so many people in
the world that feel that nobody is going to tell them what to do. I
had quite a temper, I reckon. I always had the idea that I had as
much sense as the other person and I didn’t want them to tell me
what to do. In the penitentiary there I found out that I could
listen to another fellow and be told what to do and h’it wouldn’t
kill me.”
Starting time! Linda Vaughn, with the
big blonde hair and blossomy breasts, puts down her Coca-Cola and
the potato chips and slips off her red stretch pants and her white
blouse and walks out of the officials’ booth in her Rake-a-cheek
red show-girl’s costume with her long honeydew legs in net
stockings and climbs up on the red Firebird float. The Life Symbol
of stock car racing! Yes! Linda, every, luscious morsel of Linda,
is a good old girl from Atlanta who was made Miss Atlanta
International Raceway one year and was paraded around the track on
a float and she liked it so much and all the good old boys liked it
so much, Linda’s flowing hair and blossomy breasts and honeydew
legs, that she became the permanent glamor symbol of stock car
racing, and never mind this other modeling she was doing … this,
she liked it. Right before practically every race on the Grand
National circuit Linda Vaughn puts down her Coca-Cola and potato
chips. Her momma is there, she generally comes around to see Linda
go around the track on the float, it’s such a nice spectacle seeing
Linda looking so lovely, and the applause and all. “Linda, I’m
thirstin’, would you bring me a Coca-Cola?” “A lot of them think
I’m Freddie Lorenzen’s girl friend, but I’m not any of ’em’s girl
friend, I’m real good friends with ’em all, even Wendell,” he being
Wendell Scott, the only Negro in big-league stock-car racing. Linda
gets up on the Firebird float. This is an extraordinary object,
made of wood, about twenty feet tall, in the shape of a huge bird,
an eagle or something, blazing red, and Linda, with her red
show-girl’s suit on, gets up on the seat, which is up between the
wings, like a saddle, high enough so her long honeydew legs stretch
down, and a new car pulls her—Miss Fire-bird! —slowly once around
the track just before the race. It is more of a ceremony by now
than the national anthem. Miss Fire-bird sails slowly in front of
the stands and the good old boys let out some real curdle Rebel
yells, “Yaaaaaaaaaaaaghhhhoooooo! Let me at that car!” “Honey, you
sure do start my motor, I swear to God!” “Great God and
Poonadingdong, I mean!”
And suddenly there’s a big roar from
behind, down in the infield, and then I see one of the great sights
in stock car racing. That infield! The cars have been piling into
the infield by the hundreds, parking in there on the clay and the
grass, every which way, angled down and angled up, this way and
that, where the ground is uneven, these beautiful blazing brand-new
cars with the sun exploding off the windshields and the baked
enamel and the glassy lacquer, hundreds, thousands of cars stacked
this way and that in the infield with the sun bolting down and no
shade, none at all, just a couple of Coca-Cola stands out there.
And already the good old boys and girls are out beside the cars,
with all these beautiful little buds in short shorts already
spread-eagled out on top of the car roofs, pressing down on good
hard slick automobile sheet metal, their little cupcake bottoms
aimed up at the sun. The good old boys are lollygagging around with
their shirts off and straw hats on that have miniature beer cans on
the brims and buttons that read, “Girls Wanted—No Experience
Required.” And everybody, good old boys and girls of all ages, are
out there with portable charcoal barbecue ovens set up, and folding
tubular steel terrace furniture, deck chairs and things, and
Thermos jugs and coolers full of beer—and suddenly it is not the
up-country South at all but a concentration of the modern suburbs,
all jammed into that one space, from all over America, with blazing
cars and instant goodies, all cooking under the bare blaze—inside a
strange bowl. The infield is like the bottom of a bowl. The track
around it is banked so steeply at the corners and even on the
straightaways, it is like the steep sides of a bowl. The wall
around the track, and the stands and the bleachers are like the rim
of a bowl. And from the infield, in this great incredible press of
blazing new cars, there is no horizon but the bowl, up above only
that cobalt-blue North Carolina sky. And then suddenly, on a
signal, thirty stock car engines start up where they are lined up
in front of the stands. The roar of these engines is impossible to
describe. They have a simultaneous rasp, thunder and rumble that
goes right through a body and fills the whole bowl with a noise of
internal combustion. Then they start around on two build-up runs,
just to build up speed, and then they come around the fourth turn
and onto the straightaway in front of the stands at—here, 130 miles
an hour, in Atlanta, 160 miles an hour, at Daytona, 180 miles an
hour—and the flag goes down and everybody in the infield and in the
stands is up on their feet going mad, and suddenly here is a bowl
that is one great orgy of everything in the way of excitement and
liberation the automobile has meant to Americans. An
orgy!
The first lap of a stock car race is a
horrendous, a wildly horrendous spectacle such as no other sport
approaches. Twenty, thirty, forty automobiles, each of them
weighing almost two tons, 3700 pounds, with 427-cubic-inch engines,
600 horsepower, are practically locked together, side to side and
tail to nose, on a narrow band of asphalt at 130, 160, 180 miles an
hour, hitting the curves so hard the rubber burns off the tires in
front of your eyes. To the driver, it is like being inside a car
going down the West Side Highway in New York City at rush hour,
only with everybody going literally three to four times as fast, at
speeds a man who has gone eighty-five miles an hour down a highway
cannot conceive of, and with every other driver an enemy who is
willing to cut inside of you, around you or in front of you, or
ricochet off your side in the battle to get into a curve
first.
The speeds are faster than those in the
Indianapolis 500 race, the cars are more powerful and much heavier.
