I was reading today several newspaper accounts of Red Byron's 1948 crash into a group of 16 spectators at Columbus, Georgia in 1948, killing a 7-year old boy and resulting in the leg amputation of another spectator.
Here's a recap that appeared in the Columbus, Georgia newspaper in 2005.
NASCAR: Death on a Sunday afternoon
Red Byron
NASCAR was young but Red Byron had been around the track. It was summer 1948, at a brand new racetrack in Columbus, Ga. Byron won that race on his way to becoming NASCAR's first points champion. But after an accident at the dusty track on Blackmon Road, his parents rushed 7-year-old Roy Brannon to City Hospital where he died the next afternoon. Now, as NASCAR and its band of corporate advertisers comes to Atlanta Motor Speedway, remember stockcar racing's past and its forgotten pioneers. In this 2005 article from the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer, Richard Hyatt takes you back to that fatal Sunday.
Dust was flying and so was Red Byron.
Thirty-eight down, two laps to go. He had led since the 17th lap.
Coming into the fourth turn, he backed off, letting the engine in his Ford catch a breath.
Then it happened.
A tire exploded.
Not just any tire, but the right front one, the one a racecar leans on in a turn. Red Byron was no longer in a race for the finish line but a race for life.
Byron and death had met before. In World War II, his B-24 was shot down over the Aleutian Islands. He was the tail-gunner, a veteran of 57 successful missions. He limped out of the hospital after 27 months.
Now it was July 25, 1948. He was in a runaway Ford in Columbus, Ga., doing all he could to save himself and race fans huddled 10 feet from the track. Only a cattle fence was between them and Byron's 1939 coupe.
Charles Jenkins Jr. stood in the bed of a pickup truck parked between the third and fourth turn at the brand new Columbus Speedway. He had grown up around automobile engines and helped build midget racers. He knew that sound.
"I watched Red coming. He let his engine breathe then BOOM! His right tire went out," Jenkins says, his memory still clear.
Byron tried every trick he could think of but his car kept coming, to the turn and a barbed wire fence on top of a clay bank.
"His one final gasp of hope was to gas it, pulling left, hoping to spin it back," Jenkins says, figuring the driver was willing to turn into the other racers rather than spectators.
It didn't work. The car hit the fence and plowed into the crowd, but that was not the only problem. Fence posts became heavy spears, and one hit 7-year-old Roy Brannon in the head. Sixteen others also were injured.
Twenty-four hours later, Brannon died.
Five months into its first season, NASCAR had suffered its first fatalities. That same Sunday, in Greensboro, N.C., Bill "Slick" Davis flipped his 1937 Chevrolet several times and died that night.
"An occupational accident," police called it.
NASCAR is today a darling of corporate America, a mega sport nobody saw coming in 1948. Its drivers are millionaires and sex symbols backed by technology that would make NASA envious. It draws fans and sponsors in numbers that boggle the mind.
High-dollar houses surround the wooded area where the forgotten track once stood. But it was a place where history was made and a little boy lost his life.
Early days
Frank Mundy remembers NASCAR when it didn't have a name.
He was at the rooftop ballroom of the Streamline Hotel in Daytona Beach when drivers and promoters formed a sanctioning body that would govern a loosely organized sport already growing in popularity across the South.
"We made up all the rules and we elected Bill France as president," says Mundy, one of NASCAR's founding fathers and an early driver.
The organization was given its name by Red Vogt, a mechanic from Atlanta. Its given name is the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing. The organization was incorporated Feb. 21, 1948, with a full year of racing scheduled including five dates at the Columbus Speedway.
It was an era of daredevils.
"Those sons of bitches were fearless," says Bill Robinson, a former Atlanta Journal sportswriter who wrote poetically about NASCAR's early drivers. "They could have been astronauts because those fellows that went up in space had the mind of a race driver. There wasn't a damn dime's worth of difference."
Mundy offers a definition of a race driver that pre-dates NASCAR: "A driver is too late to work, too much of a coward to steal, and braver than Dick Tracy."
Those men felt they were invincible, and maybe they were. They survived the bread lines of a depression and the destruction of a world war. They hauled moonshine from the hills, outrunning revenuers on their way.
Mundy was among NASCAR's earliest contenders in first a Cadillac and then a Studebaker. As strange as it sounds, drivers often drove their racecars from track to track. Mechanics worked magic on the engines but cars on the track weren't all that different than ones on the highway.
Mundy attests to that.
He went to California with the promise of a fast car. Arriving, a mechanic confessed that no car was available.
"We were on our way to the track in Gardenia and I saw a lot that rented cars. I picked one out and raced it that night. I stayed up on the bank, away from other cars. I finished too," Mundy laughs. "Made enough to pay the fee on the car and pocket $200."
Fans and money
When Detroit made cars again after World War II, America was ready to race them.
Racetracks popped up everywhere. Lakewood Speedway, a dirt track that circled a lake at the Atlanta fairgrounds, started in 1938 and was a Mecca. Races always drew crowds there, but after the war, attendance boomed.
Tracks operated in Macon, Augusta and Savannah. In Phenix City, midget racers were a weekly feature at Idle Hour Park.
Why not Columbus?
Dollar signs in their eyes, 15 local businessmen decided to take advantage of the growing phenomenon. Tom Sikes was president, Ed Rusk was vice president and Harold Hill was general manager.
In the spring of 1948, work began on a site 8 miles northeast of town on Blackmon Road 2.25 miles from Warm Springs Road. Forty-five days later, a 6,000-seat grandstand was ready and the track was graded. The cost was $50,000.
