Red Byron

[Schwartz Fan]

Triumphant story of one man's will
60 years ago, Byron became racing's most unlikely champ
By David Caraviello, NASCAR.COM
June 10, 2009


The old photographs tell the story. The man is leaning against his race car, looking like many other drivers of the age, but somehow different at the same time. His white coveralls, for one, are immaculate, without a spot or a grease smudge to be seen. With good reason -- this isn't an outlaw or a bootlegger or a roughneck, as many of his contemporaries were, but a professional who took pride in his appearance. Other snapshots show him competing in tinted goggles with an unlit cigar clamped between his teeth, strangely flamboyant touches added in homage to the pioneers who gave birth to the American pursuit of speed on the shores of Daytona Beach.

But the most striking thing is the leg. Even through his trousers, you can see the difference -- the right leg strong and healthy, the left one withered and weak. There are no indications of the pain he dealt with on a daily basis, of the handfuls of aspirin he devoured, of the contraption designed to allow him to work the clutch pedal in the race car or the brace he needed just to walk. And yet, it's all there in his face. Red Byron was only in his mid-30s when he reached the peak of his brief yet illustrious racing career. But he looked like a man twice as old.

Inside the race car, though, everything was different. No question, racing took a tremendous physical toll on him, to the point where he often had to be helped out of the vehicle. But the race car also provided him with a degree of freedom he didn't have otherwise. Outside the car, he was an injured World War II veteran with a mangled leg and a pronounced limp. Behind the wheel, he was a smart, methodical, calculating driver who used intelligence and strategy to his advantage. And along the way, he became the first -- and easily the most unlikely -- champion of NASCAR's premier division, a tour today known as the Sprint Cup Series but 60 years ago called Strictly Stock.

How did he do it? With the financial backing of a car owner who was once sentenced to prison for running a numbers racket, but went straight and made a fortune off vending machines and real estate. With the help of a temperamental, workaholic, genius mechanic who was years ahead of his time in his ability to coax more power out of the car. And with a stoic, uncomplaining perseverance that offered no hint of the hell he had been through in a bomber high above the Pacific Ocean, or the constant discomfort he suffered as a result. He limped through life on a leg that had been shredded by Japanese shrapnel, a limb Army doctors originally wanted to amputate, an appendage that required two years of convalescence before Byron could walk on it again. In spite of it, he won more often than anyone could have imagined.

Others in the same situation would have understandably taken their pension and disability pay and retired to a quiet, sedentary life. Byron did nothing of the sort. He had raced before the war, and was good enough to catch the eye of the premier car owner of the day. After the war, he was determined to compete again. Stock cars, Indianapolis cars, sports cars -- he loved and raced them all. His damaged leg was always there, always a threat to hold him back. It never did.

"He didn't dwell on his injuries too much," said Don Johnson, a former mechanic on Byron's team. "He found a way to make things happen."

Some of those things were extraordinary. A championship in NASCAR's first, modified season in 1948. A title in that inaugural Strictly Stock campaign a year later. Three victories on Daytona's historic beach-road course. Track records and race wins at too many other, unaffiliated speedways to count. Fans who originally saw this crippled war vet as an interesting sideshow quickly realized that he was serious and intended to win. Yet for all that, he remains one of NASCAR's least-known champions. And his saga begins on the least-known battlefield of the world's greatest war.

FLIGHT OF THE LIBERATOR

Ford Motor Co. built the two vehicles that would come to define the life of Robert "Red" Byron. One was the V-8 coupe, tuned by an ornery but gifted mechanic named Red Vogt, in which Byron would launch his racing career. The other was a hulking, lumbering, beast of an aircraft that the United States used to drop tons of bombs on its enemies during World War II. It was both beloved and reviled by the men who flew in it, and it was known as the B-24 -- or by its nickname, the Liberator.

This was the aircraft Byron found himself in shortly after joining the Army Air Force at a recruiting station in Montgomery, Ala., on April 4 of 1941. It kept him out of a foxhole, but it was far from luxurious. In his book The Wild Blue, World War II chronicler Stephen E. Ambrose describes the B-24 as a aircraft that could be exhausting to fly, and even worse to ride in. There were no windshield wipers or bathrooms, no heat or pressurization. The seats were cramped and unpadded. An 8-inch-wide catwalk was the only way to move from one end of the plane to another. Anyone who slipped risked plummeting to their deaths through bomb-bay doors that could hold only 100 pounds of weight. The Liberator could fly tremendous distances, but had a thin aluminum skin that could be pierced by a knife, not to mention enemy anti-aircraft fire.