The prize money in Southern stock car racing is far greater than
that in Indianapolis-style or European Grand Prix racing, but few
Indianapolis or Grand Prix drivers have the raw nerve required to
succeed at it. ‘
Although they will deny it, it is still
true that stock car drivers will put each other “up against the
wait”—cut inside on the left of another car and ram it into a
spin—if they get mad enough. Crashes are not the only danger,
however. The cars are now literally too fast for their own parts,
especially the tires. Firestone and Goodyear have poured millions
into stock car racing, but neither they nor anybody so far have
been able to come up with a tire for this kind of racing at the
current speeds. Three well-known stock car drivers were killed last
year, two of them champion drivers, Joe Weatherly and Fireball
Roberts, and another, one of the best new drivers, Jimmy Pardue,
from Junior Johnson’s own home territory, Wilkes County, North
Carolina. Roberts was the only one killed in a crash. Junior
Johnson was in the crash but was not injured. Weatherly and Pardue
both lost control on curves. Pardue’s death came during a tire
test. In a tire test, engineers from Firestone or Goodyear try out
various tires on a car, and the driver, always one of the top
competitors, tests them at top speed, usually on the Atlanta track.
The drivers are paid three dollars a mile and may drive as much as
five or six hundred miles in a single day. At 145 miles an hour
average that does not take very long. Anyway, these drivers are
going at speeds that, on curves, can tear tires off their casings
or break axles. They practically run off from over their own
wheels.
JUNIOR JOHNSON WAS OVER IN THE GARDEN BY THE
HOUSE some years ago, plowing the garden barefooted, behind a mule,
just wearing an old pair of overalls, when a couple of good old
boys drove up and told him to come on up to the speedway and get in
a stock car race. They wanted some local boys to race, as a
preliminary to the main race, “as a kind of side show,” as Junior
remembers it.
“So I just put the reins down,” Junior
is telling me, “and rode on over ‘ere with them. They didn’t give
us seat belts or nothing, they just roped us in. H’it was a dirt
track then. I come in second.”
Junior was a sensation in dirt-track
racing right from the start. Instead of going into the curves and
just sliding and holding on for dear life like the other drivers,
Junior developed the technique of throwing himself into a slide
about seventy-five feet before the curve by cocking the wheel to
the left slightly and gunning it, using the slide, not the brake,
to slow down, so that he could pick up speed again halfway through
the curve and come out of it like a shot. This was known as his
“power slide,” and—yes! of course!—every good old boy in North
Carolina started saying Junior Johnson had learned that stunt doing
those goddamned about-faces running away
from the Alcohol Tax agents. Junior put on such a show one night on
a dirt track in Charlotte that he broke two axles, and he thought
he was out of the race because he didn’t have any more axles, when
a good old boy came running up out of the infield and said,
“Goddamn it, Junior Johnson, you take the axle off my car here, I
got a Pontiac just like yours,” and Junior took it off and put it
on his and went out and broke it too. Mother
dog! To this day Junior Johnson loves dirt-track racing like
nothing else in this world, even though there is not much money in
it. Every year he sets new dirt-track speed records, such as at
Hickory, North Carolina, one of the most popular dirt tracks, last
spring. As far as Junior is concerned, dirt-track racing is not so
much of a mechanical test for the car as those long five- and
six-hundred-mile races on asphalt are. Gasoline, tire and engine
wear aren’t so much of a problem. It is all the driver, his skill,
his courage—his willingness to mix it up with the other cars, smash
and carom off of them at a hundred miles an hour or so to get into
the curves first. Junior has a lot of fond recollections of mixing
it up at places like Bowman Gray Stadium in Winston-Salem, one of
the minor league tracks, a very narrow track, hardly wide enough
for two cars. “You could always figure Bowman Gray was gonna cost
you two fenders, two doors and two quarter panels,” Junior tells me
with nostalgia.
Anyway, at Hickory, which was a
Saturday night race, all the good old boys started pouring into the
stands before sundown, so they wouldn’t miss anything, the practice
runs or the qualifying or anything. And pretty soon, the dew hasn’t
even started falling before Junior Johnson and David Pearson, one
of Dodge’s best drivers, are out there on practice runs, just
warming up, and they happen to come up alongside each other on the
second curve, and—the thing is, here are two men, each of them
driving $15,000 automobiles, each of them standing to make $50,000
to $100,000 for the season if they don’t get themselves killed, and
they meet on a curve on a goddamned practice run on a dirt track,
and neither of them can resist it. Coming out of the turn they go
into a wild-ass race down the backstretch, both of them trying to
get into the third turn first, and all the way across the infield
you can hear them ricocheting off each other and bouncing at a
hundred miles an hour on loose dirt, and then they go into
ferocious power slides, red dust all over the goddamned place, and
then out of this goddamned red-dust cloud, out of the fourth turn,
here comes Junior Johnson first, like a shot, with Pearson right on
his tail, and the good old boys in the stands going wild, and the
qualifying runs haven’t started yet, let
alone the race.
Junior worked his way up through the
minor leagues, the Sportsman and Modified classifications, as they
are called, winning championships in both, and won his first Grand
National race, the big leagues, in 1955 at Hickory, on dirt. He was
becoming known as “the hardest of the hard-chargers,” power
sliding, rooting them out of the groove, raising hell, and already
the Junior Johnson legend was beginning.
He kept hard-charging, power sliding,
going after other drivers as though there wasn’t room on the track
but for one, and became the most popular driver in stock-car racing
by 1959. The presence of Detroit and Detroit’s big money had begun
to calm the drivers down a little. Detroit was concerned about
Image. The last great duel of the dying dog-eat-dog era of stock
car racing came in 1959, when Junior and Lee Petty, who was then
leading the league in points, had it out on the Charlotte raceway.
Junior was in the lead, and Petty was right on his tail, but
couldn’t get by Junior. Junior kept coming out of the curves
faster. So every chance he got, Petty would get up right on
Junior’s rear bumper and start banging it, gradually forcing the
fender in to where the metal would cut Junior’s rear tire. With
only a few laps to go, Junior had a blowout and spun out up against
the guardrail. That is Junior’s version. Petty claimed Junior hit a
pop bottle and spun out. The fans in Charlotte were always throwing
pop bottles and other stuff onto the track late in the race,
looking for blood. In any case, Junior eased back into the pits,
had the tire changed, and charged out after Petty. He caught him on
a curve and—well, whatever really happened, Petty was suddenly “up
against the wall” and out of the race, and Junior won.
