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How a Group of Daring Bootleggers Created NASCAR
Moonshine money fueled the sport’s rise.
BY TOVE DANOVICH JANUARY 23, 2019
How a Group of Daring Bootleggers Created NASCAR

Joe Littlejohn's racecar (No. 7) is seen outside “Little Joe’s” tavern
in the late-1930s. ISC IMAGES & ARCHIVES/GETTY IMAGES
1,262
It was a two-man job. Bill Blair Sr., in a ‘39 Ford loaded with white
liquor, hung back, while his friend Elmer sped down winding North
Carolina roads as though he was riding the devil’s horse. “Agents would
get after Elmer and chase him,” says Bill Blair, who inherited Blair
Sr.’s name and love for racing. “My daddy would come down the road with nothing to bother him.”

The agents were from what’s now known as ATF: the Bureau of Alcohol,
Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives. But on this occasion, Elmer hesitated
at a fork. Instead of picking left or right, he slid into a maple tree. According to Blair, Elmer shimmied out the window and hid. The agents,
who assumed he’d run for the tree line, started shooting. “Daddy rolled
up and he saw all that and slowed,” says Blair. “Elmer came out of that tree like a squirrel, opened the door, hopped in, and said ‘Let’s get
out of here!’”

They had 40 miles to go and were weighed down by 120 gallons of white
liquor. The ATF caught up to Blair Sr., inching next to them on the
backroads. So the haulers tapped the government vehicle off the road and
kept driving until they came to a row of cabins along the Dan River. The hideouts, Blair says, were big enough to drive inside, then put the
doors down behind you.

This is one of many stories Blair grew up hearing from his father about
his moonshining days. While the story, like many family legends, is
difficult to verify, it fits with many other accounts. The
almost-friendly rivalry between cops and bootleggers was such that the
Atlanta police were quoted as calling moonshiner Roy Hall a “genius at
the wheel” because of his ability to outrun the law.

A moonshine car racing at Greensboro Fairgrounds, North Carolina.
COURTESY OF BILL BLAIR
Blair’s father started hauling moonshine in 1932, trying to liven up his dairy farm life in High Point, North Carolina. According to his father,
he was “born to be hung.” Blair Sr. was a gearhead, a moonshiner, and a pool shark, and like so many trippers who raced illegal liquor from the
swamps and forests of North Carolina to cities and mill towns, he was
getting all the education he needed to become a stockcar driver.

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The stakes of these races against the law were high, but many early
NASCAR drivers got their start tripping whiskey down dirt roads in the
South. While NASCAR downplayed it for generations, these are the sport’s roots. Names like Junior Johnson or Lloyd Seay are almost as synonymous
with NASCAR as they are with white lightning and bootlegging.

Most people associate moonshine with Prohibition, but Americans have
been making booze in the backwoods since there was a tax man come to
collect on it. The United States wasn’t even a decade out of the Revolutionary War before Alexander Hamilton proposed a tax on domestic spirits—in other words, whiskey. Many farmers living near the
Appalachian Mountains converted extra grain into spirits, and they hated
the tax so much that they tarred and feathered collectors. President
Washington had to send 13,000 troops to quell the rebellion.

Officially, the rebellion collapsed. But people continued making
moonshine in the Appalachians. As more and more states prohibited
alcohol in the 1900s—a prelude to national Prohibition in 1920—it was
old hat for families who had been selling boozy wares tax-free for
generations. “Most people in rural areas didn’t see [making moonshine]
as illegal,” says Daniel S. Pierce, author of Real NASCAR, a book about
the origins of the sport. “It was a violation of federal law, but that didn’t count.”

A moonshine still confiscated by the Internal Revenue Bureau,
photographed at the Treasury Department.

In the early days, moonshine was sold locally, to friends and family;
Pierce says it’s unlikely that people moved moonshine more than 20 or 30 miles by wagon. It might have remained a small, lawless enterprise if Prohibition hadn’t coincided with the advent of mass-produced
automobiles. Bootleggers replaced 40 gallon stills with stills that
could hold up to 1,000 gallons and hid them in Appalachia’s mountains, swamps, and thick forests. The local geography lent itself to secrecy
and speed. No matter how swampy the terrain, there was usually a road
nearby which led to customers. By 1934, Neal Thompson writes in Driving
with the Devil, as many as 35 million gallons of moonshine were produced nationwide.

Blair Sr. was just one of many young men whose love of cars and thrills
got illicit booze into customers’ hands. While he and Elmer partnered to
draw the ATF away from the real cargo, others turned off their lights
and drove in the dark along lonely and jagged side roads. Moonshiner
Smokey Purser used disguises from wearing a priest’s collar to writing “fresh Florida fish” on the side of his vehicle and throwing in some
dead fish for good measure, Daniel S. Pierce writes in Real NASCAR.
Trippers drove Ford V-8s, often modified with additional springs to keep contraband-loaded cars from sinking so low they tipped off authorities,
and learned maneuvers like the “bootleg turn,” a high-speed dance of
breaks and gears that turned the car 180 degrees.

“Moonshiners put more time, energy, thought, and love into their cars
than any racers ever will,” moonshiner and NASCAR driver Junior Johnson
once said. “Lose on the track and you go home. Lose with a load of
whiskey and you go to jail.”

Mechanics help NASCAR driver Junior Johnson (center) check on his 1965
Ford before the start of the Watkins Glen Grand National stockcar race
at Watkins Glen, New York.
Mechanics help NASCAR driver Junior Johnson (center) check on his 1965
Ford before the start of the Watkins Glen Grand National stockcar race
at Watkins Glen, New York. BETTMANN/GETTY IMAGES

Auto racing was then dominated by AAA, which controlled the largest
race, the Indy 500. “A Kentucky Derby-like air of of aristocracy hung
over most races,” Thompson writes. “Fans were typically men, wearing
suits and bowlers and smoking pipes.” Southern stockcar racing, with its desperado drivers and cars modified for whiskey tripping, was distinct.
At first, races were informal affairs among drivers, but they quickly
attracted spectators.