And then there was the cold. Ambrose writes that wind constantly whipped through the aircraft from the gunner's windows, that oxygen masks sometimes froze to men's faces, that machine gunners' hands would stick to the metal if they touched their weapons without gloves. At 20,000 feet, the temperature could drop to 50 degrees below zero -- especially where Byron was going. He had seen much of the United States already, having been born in Virginia, raised in Colorado, and lived in Alabama. Now he was being assigned to the 11th Air Force, which patrolled perhaps the bleakest theater of the Pacific War: Alaska and the Aleutian Islands.

At the time of his enlistment, Byron was a relatively healthy 26-year-old who had already gained notice for his driving ability at Lakewood Speedway, then the big track in metro Atlanta. He was good enough to catch the eye of Raymond Parks, the bootlegger turned stock-car owner who fielded winning entries built by Vogt. But the war intervened first. Like almost everyone else who joined the Army Air Force in those days, Byron almost certainly harbored dreams of becoming a pilot, but only a few survived the strict screening process. His enlistment record denotes Byron as a "semiskilled" repairer of motor vehicles -- probably why he wound up as a flight engineer, essentially the aircraft's on-board mechanic.

The battlefield that welcomed Sgt. Byron -- Ambrose writes that everyone who flew was at least a sergeant, because NCOs and officers were treated better than enlisted men in enemy POW camps -- was a stark and desolate one. The AAF had thwarted an attempted Japanese occupation of the Alaskan islands of Attu and Kiska, but the harsh landscape took its toll on the victors. In Stepping Stones to Nowhere, author Galen Roger Perras writes that morale in Alaska was low, and cases of depression and attempts at suicide were not uncommon. He tells of a physician sharing an aircraft with six GIs, all of them straightjacketed and afflicted with a catatonic condition called "the Aleutian stare."

The place was tough on aircraft, too. According to the 11th Air Force's official history, the extreme cold would turn oil into sludge and render metal and rubber brittle enough to break. Pilots combated sudden fog, frozen windshields, and winds strong enough to rip off an airplane wing. The ratio of aircraft lost to operational accidents to those lost in combat was higher in Alaska than anywhere else in the war.

And yet, perhaps because of that stoicism that would serve him so well later in life, Byron stuck around Alaska much longer than he had to. According to Ambrose, airmen could go home after completing 25 missions over enemy territory. For reasons still not quite understood, Byron flew more than 50. On his last one, he stepped in for someone else who had been excused because his wife was expecting a baby. The target was Paramushiro -- among the northernmost of the Kuril Islands, considered by the Japanese to be home territory, and 1,000 cold miles across the Pacific.

It was part of a prolonged bombing campaign that began in July of 1943 and continued into the spring of the next year. At first, the Japanese were caught off-guard. But over time they reinforced their defenses, and for American airmen the missions gradually became more perilous. In one attack on the Kuriles, Perras writes, 10 of 18 planes failed to return, with three being shot down and seven others forced to land in Siberia. Byron and his crew flew into this environment and dropped all their bombs -- except for one, which became stuck. As flight engineer, it was Byron's job to free it.

While the details surrounding the event aren't exactly clear, Don Johnson said Byron told him that the B-24 was struck by anti-aircraft fire soon after the last bomb was knocked loose. Whether the cause was exploding enemy shells or their own bomb blowing up too close to the airplane, the result was the same -- shrapnel ripping into Byron's left leg, a severe wound that had to be unbearable on the long flight back to Alaska. According to author Neal Thompson, whose Driving With the Devil chronicles the story of Parks and the early days of NASCAR, surgeons at a makeshift army hospital initially suggested amputation. One fragment in Byron's hip was too deep to be extracted.

His recovery took two years. Just learning to walk again would be a struggle. Thompson writes that Byron was convalescing in Colorado when family members suggested he try driving again, and the injured war vet bought a Ford he had outfitted with a hand-operated clutch he had designed. Through the automobile Byron rediscovered his freedom, driving as far as Florida during his recovery. But he had more in mind than just touring the country. He wanted to race again.