What a howl went up. The Charlotte
chief of police charged out onto the track after the race,
according to Petty, and offered to have Junior arrested for
“assault with a dangerous weapon,” the hassling went on for
weeks—
“Back then,” Junior tells me, “when you
got into a guy and racked him up, you might as well get ready,
because he’s coming back for you. H’it was dog eat dog. That
straightened Lee Petty out right smart. They don’t do stuff like
that anymore, though, because the guys don’t stand for
it.”
Anyway, the Junior Johnson legend kept
building up and building up, and in 1960 it got hotter than ever
when Junior won the biggest race of the year, the Daytona 500, by
discovering a new technique called “drafting.” That year stock car
racing was full of big powerful Pontiacs manned by top drivers, and
they would go like nothing else anybody ever saw. Junior went down
to Daytona with a Chevrolet.
“My car was about ten miles an hour
slower than the rest of the cars, the Pontiacs,” Junior tells me.
“In the preliminary races, the warmups and stuff like that, they
was smoking me off the track. Then I remember once I went out for a
practice run, and Fireball Roberts was out there in a Pontiac and I
got in right behind him on a curve, right on his bumper. I knew I
couldn’t stay with him on the straightaway, but I came out of the
curve fast, right in behind him, running flat out, and then I
noticed a funny thing. As long as I stayed right in behind him, I
noticed I picked up speed and stayed right with him and my car was
going faster than it had ever gone before. I could tell on the
tachometer. My car wasn’t turning no more than 6000 before, but
when I got into this drafting position, I was turning 6800 to 7000.
H’it felt like the car was plumb off the ground, floating
along.”
“Drafting,” it was discovered at
Daytona, created a vacuum behind the lead car and both cars would
go faster than they normally would. Junior “hitched rides” on the
Pontiacs most of the afternoon, but was still second to Bobby
Johns, the lead Pontiac. Then, late in the race, Johns got into a
drafting position with a fellow Pontiac that was actually one lap
behind him and the vacuum got so intense that the rear window blew
out of Johns’ car and he spun out and crashed and Junior
won.
This made Junior the Lion Killer, the
Little David of stock car racing, and his performance in the 1963
season made him even more so.
Junior raced for Chevrolet at Daytona
in February, 1963, and set the all-time stock car speed record in a
hundred-mile qualifying race, 164.083 miles an hour, twenty-one
miles an hour faster than Parnelli Jones’s winning time at
Indianapolis that year. Junior topped that at Daytona in July of
1963, qualifying at 166.005 miles per hour in a five-mile run, the
fastest that anyone had ever averaged that distance in a racing car
of any type. Junior’s Chevrolet lasted only twenty-six laps in the
Daytona 500 in 1963, however. He went out with a broken push rod.
Although Chevrolet announced they were pulling out of racing at
this time, Junior took his car and started out on the wildest
performance in the history of stock car racing. Chevrolet wouldn’t
give him a cent of backing. They wouldn’t even speak to him on the
telephone. Half the time he had to have his own parts made.
Plymouth, Mercury, Dodge and Ford, meantime, were pouring more
money than ever into stock car racing. Yet Junior won seven Grand
National races out of the thirty-three he entered and led most
others before mechanical trouble forced him out.
All the while, Junior was making record
qualifying runs, year after year. In the usual type of qualifying
run, a driver has the track to himself and makes two circuits, with
the driver with the fastest average time getting the “pole”
position for the start of the race. In a way this presents stock
car danger in its purest form. Driving a stock car does not require
much handling ability, at least not as compared to Grand Prix
racing, because the tracks are simple banked ovals and there is
almost no shifting of gears. So qualifying becomes a test of raw
nerve—of how fast a man is willing to take a curve. Many of the top
drivers in competition are poor at qualifying. In effect, they are
willing to calculate their risks only against the risks the other
drivers are taking. Junior takes the pure risk as no other driver
has ever taken it.
“Pure” risk or total risk, whichever,
Indianapolis and Grand Prix drivers have seldom been willing to
face the challenge of Southern stock car drivers. A. J. Foyt, last
year’s winner at Indianapolis, is one exception. He has raced
against the Southerners and beaten them. Parnelli Jones has tried
and fared badly. Driving “Southern style” has a quality that shakes
a man up. The Southerners went on a tour of northern tracks last
fall. They raced at Bridgehampton, New York, and went into the
corners so hard the marshals stationed at each corner kept radioing
frantically to the control booth: “They’re going off the track.
They’re all going off the track!”
BUT THIS, JUNIOR JOHNSON’S LAST RACE IN A
DODGE, WAS NOT his day, neither for qualifying nor racing. Lorenzen
took the lead early and won the 250-mile race a lap ahead of the
field. Junior finished third, but was never in contention for the
lead.
“COME ON, JUNIOR, DO MY HAND—”
Two or three hundred people come out of
the stands and up out of the infield and onto the track to be
around Junior Johnson. Junior is signing autographs in a neat
left-handed script he has. It looks like it came right out of the
Locker book. The girls! Levi’s, stretch pants, sneaky shorts,
stretch jeans, they press into the crowd with lively narbs and try
to get their hands up in front of Junior and say:
“Come on, Junior, do my
hand!”
In order to do a hand, Junior has to
hold the girl’s hand in his right hand and then sign his name with
a ball-point on the back of her hand.
“Junior, you got to do mine,
too!”
“Put it on up here.”
All the girls break into … smiles.
Junior Johnson does a hand. Ah, sweet little cigarette-ad blonde!
She says:
“Junior, why don’t you ever call me
up?”
“I ‘spect you get plenty of calls
’thout me.”
“Oh, Junior! You call me up, you hear
now?”
But also a great many older people
crowd in, and they say:
“Junior, you’re doing a real good job
out there, you’re driving real good.”