With a $2,000 purse at stake, the track opened June 20. Local dignitaries came along with 4,000 fans. NASCAR president Bill France personally supervised the racing. There were even female drivers in the field.
Bob Flock was the winner, turning June 20 into a historic day. Fonty Flock won at Birmingham, Ala., and Tim Flock won at Greensboro, N.C., making it a clean sweep for the Brothers Flock.
France announced that NASCAR would return on July 25. In that Monday's Ledger, sports writer Cecil Darby said a roof would be over the grandstand by then and that there would be more cars on the card. Darby said those things "will make for a bigger and more thrilling afternoon of spills."
His choice of words was unfortunate.
The big race
Red Byron was as hot as that July afternoon.
Coming into town, he had seven wins five in a row from April 25 to May 16. He had won NASCAR's first race, on the beach at Daytona.
Byron's '39 Ford was backed by Raymond Parks, owner of an Atlanta liquor store and a novelty machine company that collected cash from pinball machines all over the city. Red Vogt was the mechanic.
"They had a domineering effect," Mundy says. "The rest of us had trouble buying tires or paying motel bills. They had everything they wanted."
After going down in that B-24, doctors said Byron never would walk again but by 1946, he was back behind the wheel of a racer. A metal stirrup bolted to the clutch of his Ford kept his bad left leg in place.
When Byron rolled into Columbus for trials on July 24, he was fighting with Fonty Flock for NASCAR's point lead.
Hoping to cut down on the dust, officials put down 10 tons of calcium chloride.
It didnt help, Charles Jenkins Jr. says.
"If you had to contend with dust like you had then, you wouldn't have 90 percent of the crowds you have today," he says. "You had to wash your hair four times to get out the dust after a race."
Looking back
Dust didn't keep Charles Jenkins Jr. away. His father worked on cars and he grew up tinkering with them.
He still remembers a trip downtown when his father was driving. He and his brother were in the backseat.
First Avenue was paved with bricks that turned to glass when it rained. Approaching 14th Street, his father said, "Watch this." With that, he spun the wheel and went sideways through the intersection. Turning into the skid, he straightened up and continued down First Avenue.
"Do it again!" the boys begged.
Jenkins Jr., 85 and leaning on a walker, still loves cars and engines. He shows off framed photographs of his father in a 1921 Willys-Overland coming up a wooden ramp at the Columbus Fairgrounds and jumping the car 28 feet to a ramp on the other side.
"No helmet. No seatbelt. All he did was hold to that wooden steering wheel," Jenkins says.
His passion for racing made him buy $1.50 tickets for himself, his wife and his little sister that day in 1948. Mary, his sister, was excited. Red Byron was her favorite driver. Decades later, she still has his autograph. The women hurried to the fence between the third and fourth turns. They had a great view of the half-mile track.
Watching the early heats, Jenkins saw how close to the track they were. Jesse Russell had his pickup on the hill so Jenkins waved back to his wife, Dorabelle, and his 14-year-old sister, Mary. They'd watch in the back of that truck.
"It was exciting down there but at that age I couldn't see how dangerous it was," remembers Mary Jenkins now Mrs. J. Marvin Mills of Columbus.
Danger drove a black and white Ford coupe.
Once Byron was in the crowd everything was a blur. People were helpless. There wasn't time to react. Injured people were everywhere. Brannon, the child hit by the fence post, was picked up by his parents and put in their car for a ride to City Hospital. They didn't wait for ambulances. He died the next afternoon.
One spectator's leg was amputated at the hospital. Others had fractures and lacerations.
Driver Stan Pannell offered an eyewitness account:
"I noticed Red's car in trouble as he passed me going into the east turn. Suddenly I heard the tire go . . . The next thing I saw, people were scattering, trying to get out of the way, and one person, I think a man, was hit by the front of Red's car and was knocked into the air. I stopped as soon as I could and Red told me to get help. As I got back into my car, I could hear people yelling and moaning."
Jenkins watched from the truck. Byron caught his eye, limping toward the flag stand.
"That's the first time I knew he was crippled," Jenkins says.
A legacy
No one blamed Byron. He did everything he could do. Accidents were, and are, an unfortunate part of automobile racing. Enquirer sports editor Joe Railey did chide the speedway for permitting spectators to be that close to the track.
Byron came back for the race on Sept. 5, finishing third. On Nov. 14, the last race of the 1948 season, Byron was here again. This time he won, the eleventh time that year, clinching NASCAR's first point championship.
Byron died in 1960. He didn't die in a flaming automobile. He died of a heart attack in a hotel room. He was 44.
The Columbus Speedway survived for a time. In 1951, more than 9,000 people crammed into it for a race the largest turnout for a local sporting event other than crowds for the Georgia-Auburn football game.
In four years, the track attracted drivers listed among NASCAR's 50 all-time best, including Byron, Marshall Teague, Glenn "Fireball" Roberts, Lee Petty, Curtis Turner, Buck Baker and the Flocks Fonty, Bob and Tim. Mundy is a member of several racing halls of fames as are Byron, Parks and Vogt.
The track never was the same after Byron's accident and the little boy's death. By 1952, the Columbus Speedway closed. NASCAR quit coming and so did the backing.
NASCAR has grown up and gone uptown. It's a monolith, going after Madison Avenue and sophisticated fans who never tasted dust at a dirt track. The contributions of Byron, Mundy and the Flocks on those abandoned raceways are forgotten.
"People discounted those old boys because of their twangs," Bill Robinson says, "but those mountain boys were pure genius."
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"Any Day is Good for Stock Car Racing"
updated by @dave-fulton: 12/05/16 04:00:58PM