TWO REDS AND A RAYMOND

When it came to Raymond Parks, appearances could be deceiving. He looked every part the Atlanta businessman, often appearing in public in a Fedora and wool suit. But during the Prohibition era, this quiet, mild-mannered gentleman was the godfather of a moonshining empire that covered much of north Georgia. He ran an illegal lottery, known by those who played it as "the bug." He served a year in federal prison on conspiracy charges. And like so many other wealthy men of his time, he took a liking to fast cars.

By the end of World War II he had gone legitimate, and constructed a wholly legal financial kingdom built on his novelty machine business. This allowed him to finance race cars, which he did to great success. Parks' drivers on the ragtag southern stock-car circuit were two of his younger cousins, Lloyd Seay and Roy Hall, who when they weren't tearing up race tracks were tearing up back roads hauling 'shine. But they were trouble. Seay was ultimately shot to death in a moonshining dispute, and Hall had difficulty staying out of jail.

So when the calm, cerebral Red Byron returned to the scene following his convalescence, bag leg and all, he must have been something of a relief to Parks. The former flight engineer had come to Atlanta and gravitated toward the place that had become the center of the city's racing community: Red Vogt's garage on Spring Street. He had a severe limp and needed a leg brace to walk, but Byron was something far different from many of the bootleggers, criminals and toughs who populated the sport back then.

"He was a gentle person," recalled former mechanic Frank Scott, whom Byron gave a boxer puppy named Molar when the driver retired from racing. "He was not rough talking. He didn't do anything that I knew of, or I never saw anything out of the way or that broached anything illegal or anything of that sort. He was just a kind, gentle person."

Byron separated himself from other competitors in ways that made his co-workers forget about his disability. Another former mechanic, Don Johnson, remembers Byron as having a photographic memory; the driver loved to play canasta, and could recall any card that had once been face up on the table. Byron would later pen a "Tech Topics" column in a weekly racing publication called Speed Age, opining on topics such as installing a rear-end assembly or building a midget car. Other drivers would fill up their gas tanks and go run practice laps. Byron would practice with only the amount of fuel needed for the race, and have a better feel for the weight of the car by the time the green flag dropped.

"Most of the drivers and car owners would just fill up the tank with gas, and not worry about the weight or the balance or anything else with it. Red would go out and actually practice, and he would determine how much gas it took to run so many miles. If you were going to run a 25-mile race, he would only put in enough fuel for the practice laps in the 25-lap race, whereas some other guys, they'd be hauling around enough gas to go 200 miles," Johnson said.

"They couldn't figure out how he was doing things better than they were with the same type of equipment. He approached everything from a logical, sensible position, and tried to figure out what it took to make things work. I think that's one reason he was as good as he was. A lot of the drivers who came along, the bootleggers, they knew one thing -- either stop or go. Pedal to the metal. And if you wrecked the car, it was just a wreck. But Red tried to pay special attention to the fact that you had to protect your equipment, and knew you couldn't win the race if you couldn't finish the race. He was very unique in that fashion."

He was clearly ahead of his time, and he wasn't alone. Building Parks' cars was Vogt, the genius mechanic of the age, but a terribly temperamental and profane man who could intimidate those who worked around him. And yet, young Atlanta-area gear heads like Scott and Johnson flocked to Vogt's shop to learn how to construct cars and build engines. Vogt was a workaholic who sometimes kept his shop open 24 hours a day, grabbing a few hours of sleep on a cot in a back room and exercising with an iron railroad tie. But he could be a father figure to aspiring mechanics like Scott, who lost his father at an early age and came to rely on Vogt for life lessons and advice.

"He was outspoken. He used a lot of four-letter words and he smoked a lot of cigarettes, but to my knowledge he never drank. He taught me some things about building engines. I was very interested in mechanical stuff, and built a couple of engines on my own," said Scott, who would later build his own airplane and fly it around the country. "I was just a kid. I had lost my father, who had died the year before, and I kind of dropped out my senior year in high school and started hanging around Red Vogt. Red was more or less a surrogate father of mine. He told me the wrong things and the right things to do. He was a teetotaler and a non-drinker and Byron was the same. They were just great guys."

