The Purple Decades - a Reader, Page 6

  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 blonde 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 goddamn 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 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 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 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.”r />
  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!”