“Junior, when you get in that Ford, I
want to see you pass that Freddie Lorenzen, you hear
now?”
“Junior, you like that Ford better than
that Dodge?” And:
“Junior, here’s a young man that’s been
waiting some time and wanting to see you—” and the man lifts up his
little boy in the middle of the crowd and says: “I told you you’d
see Junior Johnson. This here’s Junior Johnson!”
The boy has a souvenir racing helmet on
his head. He stares at Junior through a buttery face. Junior signs
the program he has in his hand, and then the boy’s mother
says:
“Junior, I tell you right now, he’s
beside you all the way. He can’t be moved.”
And then:
“Junior, I want you to meet the meanest
little girl in Wilkes County.”
“She don’t look mean to
me.”
Junior keeps signing autographs and
over by the pits the other kids are all over his car, the Dodge.
They start pulling off the decals, the ones saying Holly Farms
Poultry and Autolite and God knows whatall. They fight over the
strips, the shreds of decal, as if they were totems.
All this homage to Junior Johnson lasts
about forty minutes. He must be signing about 250 autographs, but
he is not a happy man. By and by the crowd is thinning out, the sun
is going down, wind is blowing the Coca-Cola cups around, all one
can hear, mostly, is a stock car engine starting up every now and
then as somebody drives it up onto a truck or something, and Junior
looks around and says:
“I’d rather lead one lap and fall out
of the race than stroke it and finish in the money.”
“Stroking it” is driving carefully in
hopes of outlasting faster and more reckless cars. The opposite of
stroking it is “hard-charging.” Then Junior says:
“I hate to get whipped up here in
Wilkes County, North Carolina.”
Wilkes County, North Carolina! Who was
it tried to pin the name on Wilkes County, “The bootleg capital of
America”? This fellow Vance Packard. But just a minute …
.
The night after the race Junior and his
fiancée, Flossie Clark, and myself went into North Wilkesboro to
have dinner. Junior and Flossie came by Lowes Motel and picked us
up in the dreamboat white Pontiac. Flossie is a bright, attractive
woman, zaftig, well-organized. She and
Junior have been going together since they were in high school.
They are going to get married as soon as Junior gets his new house
built. Flossie has been doing the decor. Junior Johnson, in the
second-highest income bracket in the United States for the past
five years, is moving out of his father’s white frame house in
Ingle Hollow at last. About three hundred yards down the road.
Overlooking a lot of good green land and Anderson’s grocery. Junior
shows me through the house, it is almost finished, and when we get
to the front door, I ask him, “How much of this land is
yours?”
Junior looks around for a minute, and
then back up the hill, up past his three automated chicken houses,
and then down into the hollow over the pasture where his $3100
Santa Gertrudis bull is grazing, and then he says:
“Everything that’s green is
mine.”
Junior Johnson’s house is going to be
one of the handsomest homes in Wilkes County. Yes. And—such
complicated problems of class and status. Junior is not only a
legendary figure as a backwoods boy with guts who made good, he is
also popular personally, he is still a good old boy, rich as he is.
He is also respected for the sound and sober way he has invested
his money. He also has one of the best business connections in
town, Holly Farms Poultry. What complicates it is that half the
county, anyway, reveres him as the greatest, most fabled night-road
driver in the history of Southern bootlegging. There is hardly a
living soul in the hollows who can conjure up two seconds’ honest
moral indignation over “the whiskey business.” That is what they
call it, “the whiskey business.” The fact is, it has some positive
political overtones, sort of like the I.R.A. in Ireland. The other
half of the county—well, North Wilkesboro itself is a prosperous,
good-looking town of 5000, where a lot of hearty modern business
burghers are making money the modern way, like everywhere else in
the U.S.A., in things like banking, poultry processing, furniture,
mirror, and carpet manufacture, apple growing, and so forth and so
on. And one thing these men are tired of is Wilkes County’s
reputation as a center of moonshining. The U.S. Alcohol and Tobacco
Tax agents sit over there in Wilkesboro, right next to North
Wilkesboro, year in and year out, and they have been there since
God knows when, like an Institution in the land, and every day that
they are there, it is like a sign saying, Moonshine County. And
even that is not so bad—it has nothing to do
with it being immoral and only a little to do with it being
illegal. The real thing is, it is—raw and hillbilly. And one thing
thriving modern Industry is not is hillbilly. And one thing the
burghers of North Wilkesboro are not about to be is hillbilly. They
have split-level homes that would knock your eyes out. Also
swimming pools, white Buick Snatchwagons, flagstone terrasse-porches enclosed with louvered glass that opens
wide in the summertime, and built-in brick barbecue pits and they
give parties where they wear Bermuda shorts and Jax stretch pants
and serve rum collins and play twist and bossa nova records on the
hi-fi and tell Shaggy Dog jokes about strange people ordering
martinis. Moonshining … just a minute—the truth is, North
Wilkesboro … .
So we are all having dinner at one of
the fine new restaurants in North Wilkesboro, a place of suburban
plate-glass elegance. The manager knows Junior and gives us the
best table in the place and comes over and talks to Junior a while
about the race. A couple of men get up and come over and get
Junior’s autograph to take home to their sons and so forth. Then
toward the end of the meal a couple of North Wilkesboro businessmen
come over (“Junior, how are you, Junior. You think you’re going to
like that fast-backed Ford?”) and Junior introduces them to
me.
“You’re not going to do like that
fellow Vance Packard did, are you?”
“Vance Packard?”
“Yeah, I think it was Vance Packard
wrote it. He wrote an article and called Wilkes County the bootleg
capital of America. Don’t pull any of that stuff. I think it was in
American magazine. The bootleg capital of America. Don’t pull any
of that stuff on us.”
I looked over at Junior and Flossie.
Neither one of them said anything. They didn’t even change their
expressions.