When it came to getting power out of a Ford motor, no one was better than Vogt. He would help the company design its cam shafts, suggesting the proper length of time to leave the valves open for the exhaust to get out and the fuel to get in. He would have the intakes polished and ground until they sparkled. He experimented with fuel additives. He had a secret to getting more RPM out of an engine that he called "the tip," and he was careful who he shared it with. As of a few years ago, one of the engines he and Scott built together was still running. It was even Vogt who suggested the acronym "NASCAR" -- National Association for Stock Car Automobile Racing -- at that famous meeting at Daytona's Streamline Hotel that gave birth to the series.

Financing the entire operation was Parks, who still lives in Atlanta, but is deaf and has difficulty speaking. He had taken his money from moonshine and the bug and invested wisely. If there was a pinball machine or a cigarette machine in Atlanta, Parks' company likely owned it. He owned gas stations and package stores. He made money off real estate, selling some of his properties to Georgia Tech. He and Byron would eventually form a company called Overseas Motors that imported cars from England. "I can't imagine the money he had for the day," said NASCAR historian Buz McKim.

And yet, the success of this trio on the race track hinged on Byron's ability to drive a race car, no small feat with a withered leg. Mechanics developed a brace, with one peg on either side of the clutch, to keep Byron's left foot on the pedal during races. Still, it wasn't easy -- since use of his left leg was severely limited, Byron had to shift his body weight to the left to depress the pedal. This while driving a race car in a counterclockwise direction, and creating a centrifugal force in the corners that pulled him naturally to the right. It worked, but it was a struggle. In Driving With the Devil, Neal Thompson writes that Byron was rarely without an aspirin bottle, and that he popped the pills like candy.

"He didn't complain. He was a non-complainer, but you could tell when he was hurting sometimes," said Scott, who often accompanied Byron on trips to races. "We'd drive an old paneled truck and load it down with tires and go to the race, and he'd get to hurting and I'd wind up driving the truck and loading and unloading it. I'm sure he was in pain."

He quietly persevered. Johnson said Byron never appeared bitter, and was occasionally lighthearted in regard to his war injury. Once while driving through Florida during his recovery, he was pulled over for speeding and brought before a judge. The judge threatened Byron with 30 days in jail. Shoot, Byron said, I'm supposed to be taking it easy anyway. If someone will fetch my bag, I'll gladly stay with you. The judge dismissed all charges.

It was that mind-set that allowed Byron to overcome the pain, that led Parks to put him in a race car, that drove him to win in automobiles Vogt had fine-tuned. Together, these three men -- two Reds and a Raymond -- would comprise the first great team in NASCAR history.

"That really was the Hendrick of its day," said McKim, referring to Hendrick Motorsports, the best team of the current era. "[Parks] always had the best of equipment, the best drivers, the best mechanics. He always made sure the cars were totally spotless when they came to the track. That's just the way he did things."

TWIN TITLES

The stock-car landscape that Byron, Parks and Vogt set out to conquer in the late 1940s was a more diffuse and vastly different one from the NASCAR of today. There was no true national sanctioning body, only a few regional confederations -- cobbled together by men like Joe Littlejohn, whose South Carolina Racing Association was a forerunner to NASCAR -- that tried to bring promoters, drivers, and race track owners together. There was no set schedule, only a wide array of events. Men like Byron roamed all over the country looking for the ones that paid the best, races like those at Lakewood Speedway and on Bill France's beach and road course in Daytona Beach.

Byron's withered left leg didn't affect his performance. Once he hooked up with Parks, he became the driver to beat each time competitors descended on the beach-road course. According to an old issue of Speed Age provided by Roy Largin, another former Vogt protégé, Byron went on to set track records at places like Lakewood, Jacksonville, Fla., Langhorne, Pa., Lonsdale, R.I., Charlotte and North Wilkesboro. His wife, Nell, always sent him off with the same words: "Be careful, Red, but win the race!" More times than not, he did. He was seen no longer as an injured war veteran, but as Speed Age called him, "the red-headed Huck Finn of racing."

Byron was at his peak at December of 1947 when France summoned industry leaders to the Streamline Hotel in Daytona Beach for the meetings that would give birth to NASCAR. Parks and Vogt were there, as was Byron, which says something about his status as a driver at the time. According to Speed Age, France even arranged for a local charm school to bring in models to mix with the attendees. Unfortunately for Don Johnson, one of Byron's former mechanics, he was just a teenager and had to wait outside in the car.

