PURLEAR -- The sun was sinking behind the hillside at the old Parsons homeplace, a few miles outside North Wilkesboro. The scent of wood smoke was in the air when the sound of sirens pierced the chill of late afternoon.
Junior Johnson was coming up the road in a black moonshine car, a 1940 Ford, and revenuers were in the area. It was a made-for-TV moment Tuesday, the start of an evening of storytelling intended to evoke memories of the days when Johnson and others ran illegal liquor from their stills to towns and cities throughout the Carolinas and Virginia. Moonshining was a part of the culture in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, and it played a role in the evolution of stock-car racing.
The NASCAR on display at Lowe's Motor Speedway in Saturday night's Banking 500 and around the nation was created by Bill France Sr., who organized races on the sand at Daytona Beach, Fla. France then spiked the sport with moonshine runners who learned to drive on the twisting, two-lane roads that run through Wilkes County and on tiny tracks speckled through the South.
The men who delivered the moonshine understood that getting caught meant going to jail. To avoid that, they relied on stealth and speed, horsepower and nerve. They transformed their boxy cars into hot rods, so that even if government agents were chasing them, they could outrun and outdrive them.
"Bootleggers had the best cars," Johnson said. "There was really no comparison."
France heard through his connections about the men who drove moonshine cars, and as his racing empire expanded, he and others recruited them to drive.
Johnson was the best known but far from the only driver with a bootlegging background.
"We had the money and we had the fastest cars, and Bill France wouldn't leave till he got our money and our cars," Johnson said, recalling the unofficial but undeniable link between NASCAR, its founder and the illegal liquor business.
Recalling the days
On Wednesday, Johnson was one of five men elected to the first class of inductees into the new NASCAR Hall of Fame. He earned the distinction for winning 50 races as a driver and six championships as a team owner. It was running moonshine, though, that made Johnson fast.
On the evening before his election, Johnson joined other former moonshiners and some of the government agents who chased them in Purlear, 90 miles northwest of Charlotte, to trade stories about their hide-and-seek game.
For an hour, they sat in white rocking chairs in front of the decaying brown frame of the 108-year-old house that once belonged to the great-grandmother of NASCAR star Benny Parsons, whose grave site was on the hill above them.
As part of a private, fundraising event, the men told stories about a business -- and its dangers -- that continues today in the dense, tree-covered hills of Wilkes County. Just last weekend, agents confiscated 929 gallons of moonshine in North Wilkesboro.
In the same way grainy, black-and-white images of cars racing on Daytona Beach illustrate NASCAR's beginnings, the almost romantic image of mountain men running souped-up cars through the night, evading law enforcement, has its own page in the sport's story.
"So many people tried to muffle it at first," Humpy Wheeler, former president of Speedway Motorsports, said. "This is definitely a part of the heritage. It wasn't all of it, but it had a huge part with getting it started."
Fast cars, good times
To get their product to Asheville, Charlotte, Virginia Beach and elsewhere, mountain moonshiners such as Willie Clay Call and James Willard Shew needed fast cars and men to drive them.
They discovered high-performance car parts -- superchargers and larger pistons -- on the West Coast that could be shipped to North Carolina. Pretty soon, the moonshiners learned to make their own parts, and they built cars that were too fast for the authorities chasing them.
"I've never seen [a motor] I couldn't make better," Johnson said.
Fast cars kept the moonshiners in business.
"Most times, I got away when I was in a car," said Call, who like most of the other former moonshiners wore overalls. "They caught 'em sitting still when they caught 'em."
A legend on the road
Johnson learned to drive on the back roads when he was 12, running 'shine for his father, Robert, who spent nearly 20 of his 63 years in jail. Junior Johnson spent more than 11 months in jail on moonshine charges in the mid-1950s, but he received a full pardon from President Reagan in 1986.
Johnson, now 78, gets credit for inventing a 180-degree "moonshine turn" to avoid capture. He says he would drop the car into low gear, cut the wheel hard, spin and head back toward the pursuing cars.
"Whoever had the most guts made it," Johnson said, grinning. "I usually went right between 'em. Doing a 180, if you messed up with that, they got you."
In 1964, writer Tom Wolfe came south and profiled Junior Johnson, calling him the Last American Hero. At the time, NASCAR lived in places like Darlington and Rockingham and was hardly known outside the South.
Then Johnson showed up on the cover of Esquire magazine, and stock car racing, which had been confined to the South, was introduced to the nation.
"It was like landing on the moon for us," Wheeler said. "[Johnson] is so Americana, so Southern and so mountain.
"The West had Kit Carson and Billy the Kid and Wyatt Earp. We had Junior Johnson."
As darkness descended on the valley Tuesday, the show ended and the men signed their white rocking chairs. The proceeds from auctioning the chairs -- in the thousands of dollars -- were donated to Mothers Against Drunk Driving.
Johnson was asked if he thinks often about those nights he sped down twisting two-lane highways, his car stacked with illegal liquor.
"Yes, I do," Johnson said. "I enjoyed it. I wouldn't take nothing for the days that I was in the whiskey business, and I wouldn't take nothing for the days I was in the racing business."
Are there times when he's tempted to take a turn faster than he should, just to remember the thrill of it?
"I do it once in a while," he said.
Does the Last American Hero still have it when he's behind the wheel?
"Not like I did have," Johnson said.
