This story appears in the November 16 issue of ESPN The Magazine.
As I turn off the paved road, following directions e-mailed to me under the subject line SHHHH!, two men in overalls step in front of my truck. "Hey, bud," one says, "you can't go any further until you give the pass code." In 15 years of chasing racers to questionable locales, this is the first time I've needed a secret phrase.
I stammer through "I see the moon, the moon sees me" and am waved into a small valley tucked into the Blue Ridge foothills near North Wilkesboro, N.C. A half mile into the woods, a secret meeting is underway. Four dozen folks sit on hay bales near a bubbling creek as they listen to lie-laced stories of illegal acts and hot pursuits. There's also talk of NASCAR. And why not? These guys did birth it, after all.
This, on the night before the unveiling of the NASCAR Hall of Fame's first class, is likely the final roundup for those whose midnight chases led to the Chase for the Sprint Cup. The event is the Moonshiners and Revenuers Reunion, organized by a couple of locals: Terri Parsons, widow of 1973 Cup champ Benny Parsons, and Junior Johnson, the by-god Last American Hero.
Throughout the middle stanza of the 20th century, moonshiners brewed liquor on the down-low, then delivered it after dark in a Road Runner vs. Wile E. Coyote showdown with federal agents. The hooch was unregulated and potentially dangerous, but what most concerned the government was that the "white lightning" was not taxed. It was with all that unwashed profit that the whiskey runners built the fastest cars this side of Indy.
"Bill France had the idea for NASCAR down there in Florida," Johnson says in his slow drawl. "But up here we had the money and the fastest cars. He came north and wouldn't leave until he had both. Go to a race now, and what is it still all about? Money and the fastest cars."
To the left of the aisle, seven bootleggers teeter in white rocking chairs and denim overalls. To the right sit five retired revenuers. Sprinkled among the crowd, lit by the glowing coals of a still, are such team owners as Robert Yates and Jack Roush and a legion of legendary crew chiefs. It's hard to imagine meth dealers and vice cops rehashing old times 40 years from now. Then again, they won't be watching their legacy each week on ESPN, either.
The former rivals rode together to this gathering in a long procession of 1940s sedans, most painted black as night, all featuring the roar of Ford Flatheads or Offenhausers, the same engines that once powered roadsters through the Indy 500. Johnson led the parade, steering a car nearly identical to the one he used to haul his first load of 'shine, when he was 14, hammering his way through the bends of old Highway 421, just down the road from our secret locale. He ran his first NASCAR event at 17, driving barefoot on a track that still sits along that road. The now-abandoned North Wilkesboro Speedway was a half-mile dirt oval built exclusively for moonshiners -- and the occasional revenuer -- who wanted to put their rides to the test.
On this night, Johnson has made peace with his onetime pursuers, even those who've spent their whole lives crowing, "I'm the man who caught Junior Johnson." Junior is quick to say, though, that no man ever caught him on the road, only on foot after staking out his daddy's stills. "If we'd tried to have this meeting 40 years ago, we'd've had a pretty nice fight," Johnson says with a smile, pointing to his fellow senior citizens who are proudly wearing ATF hats and jackets. "It wouldn't be much of a fight tonight. We'd stand up, and our backs would give out."
The next morning, Johnson and Parsons are among the 25 nominees named for the Hall of Fame's inaugural class, nearly half of which has had direct ties to liquor running, though a few denied it to the grave. Curtis Turner burned up the southern Virginia hills, while Tim Flock's family ran 'shine up legendary Thunder Road from Georgia into Tennessee and Kentucky. They shared the stretch with cars built by Raymond Parks, who went on to build the cars Red Byron drove to take NASCAR's first Strictly Stock title, in 1949. The winner of that season's first race, Glenn Dunnaway from Gastonia, N.C., had his victory revoked for using "moonshine springs."
The gleaming, $190 million Hall, which opens in Charlotte in May 2010, will educate NASCAR Nation about the sport's founding fathers, no matter what their background. But not so long ago, league management took great pains to rewrite history, erasing the word "moonshine" from sanctioned television scripts and books and asking broadcast partners and tracks to avoid using bluegrass or country music to promote events. Now, to its credit, NASCAR is finally embracing what it was and, deep down, still is.
"I started going to tracks with my daddy," says Richard Petty, who will join Johnson, Dale Earnhardt, France and son/heir Bill France Jr. in the Hall's first class come May. "Just about everybody would run the race, then go home and race the feds as their day job -- though I guess you'd call that a night job, wouldn't you?"
As for the corn mashing, they still make it. Three days before the reunion, agents confiscated 929 gallons from a home in North Wilkesboro. And the youngest reunion participant, 57-year-old Dean Combs, a former Cup racer who once served as a crew chief under Johnson, was caught in February with a still and 200 gallons of the good stuff. State agents blew it up with so much dynamite that windows cracked at the nearby North Wilkesboro Speedway. "I told them I made apple brandy to fight my allergies," Combs says to raucous hoots. "Last year I didn't have a bit of trouble. This year I've been sneezing my butt off."
The Sprint Cup garage still has moonshine in its blood. Pit Road is packed with mechanics who learned their trade from Johnson. Richard Childress, who as a teenager delivered illegal liquor to saloons on the black side of segregated Winston-Salem, took up the No. 3 because it once belonged to Johnson, his childhood hero. "Watch NASCAR's tech inspection line at the racetrack," says retired revenuer Bob Powell. "It always reminds me of tearing down a suspected moonshiner's car."
A week after the reunion, I'll see Johnson strolling the Sprint Cup garage at Lowe's Motor Speedway. So many crew members stop him that he barely gets to the stage to perform his grand marshal duties. They don't want his autograph. They want tips -- engineers and aerodynamicists asking a fifth-grade dropout and ex-con (Ronald Reagan pardoned him in 1986) to help them find horsepower.
"NASCAR is more complicated now," Johnson says as he waves to the Charlotte fans. "Too damn complicated. But no matter how much technology and money they throw at cars, I have yet to find an engine I couldn't make go a little faster. It ain't any different than getting my daddy's car ready to make a liquor run."
Ryan McGee is a senior writer for ESPN The Magazine. His last NASCAR feature in the Mag was this profile of Jimmie Johnson's legacy. Check out his daily blog here.