"Nobody knew what it was going to be at that time," Johnson remembered. "All of these races were autonomous or spontaneous races that were occurring around the country at the time, and Bill France had the vision of organizing them all under one body. No one else had done that before. There were regional organizations, but nothing on a national basis. ... Each one of these race tracks would have an owner and a promoter. but they only promoted their individual race. Bill France would talk these people into organizing under the NASCAR umbrella, and he could bring drivers from other parts of the country rather than the locals running all the time."

And that's precisely what happened. NASCAR's first season of 1948 featured an ambitious slate of 52 races, and drivers racing "modified" cars that were actually tricked-out, pre-war coupes. They were vehicles that never would have passed the stringent technical inspection processes of today, and nobody was better at building them than Red Vogt. Byron took advantage, winning the first sanctioned NASCAR race on the Daytona beach-road course on Feb. 15. He would win 10 more events that season, including the finale in Jacksonville, Fla., in November, and edge Fonty Flock by 32 points for NASCAR's first championship. His share of the point fund was $1,250.

Yet Byron remained shaken by an incident that had occurred that July in Columbus, Ga., when a blown tire sent his car through the fence and into the crowd. In Driving With the Devil, Neal Thompson writes that nothing more than chicken wire separated the speeding race cars from spectators. According to news reports from the time, one man lost his leg in the accident, and a 7-year-old boy named Roy Brannon died from a fractured skull. For Byron, by all accounts a decent and kindhearted man, the experience must have been devastating. Some wonder if the accident was one reason for the relative brevity of Byron's racing career. After the 1948 season, Byron competed in only 15 more sanctioned NASCAR events, and was retired by September of 1951.

"I know that had an impact on him, because he was that kind of person," former mechanic Frank Scott said of the Columbus crash. "I think he and Nell decided to get out of racing. I think he opened a repair shop or a speed shop to get out of racing and avoid hurting somebody. It very well could have been."

As the 1949 season dawned, though, Byron wasn't quite finished with racing. Now he had another challenge to overcome -- NASCAR's change from modified cars to Strictly Stock," the division that would become the Sprint Cup tour. Souped-up, pre-war coupes were out, and showroom floor stock cars were in. Byron was forced to switch from a Ford to an Oldsmobile, and there were real concerns about the rule change mitigating the advantage of having Red Vogt. But it took time for the new schedule to come together, and it took time for teams to acquire new cars. The result was a slate of only eight races, beginning in June at Charlotte, where Byron finished third.

Byron would win twice that season, prevailing yet again on the Daytona beach-road course, where he beat Tim Flock by almost two minutes before a crowd of 5,000 spectators. Later he won at Martinsville, outdistancing Lee Petty by more than three laps with roughly 10,000 fans in attendance. Down the stretch, the championship battle wasn't much of a contest. Byron failed to finish only one race, posted an average finish of 7.7, and took that inaugural title by 117 points over Petty. This time, his share of the point fund was a more robust $5,800. Amazingly, a man doctors thought might never walk again after his World War II injury had become the unqualified standard-bearer for early NASCAR.

"I guess you'd have to say that Red Byron never knew he was going to accomplish what he did until he got the opportunity to get out there and show what he could do, and prove to himself that he had the expertise and the equipment to do it," Johnson said. "Now, once he did it, he found a way to continue to win. It was not just a spontaneous thing. He knew that if he continued to employ the principles and the methods that he had taught himself, he could pretty much predict his success if everything stayed together."

But things didn't stay together. Parks, who occasionally butted heads with France, was growing restless. Vogt was fighting an uphill battle against an ever-tightening technological box. And as suddenly as he appeared on the stock-car circuit following his tour of duty in the Pacific, Red Byron would soon be gone.

STOCKERS AND SPORTS CARS

After his consecutive championships in 1948 and '49, Raymond Parks gradually scaled back his involvement in NASCAR. He fielded a car for Red Byron for only four events in the 19-race 1950 season, and made a handful of starts with Fonty Flock in 1954 and Curtis Turner the following year. But his glory days were behind him. After Byron's victory at Martinsville in 1949, Parks' cars never won another race in the Strictly Stock division. The one-time moonshiner and current novelty machine kingpin was taking his money and moving on.