THE NEXT MORNING I MET JUNIOR DOWN IN INGLE
HOLLOW at Anderson’s Store. That’s about fifteen miles out of North
Wilkesboro on County Road No. 2400. Junior is known in a lot of
Southern newspapers as “the wild man from Ronda” or “the
lead-footed chicken farmer from Ronda,” but Ronda is only his
post-office-box address. His telephone exchange, with the Wilkes
Telephone Membership Corporation, is Clingman, North Carolina, and
that isn’t really where he lives either. Where he lives is just
Ingle Hollow, and one of the communal centers of Ingle Hollow is
Anderson’s Store. Anderson’s is not exactly a grocery store. Out
front there are two gasoline pumps under an overhanging roof.
Inside there are a lot of things like a soda-pop cooler filled with
ice, Coca-Colas, Nehi drinks, Dr Pepper, Double Cola, and a gumball
machine, a lot of racks of Red Man chewing tobacco, Price’s potato
chips, OKay peanuts, cloth hats for working outdoors in, dried
sausages, cigarettes, canned goods, a little bit of meal and flour,
fly swatters, and I don’t know what all. Inside and outside of
Anderson’s there are good old boys. The young ones tend to be
inside, talking, and the old ones tend to be outside, sitting under
the roof by the gasoline pumps, talking. And on both sides, cars;
most of them new and pastel.
Junior drives up and gets out and looks
up over the door where there is a row of twelve coon tails. Junior
says:
“Two of them gone, ain’t
they?”
One of the good old boys says, “Yeah,”
and sighs.
A pause, and the other one says,
“Somebody stole ’em.”
Then the first one says, “Junior, that
dog of yours ever come back?”
Junior says, “Not yet.”
The second good old boy says, “You
looking for her to come back?”
Junior says, “I reckon she’ll come
back.”
The good old boy says, “I had a coon
dog went off like that. They don’t ever come back. I went out ‘ere
one day, back over yonder, and there he was, cut right from here to
here. I swear if it don’t look like a coon got him. Something. H’it
must of turned him every way but loose.”
Junior goes inside and gets a Coca-Cola
and rings up the till himself, like everybody who goes into
Anderson’s does, it seems like. It is dead quiet in the hollow
except for every now and then a car grinds over the dirt road and
down the way. One coon dog missing. But he still has a lot of the
black and tans, named Rock … .
… ROCK, WHITEY, RED, BUSTER ARE IN THE PEN OUT
BACK OF the Johnson house, the old frame house. They have scars all
over their faces from fighting coons. Gypsy has one huge gash in
her back from fighting something. A red rooster crosses the lawn.
That’s a big rooster. Shirley, one of Junior’s two younger sisters,
pretty girls, is out by the fence in shorts, pulling weeds. Annie
May is inside the house with Mrs. Johnson. Shirley has the radio
outside on the porch aimed at her, The Four Seasons! “Dawn!—ahhhh,
ahhhhh, ahhhhhh!” Then a lot of electronic wheeps and lulus and a
screaming disc jockey, yessss! WTOB, the Vibrant Mothering Voice of
Winston-Salem, North Carolina. It sounds like WABC in New York.
Junior’s mother, Mrs. Johnson, is a big, good-natured woman. She
comes out and says, “Did you ever see anything like that in your
life? Pullin’ weeds listenin’ to the radio.” Junior’s father,
Robert Glenn Johnson, Sr.—he built this frame house about
thirty-five years ago, up here where the gravel road ends and the
woods starts. The road just peters out into the woods up a hill.
The house has a living room, four bedrooms and a big kitchen. The
living room is full of Junior’s racing trophies, and so is the
piano in Shirley’s room. Junior was born and raised here with his
older brothers, L. P., the oldest, and Fred, and his older sister,
Ruth. Over yonder, up by that house, there’s a man with a mule and
a little plow. That’s L. P. The Johnsons still keep that old mule
around to plow the vegetable gardens. And all around, on all sides,
like a rim are the ridges and the woods. Well, what about those
woods, where Vance Packard said the agents come stealing over the
ridges and good old boys go crashing through the underbrush to get
away from the still and the women start “calling the cows” up and
down the hollows as the signal they were
coming. …
Junior motions his hand out toward the
hills and says, “I’d say nearly everybody in a fifty-mile radius of
here was in the whiskey business at one time or another. When we
growed up here, everybody seemed to be more or less messing with
whiskey, and myself and my two brothers did quite a bit of
transporting. H‘it was just a business, like any other business,
far as we was concerned. H’it was a matter of survival. During the
Depression here, people either had to do that or starve to death.
H‘it wasn’t no gangster type of business or nothing. They’s nobody
that ever messed with it here that was ever out to hurt anybody.
Even if they got caught, they never tried to shoot anybody or
anything like that. Getting caught and pulling time, that was just
part of it. H’it was just a business, like any other business. Me
and my brothers, when we went out on the road at night, h’it was
just like a milk run, far as we was concerned. They was certain
deliveries to be made and … .”
A milk run—yes! Well, it was a
business, all right. In fact, it was a regional industry, all up
and down the Appalachian slopes. But never mind the Depression. It
goes back a long way before that. The Scotch-Irish settled the
mountains from Pennsylvania down to Alabama, and they have been
making whiskey out there as long as anybody can remember. At first
it was a simple matter of economics. The land had a low crop yield,
compared to the lowlands, and even after a man struggled to grow
his corn, or whatever, the cost of transporting it to the markets
from down out of the hills was so great, it wasn’t worth it. It was
much more profitable to convert the corn into whiskey and sell
that. The trouble started with the Federal Government on that score
almost the moment the Republic was founded. Alexander Hamilton put
a high excise tax on whiskey in 1791, almost as soon as the
Constitution was ratified. The “Whiskey Rebellion” broke out in the
mountains of western Pennsylvania in 1794. The farmers were mad as
hell over the tax. Fifteen thousand Federal troops marched out to
the mountains and suppressed them. Almost at once, however, the
trouble over the whiskey tax became a symbol of something bigger.