Early stockcar races were messy affairs with scrappy drivers and
scrapped cars. Country drivers didn’t have automobiles crafted for
racing; they were stock, no different from a family car, other than
perhaps some modifications under the hood. Blair Sr., like many drivers
of his day, purchased his car from a local junkyard dealer.

“The do-gooders didn’t go to stockcar racing,” Blair says. “You’d need
to take a bath because it changes your shirt from white to red.”

Junior Johnson rolled his 1956 Pontiac several times, but managed to
escape uninjured through the back window in 1956 at Daytona Beach, Florida.

On race day, you could see the dust cloud a mile away. Mud caked onto windshields and drivers put screens in front of radiators to protect
them from dust. There were so many rocks on the track that racers
scoured junkyards for new windshields. Drivers didn’t have jumpsuits,
but wore primitive helmets and tied handkerchiefs around their faces
like bank robbers. Lacking seat belts, they sometimes tied themselves in
place with rope. “My daddy would spit red dirt until Tuesday,” Blair remembers. If your hands had blisters, you’d pop them until you had two bloody hands.

“He did it because he loved it,” Blair says of his father. “There was no money in it.” Drivers might collect $75 for winning, or they might find
that a promoter ran off with the purse. There weren’t sponsors, Blair
says. “White liquor was his sponsor.” Pierce writes that haulers could
make as much as $450 a night driving moonshine well into the
1950s—income that was, of course, tax-free.

Blair’s father raced, he says, because “it made you somebody important.” Whether Blair Sr. was at a racetrack or visiting a small town, people
stopped to talk to him. “It was like he had an entourage.” The family
home was close to racetracks, and since it wasn’t easy to find a motel, people would stay at the Blair house in the grove of pin oak trees near
the dairy. Blair remembers his mother making breakfast for the racers.

Bill Blair poses as the winner at Butner Race Track, Camp Butner, North Carolina. COURTESY OF BILL BLAIR
These races were gaining popularity when World War II hit. Many young
men went off to fight or work in shipyards, and gasoline rationing was a temporary stop sign for automobile racing. But when the war ended, a
former racer turned promoter known as Big Bill France changed the sport forever.

Until France came along, tracks made their own rules, and a hodgepodge
of promoters, track owners, and sanctioning bodies put on each race. The
AAA sponsored several stockcar races, Thomspon writes, but stopped in
1946, stating, “The Contest board is bitterly opposed to what it calls ‘junk car’ events.”

France had a chip on his shoulder about the respectability of races.
According to Pierce, France’s life’s mission was to “raise the level of NASCAR and take it beyond a working class thing—increase the appeal to families and women and the middle class.” France began promoting races, taking money at the door, and offering bigger purses to attract the best racers. He created an organization called the NCSCC that paid drivers
for each victory and offered a $1,000 prize to the driver with the most
points from NCSCC races.

A policeman standing alongside a wrecked car and cases of moonshine.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS/LC-USZ62-96757
The crowds grew larger under France’s watch. People like Raymond Parks,
a moonshiner who was the first team owner in the sport’s history, hired
some of the best early racers, and new racetracks and speedways were
built left and right. In 1947, the Blair family opened the Tri-City
Speedway in North Carolina. The money Blair Sr. used to build that track wasn’t racing money; it was liquor money.

In 1947, a meeting of drivers, mechanics, team owners, and others
important to the sport’s early success led to the official creation of
NASCAR (renamed from NCSCC)—all under Bill France’s private ownership. While the crowds were good, France still wanted to attract the country
club set to stockcar racing. In fact, NASCAR didn’t lift a rule that prevented liquor companies from sponsoring cars until 2005.

Yet moonshiners still raced. In NASCAR’s inaugural year, Blair Sr. won a championship race in Danville, Virginia, and would win another three
among the 123 strictly stock races he participated in between 1949 and
1958. When Tom Wolfe famously wrote an article about Junior Johnson for
Esquire in 1965, raising NASCAR’s profile tremendously, he highlighted Johnson’s history in bootlegging, including an arrest at his father’s still.

NASCAR competitor Dean Combs, pictured here with a crew member, was
charged with operating an illegal still.

Though the NASCAR Hall of Fame has a small section on moonshine,
including one of Johnson’s stills, it downplays moonshine’s role. Pierce says it gives the impression that only a couple outliers were involved.
But without the skill of young bootleggers, it’s possible that no one
would have seen stockcars as something worth racing and watching.
Moonshine was the fuel NASCAR raced on, while pretending it needed only gasoline.

That attitude may be changing. In October 2018, NASCAR joined forces
with Tennessee’s Sugarlands Shine to sell an official moonshine. When
asked whether it was correct to say NASCAR didn’t always publicize this
part of its history, Chief Revenue Officer John Tuck stated by email, “Moonshine has a historic connection to the roots of our sport and that association has always been present with our fans … who embrace the
lineage of our sport.”

The connection between NASCAR drivers and moonshine seems more corporate
in recent years. In 2007, Johnson cashed in on his legacy by creating
Midnight Moon—a “moonshine” made indoors at a legal distillery and sold in clear mason jars at stores. But some men just can’t stay away from
the good stuff, the secretly stilled moonshine, white mule, or mountain
dew. Just 10 years ago, former NASCAR driver Dean Combs was charged with operating an illegal still. “I’d drink it for a cold,” he told The Richmond-Times Dispatch. He’d made a batch that morning. Authorities confiscated over 200 gallons.

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