Why did he quit? Former mechanic Don Johnson surmises that Parks had grown disillusioned with how so much of the power and fortune in NASCAR had become consolidated behind one man -- Bill France. Then there were the expenses of racing, which even in that day and age were beginning to escalate.

"He just decided it was costing him too much money," historian Buz McKim said. "He had done everything he had set out to do, and he had won everything he had wanted to win, and he kind of felt like there weren't any more worlds to conquer. And he said it was just getting too expensive."

Parks' gradual pullout had a direct effect on Byron, who had considered getting out of racing after the accident at Columbus that had killed young Roy Brannon. The two-time champion was essentially left without a ride in a sport where he was older than most of the other participants. And then there was the leg, suddenly a factor again, and almost certainly a consideration for other team owners who thought about hiring him. Byron's results from 1950 show that he still had it -- in four starts for Parks, he finished worse than fourth only one time -- but he faired poorly when separated from the mechanical wizardry of Vogt. Byron ended his career running a few races for little-known owner B.J. Dantone. In his final NASCAR start, a 1951 race at Darlington featuring 82 cars, he was involved in a crash and finished 25th.

And with that, he disappeared from the scene. He left Molar the boxer puppy with friend and former mechanic Frank Scott, and moved with his wife, Nell, to West Palm Beach, Fla. It was there that Byron kindled a passion for sports cars, even working with Briggs Cunningham, the renowned racer and yachtsman who had graced the cover of Time magazine and was trying to develop an American team to compete on the Grand Prix circuit. This was no mere dalliance -- McKim has a photograph of Byron standing next to a Scarab driven by Lance Reventlow at Riverside International Raceway, leading him to believe the former NASCAR champion became heavily involved in the Sports Car Club of America.

Byron did return to the shores of Daytona one last time, driving a Chrysler 300 through the measured mile in 1957 in emulation of his old hero, Barney Oldfield. But by then, he had moved on from NASCAR. Byron had always been a fan of sleeker automobiles, believing as a youth that his calling was not in stock cars, but the open-wheeled machines driven at Indianapolis. He juggled those dual loyalties throughout his career, making three attempts to qualify for the Indianapolis 500. He never made it, but came painfully close in 1947 in a car modified by Red Vogt. But Vogt didn't make the trip, and there was a problem with the fuel, and the car could never produce the power necessary to make the race.

"It was a good car," former mechanic Don Johnson said, "but it wasn't as good as the others up there at the time."

By all accounts, though, Byron relished his experiences with open-wheel and sports cars. In Driving With the Devil, Neal Thompson writes of how Byron, always better dressed, more polite and more worldly than many of his contemporaries in the stock-car arena, felt so at ease in this different environment. He competed in a Mexican road race and the 12 Hours of Sebring. At one point, Byron even managed a sports-car program backed by Corvette. What he didn't have, though, was performance. Without the mechanical expertise of a Red Vogt, Byron was competing at the same level as everyone else, and success was a hit-or-miss proposition.

And yet, he approached every opportunity with gusto. Which is why, in November of 1960, he flew to Chicago to meet with officials from Anheuser-Busch who were thinking about starting a sports-car team. Thompson writes that Byron attended a party for the prospective team members, returned to his hotel room with a chill, and called the front desk to request that the heat be turned up. He went to bed and never woke up, suffering a fatal heart attack at the age of 44. Friends who had lost touch with Byron after the former champion had left NASCAR were shocked to hear the news.

It was a quiet, unceremonious end to one of the more remarkable careers in the history of American auto racing, one that showed what will and perseverance can do in the face of disability and pain. Appropriately, reminders of Byron's accomplishments will become part of the NASCAR Hall of Fame when the facility opens next year. Parks announced in March that he is donating many of his trophies to the hall, including those Byron collected for winning the first NASCAR race and modified championship in 1948, and the first Strictly Stock title in 1949. Only time will tell whether Byron himself, named one of NASCAR's 50 greatest divers in 1998, will also be enshrined.

Given what he overcame and what he accomplished, his former associates would see it as a fitting honor. "I don't think," Scott said, "you could find a more deserving person."


NASCAR.COM - Triumphant story of one man's will - Jun 10, 2009

[revvinjim]

Thanks SF, this is a must read.