This was a general enmity between the western and eastern sections
of practically every seaboard state. Part of it was political. The
eastern sections tended to control the legislatures, the economy
and the law courts, and the western sections felt shortchanged.
Part of it was cultural. Life in the western sections was rougher.
Religions, codes and styles of life were sterner. Life in the
eastern capitals seemed to give off the odor of Europe and
decadence. Shays’ Rebellion broke out in the Berkshire hills of
western Massachusetts in 1786 in an attempt to shake off the yoke
of Boston, which seemed as bad as George Ill’s. To this day people
in western Massachusetts make proposals, earnestly or with
down-in-the-mouth humor, that they all ought to split off from
“Boston.” Whiskey—the mountain people went right on making it.
Whole sections of the Appalachians were a whiskey belt, just as
sections of Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi were a cotton belt.
Nobody on either side ever had any moral delusions about why the
Federal Government was against it. It was always the tax, pure and
simple. Today the price of liquor is 60 per cent tax. Today, of
course, with everybody gone wild over the subject of science and
health, it has been much easier for the Federals to persuade people
that they crack down on moonshine whiskey because it is dangerous,
it poisons, kills and blinds people. The statistics are usually
specious.
Moonshining was illegal, however, that was also the unvarnished truth.
And that had a side effect in the whiskey belt. The people there
were already isolated, geographically, by the mountains and had
strong clan ties because they were all from the same stock,
Scotch-Irish. Moonshining isolated them even more. They always had
to be careful who came up there. There are plenty of hollows to
this day where if you drive in and ask some good old boy where
so-and-so is, he’ll tell you he never heard of the fellow. Then the
next minute, if you identify yourself and give some idea of why you
want to see him, and he believes you, he’ll suddenly say, “Aw,
you’re talking about so-and-so. I thought
you said—” With all this isolation, the mountain people began to
take on certain characteristics normally associated, by the
diffident civilizations of today, with tribes. There was a strong
sense of family, clan and honor. People would cut and shoot each
other up over honor. And physical courage! They were almost like
Turks that way.
In the Korean War, there were
seventy-eight Medal of Honor winners. Thirty-two of them were from
the South, and practically all of the thirty-two were from small
towns in or near the Appalachians. The New York metropolitan area,
which has more people than all these towns put together, had three
Medal of Honor winners, and one of them had just moved to New York
from the Appalachian region of West Virginia. Three of the Medal of
Honor winners came from within fifty miles of Junior Johnson’s side
porch.
Detroit has discovered these pockets of
courage, almost like a natural resource, in the form of Junior
Johnson and about twenty other drivers. There is something
exquisitely ironic about it. Detroit is now engaged in the highly
sophisticated business of offering the illusion of Speed for
Everyman—making their cars go 175 miles an hour on racetracks—by
discovering and putting behind the wheel a breed of mountain men
who are living vestiges of a degree of physical courage that became
extinct in most other sections of the country by 1900. Of course,
very few stock car drivers have ever had anything to do with the
whiskey business. A great many always led quiet lives off the
track. But it is the same strong people among whom the whiskey
business developed who produced the kind of men who could drive the
stock cars. There are a few exceptions, Freddie Lorenzen, from
Elmhurst, Illinois, being the most notable. But, by and large, it
is the rural Southern code of honor and courage that has produced
these, the most daring men in sports.
CARS AND BRAVERY! THE MOUNTAIN-STILL OPERATORS
HAD been running white liquor with hopped-up automobiles all during
the thirties. But it was during the war that the business was so
hot out of Wilkes County, down to Charlotte, High Point,
Greensboro, Winston-Salem, Salisbury, places like that; a night’s
run, by one car, would bring anywhere from $500 to $1000. People
had money all of a sudden. One car could carry twenty-two to
twenty-five cases of white liquor. There were twelve half-gallon
fruit jars full per case, so each load would have 132 gallons or
more. It would sell to the distributor in the city for about ten
dollars a gallon, when the market was good, of which the driver
would get two dollars, as much as $300 for the night’s
work.
The usual arrangement in the
white-liquor industry was for the elders to design the distillery,
supervise the formulas and the whole distilling process and take
care of the business end of the operation. The young men did the
heavy work, carrying the copper and other heavy goods out into the
woods, building the still, hauling in fuel—and driving. Junior and
his older brothers, L. P. and Fred, worked that way with their
father, Robert Glenn Johnson, Sr.
Johnson, Senior, was one of the biggest
individual copper-still operators in the area. The fourth time he
was arrested, the agents found a small fortune in working corn mash
bubbling in the vats.
“My Daddy was always a hard worker,”
Junior is telling me. “He always wanted something a little bit
better. A lot of people resented that and held that against him,
but what he got, he always got h‘it by hard work. There ain’t no
harder work in the world than making whiskey. I don’t know of any
other business that compels you to get up at all times of night and
go outdoors in the snow and everything else and work. H’it’s the
hardest way in the world to make a living, and I don’t think
anybody’d do it unless they had to.”
Working mash wouldn’t wait for a man.
It started coming to a head when it got ready to and a man had to
be there to take it off, out there in the woods, in the brush, in
the brambles, in the muck, in the snow. Wouldn’t it have been
something if you could have just set it all up inside a good old
shed with a corrugated metal roof and order those parts like you
want them and not have to smuggle all that copper and all that
sugar and all that everything out here in the woods and be a
coppersmith and a plumber and a copper and a carpenter and a pack
horse and every other goddamned thing God ever saw in this world,
all at once.
And live decent hours—Junior and his
brothers, about two o’clock in the morning they’d head out to the
stash, the place where the liquor was hidden after it was made.
Sometimes it would be somebody’s house or an old shed or some place
just out in the woods, and they’d make their arrangements out
there, what the route was and who was getting how much liquor.
There wasn’t anything ever written down. Everything was cash on the
spot. Different drivers liked to make the run at different times,
but Junior and his brother always liked to start out from 3 to 4
A.M. But it got so no matter when you started out you didn’t have
those roads to yourself.
“Some guys liked one time and some guys
liked another time,” Junior is saying, “but starting about midnight
they’d be coming out of the woods from every direction. Some nights
the whole road was full of bootleggers. It got so some nights
they’d be somebody following you going just as fast as you were and
you didn’t know who h’it was, the law or somebody else hauling
whiskey.”
And it was just a business, like any
other business, just like a milk route—but this funny thing was
happening. In those wild-ass times, with the money flush and good
old boys from all over the country running that white liquor down
the road ninety miles an hour and more than that if you try to
crowd them a little bit—well, the funny thing was, it got to be
competitive in an almost aesthetic, a pure sporting way. The way
the good old boys got to hopping up their automobiles—it got to be
a science practically. Everybody was looking to build a car faster
than anybody ever had before. They practically got into industrial
espionage over it. They’d come up behind one another on those
wild-ass nights on the highway, roaring, through the black gulches
between the clay cuts and the trees, pretending like they were
officers, just to challenge them, test them out, race …
pour le sport, you mothers, careening
through the darkness, old Carolina moon. All these cars were
registered in phony names. If a man had to abandon one, they would
find license plates that traced back to … nobody at all. It wasn’t
anything, particularly, to go down to the Motor Vehicle Bureau and
get some license plates, as long as you paid your money. Of course,
it’s rougher now, with compulsory insurance. You have to have your
insurance before you can get your license plates, and that leads to
a lot of complications. Junior doesn’t know what they do about that
now. Anyway, all these cars with the magnificent engines were plain
on the outside, so they wouldn’t attract attention, but they
couldn’t disguise them altogether. They were jacked up a little in
the back and had 8.00 or 8.20 tires, for the heavy loads, and the
sound—
“They wasn’t no way you could make it
sound like an ordinary car,” says Junior.
God-almighty, that sound in the middle
of the night, groaning, roaring, humming down into the hollows,
through the clay gulches—yes! And all over the rural South, hell,
all over the South, the legends of wild-driving whiskey running got
started. And it wasn’t just the plain excitement of it. It was
something deeper, the symbolism. It brought into a modern focus the
whole business, one and a half centuries old, of the country
people’s rebellion against the Federals, against the seaboard
establishment, their independence, their defiance of the outside
world. And it was like a mythology for that and for something else
that was happening, the whole wild thing of the car as the symbol
of liberation in the postwar South.
“They was out about every night,
patrolling, the agents and the State Police was,” Junior is saying,
“but they seldom caught anybody. H‘it was like the dogs chasing the
fox. The dogs can’t catch a fox, he’ll just take ’em around in a
circle all night long. I was never caught for transporting. We
never lost but one car and the axle broke on h’it.”
The fox and the dogs! Whiskey running
certainly had a crazy gamelike quality about it, considering that a
boy might be sent up for two years or more if he were caught
transporting. But these boys were just wild enough for that. There
got to be a code about the chase. In Wilkes County nobody, neither
the good old boys nor the agents, ever did anything that was going
to hurt the other side physically. There was supposed to be some
parts of the South where the boys used smoke screens and tack
buckets. They had attachments in the rear of the cars, and if the
agents got too close they would let loose a smoke screen to blind
them or a slew of tacks to make them blow a tire. But nobody in
Wilkes County ever did that because that was a good way for
somebody to get killed. Part of it was that whenever an agent did
get killed in the South, whole hordes of agents would come in from
Washington and pretty soon they would be tramping along the ridges
practically inch by inch, smoking out the stills. But mainly it
was—well, the code. If you got caught, you went along peaceably,
and the agents never used their guns. There were some tense times.
Once was when the agents started using tack belts in Iredell
County. This was a long strip of leather studded with nails that
the agents would lay across the road in the dark. A man couldn’t
see it until it was too late and he stood a good chance of getting
killed if it got his tires and spun him out. The other was the time
the State Police put a roadblock down there at that damned bridge
at Millersville to catch a couple of escaped convicts. Well, a
couple of good old boys rode up with a load, and there was the
roadblock and they were already on the bridge, so they jumped out
and dove into the water. The police saw two men jump out of their
car and dive in the water, so they opened fire and they shot one
good old boy in the backside. As they pulled him out, he kept
saying:
“What did you have to shoot at me for?
What did you have to shoot at me for?”
It wasn’t pain, it wasn’t anguish, it
wasn’t anger. It was consternation. The bastards had broken the
code.
Then the Federals started getting radio
cars.
“The radios didn’t do them any good,”
Junior says. “As soon as the officers got radios, then they got radios. They’d go out and get the same radio.
H’it was an awful hard thing for them to radio them down. They’d
just listen in on the radio and see where they’re setting up the
roadblocks and go a different way.”
And such different ways. The good old
boys knew back roads, dirt roads, up people’s backlanes and every
which way, and an agent would have to live in the North Carolina
hills a lifetime to get to know them. There wasn’t hardly a stretch
of road on any of the routes where a good old boy couldn’t duck off
the road and into the backcountry if he had to. They had wild
detours around practically every town and every intersection in the
region. And for tight spots—the legendary devices, the “bootleg
slide,” the siren and the red light … .
It was just a matter of keeping up with
the competition. You always have to have the latest equipment. It
was a business thing, like any other business, you have to stay on
top—“They was some guys who was more dependable, they done a better
job”—and it may have been business to Junior, but it wasn’t
business to a generation of good old boys growing up all over the
South. The Wilkes County bootleg cars started picking up popular
names in a kind of folk hero worship—“The Black Ghost,” “The Grey
Ghost,” which were two of Junior’s, “Old Mother Goose,” “The
Midnight Traveler,” “Old Faithful.”
And then one day in 1955 some agents
snuck over the ridges and caught Junior Johnson at his daddy’s
still. Junior Johnson, the man couldn’t anybody catch!
The arrest caught Junior just as he was
ready to really take off in his career as a stock car driver.
Junior says he hadn’t been in the whiskey business in any shape or
form, hadn’t run a load of whiskey for two or three years, when he
was arrested. He says he didn’t need to fool around with running
whiskey after he got into stock car racing, he was making enough
money at that. He was just out there at the still helping his Daddy
with some of the heavy labor, there wasn’t a good old boy in Ingle
Hollow who wouldn’t help his daddy lug those big old cords of ash
wood, it doesn’t give off much smoke, out in the woods. Junior was
sentenced to two years in the Federal reformatory in Chillicothe,
Ohio.
“If the law felt I should have gone to
jail, that’s fine and dandy,” Junior tells me. “But I don’t think
the true facts of the case justified the sentence I got. I never
had been arrested in my life. I think they was punishing me for the
past. People get a kick out of it because the officers can’t catch
somebody, and this angers them. Soon as I started getting publicity
for racing, they started making it real hot for my family. I was
out of the whiskey business, and they knew that, but they was just
waiting to catch me on something. I got out after serving ten
months and three days of the sentence, but h‘it was two or three
years I was set back, about half of ’fifty-six and every bit of
‘fifty-seven. H’it takes a year to really get back into h’it after
something like that. I think I lost the prime of my racing career.
I feel that if I had been given the chance I feel I was due, rather
than the sentence I got, my life would have got a real
boost.”
But, if anything, the arrest only made
the Junior Johnson legend hotter.
And all the while Detroit kept edging
the speeds up, from 150 m.p.h. in 1960 to 155 to 165 to 175 to 180
flat out on the longest straightaway, and the good old boys of
Southern stock car racing stuck right with it. Any speed Detroit
would give them they would take right with them into the curve,
hard-charging even though they began to feel strange things such as
the rubber starting to pull right off the tire casing. And God!
Good old boys from all over the South roared together after the
Stanchion—Speed! Guts!—pouring into Birmingham, Daytona Beach,
Randleman, North Carolina; Spartanburg, South Carolina;
Weaverville, Hillsboro, North Carolina; Atlanta, Hickory, Bristol,
Tennessee; Augusta, Georgia; Richmond, Virginia; Asheville, North
Carolina; Charlotte, Myrtle Beach—tens of thousands of them. And
still upper- and middle-class America, even in the South, keeps its
eyes averted. Who cares! They kept on heading out where we all
live, after all, out amongst the Drive-ins, white-enameled filling
stations, concrete aprons, shopping-plaza apothecaries, show-window
steak houses, Burger-Ramas, Bar-B-Cubicles and Miami
aqua-swimming-pool motor inns, on out the highway … even outside a
town like Darlington, a town of 10,000 souls, God, here they come,
down route 52, up 401, on 340, 151 and 34, on through the South
Carolina lespedeza fields. By Friday night already the good old
boys are pulling the infield of the Darlington raceway with those
blazing pastel dreamboats stacked this way and that on the clay
flat and the tubular terrace furniture and the sleeping bags and
the Thermos jugs and the brown whiskey bottles coming on out. By
Sunday—the race!—there are 65,000 piled into the racetrack at
Darlington. The sheriff, as always, sets up the jail right there in
the infield. No use trying to haul them out of there. And now—the
sound rises up inside the raceway, and a
good old boy named Ralph goes mad and starts selling chances on his
Dodge. Twenty-five cents and you can take the sledge he has and
smash his car anywhere you want. How they roar when the windshield
breaks! The police could interfere, you know, but they are busy
chasing a good old girl who is playing Lady Godiva on a hogbacked
motorcycle, naked as sin, hauling around and in and out of the clay
ruts.
Eyes averted, happy burghers. On Monday
the ads start appearing—for Ford, for Plymouth, for
Dodge—announcing that we gave it to you, speed such as you never
saw. There it was! At Darlington, Daytona, Atlanta—and not merely
in the Southern papers but in the albino pages of the suburban
women’s magazines, such as The New Yorker,
in color—the Ford winners, such as Fireball Roberts, grinning with
a cigar in his mouth in The New Yorker
magazine. And somewhere, some Monday morning, Jim Pascal of High
Point, Ned Jarrett of Boykin, Cale Yarborough of Timmonsville and
Curtis Crider from Charlotte, Bobby Isaac of Catawba, E. J.
Trivette of Deep Gap, Richard Petty of Randleman, Tiny Lund of
Cross, South Carolina; Stick Elliott of Shelby—and from out of
Ingle Hollow—
And all the while, standing by in full
Shy, in alumicron suits—there is Detroit, hardly able to believe
itself what it has discovered, a breed of good old boys from the
fastnesses of the Appalachian hills and flats—a handful from this
rare breed—who have given Detroit … speed … and the industry can
present it to a whole generation as … yours. And the Detroit P.R.
men themselves come to the tracks like folk worshipers and the
millions go giddy with the thrill of speed. Only Junior Johnson
goes about it as if it were … the usual. Junior goes on down to
Atlanta for the Dixie 400 and drops by the Federal penitentiary to
see his Daddy. His Daddy is in on his fifth illegal distillery
conviction; in the whiskey business that’s just part of it; an able
craftsman, an able businessman, and the law kept hounding him, that
was all. So Junior drops by and then goes on out to the track and
gets in his new Ford and sets the qualifying speed record for
Atlanta Dixie 400, 146.301 m.p.h.; later on he tools on back up the
road to Ingle Hollow to tend to the automatic chicken houses and
the road-grading operation. Yes.
Yet how can you tell that to … anybody
… out on the bottom of that bowl as the motor thunder begins to
lift up through him like a sigh and his eyeballs glaze over and his
hands reach up and there, riding the rim of the bowl, soaring over
the ridges, is Junior’s yellow Ford … which is his white Chevrolet
… which is a White Ghost, forever rousing the good old boys …
hard-charging! … up with the automobile into their America, and the
hell with arteriosclerotic old boys trying to hold on to the whole
pot with arms of cotton seersucker. Junior!