Editor’s note: This story initially ran Jan. 19, 2017.
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Raymond Parks’ name will finally ring out in Friday night’s NASCAR Hall of Fame induction ceremony. His contributions to the sport will be recognized some 80 years after he first became involved in stock-car racing’s rough-edged formative years.
While his classmates have had their stories told to national audiences through advancements in modern video, very little exists about Parks but the stories themselves. Save for some fading, sepia-toned photographs and interviews conducted much later in Parks’ long life, the living, moving history of the sport before NASCAR’s formation was often left to the imagination.
A chance discovery nearly 20 years ago changed that.
“I’ve told some people it’s my great white whale,” said Ken Martin, video historian and archivist for NASCAR Productions. He says this as he scrolls through computer files, painstakingly restored and digitized from the original 16-millimeter film that Parks first commissioned in 1941, seven years before NASCAR’s founding.
For stock-car history buffs, the magnitude of the footage’s unearthing is difficult to comprehend. No other video footage of Parks’ pioneering star drivers — Georgia whiskey trippers Roy Hall, Lloyd Seay and yes, that Bill France Sr. — is known to exist. The staggering fact that it is brilliantly shot in color, a technology still in its infancy and not widely available before World War II, affirms the notion that Parks’ approach to running a top-shelf racing team was far ahead of its time.
Martin cuts out the lights in his fourth-floor office and the colors pop off his monitor. Parks’ cars — tri-toned and professionally painted in silver, black with red trim — spring to life. So do the candid shots of Seay and Hall in their heyday, hamming it up for the camera. There’s France, a towering figure in a bright red shirt. And at the center is Parks, seen in his proper businessman’s suit and hat, his military uniform before the United States’ entry into the second world war, and in casual settings away from the track.
Aside from the candids, the vintage racing action is gripping. The legend of “Lightning” Lloyd Seay has often been heralded, describing how he won three important races — at Daytona’s beach-road course, at High Point, North Carolina, and then the Labor Day classic at Lakewood Speedway in Atlanta — in a prolific span of eight days in the summer of 1941. The day after his Lakewood triumph, Seay was killed in a moonshiner’s dispute, cut down in his prime at age 21.
There is now color footage from those three races — although no sound — including part of Seay’s cool-down lap on his last day alive.
“I have to say I’m awestruck, and I don’t get awestruck by a lot of things,” said Winston Kelley, the NASCAR Hall of Fame’s executive director. Kelley watched the films for the first time this week, flanked by Hall historian Buz McKim, who compared the find to waking up on Christmas morning.
How NASCAR Productions obtained and restored the footage is a story in itself.
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The discovery and the preservation
Martin, then a producer for ESPN’s racing coverage, visited Parks at his Atlanta office on October 21, 1997. Their hours-long interview was used in a five-volume box set to commemorate NASCAR’s 50th anniversary season the following year.
During the course of their conversation, Parks indicated that he frequently divided the prize money among his drivers while he kept the trophies. Asked about the trophies’ whereabouts, Parks guided Martin to a back room and pulled back a white drape. Underneath the cover sat several glistening loving cups, among them the priceless trophy from Red Byron’s 1949 championship in NASCAR’s Strictly Stock division, which has evolved into the modern-day Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series.
The trophies were treasure enough for Martin to marvel at, but an old box that sat open behind them also snagged his eye. Inside were film reels — a baker’s dozen — some in their original metal canisters with white-tape labels reading Daytona, Spartanburg, Ft. Wayne and High Point. Martin knew he’d found a historian’s jackpot.
“It’s like a dream when you see these things,” Martin says. “I don’t know how you’d call it anything but like the Holy Grail of the sport. I can’t think of any other artifact that has the significance of these trophies and now of this footage.”
Martin didn’t know Parks that well, but made his best sales pitch to view the reels’ contents and hopefully preserve them. Parks, always protective of his business interests and possessions, declined, wary about how the footage might be circulated. The films stayed put.
Fast forward by nearly two decades, when Parks’ name was announced as part of the Hall’s Class of 2017 last May. Martin talked with Grady Rogers, a longtime Parks family friend, on Voting Day about potentially using the footage as a key piece of Parks’ induction video. The conversation then spread to Steve White, Parks’ stepson, and Violet Parks, Raymond’s widow, who ultimately agreed to donate the film with the only stipulation that there be no outside licensing of it without the family’s permission.
Once in NASCAR Productions’ possession, Martin had the film sent to Crawford Media Services in Atlanta for an exhaustive frame-by-frame restoration. After the six-week process, Martin returned the originals to the Parks family along with digitized copies on a hard drive. When that transfer occurred, White matter-of-factly handed Martin a booklet that he said might help him with the documentation. Martin’s eyes lit up. The soft-bound pamphlet with a cover reading “1941 Stock Car Racing Record” contained results and recaps of major and minor events from early in the sport’s inception, a stunning narrative from an era when record-keeping was spotty at best.
Martin called it “the skeleton key” to the film, helping him identify race dates, locations of long-lost tracks and drivers by car number, even beyond Parks’ familiar No. 7 for Seay, No. 14 for Hall and No. 21 for France. Neither the film nor the record book explain why Seay’s car was changed from No. 7 to unlucky No. 13 in the Lakewood race the day before he died. The unearthed footage eerily confirms that legend in striking color, but the reasons behind the number switch may be lost forever to NASCAR lore.
The approximately 80 minutes of film is now catalogued in fine detail. For perspective, the earliest documented color footage of stock-car racing before the Parks discovery was from the 1950s at Darlington Raceway.
“Any footage of pre-war auto racing in general, even the Indy 500, is very rare,” McKim says. “I don’t know of any other footage of stock-car racing pre-war, and if it exists, you can guarantee it’s not in color. Looking at it was like the best Christmas ever. I can’t even imagine what folks who have been fans of that era, if they ever get a chance to see this footage, how they’re going to react to it. It’s a tremendous revelation.”
Parks’ legacy in film
Though his official induction won’t come until Friday, Parks has always been part of the NASCAR Hall of Fame’s fabric. A statue of Parks and other founding fathers sits on the building’s top floor, not far from a reproduction garage meant to pay tribute to his famed mechanic, Red Vogt.
In many ways, Parks established the groundwork for modern-day team owners Richard Childress and Rick Hendrick, two of his 2017 Hall of Fame classmates. Parks fielded multiple professional drivers in top-notch equipment in an era when mere souped-up jalopies were commonplace. The film of Parks’ expertly prepared cars tearing up the primitive dirt tracks of the South offers definitive proof.
“It puts an exclamation point on some things that we already know about Raymond Parks, that he always did things first class,” Kelley said. “Didn’t matter whether it was his cars, his business, his attire, his drivers, his mechanics, his race teams, he had what appears to be the best cameraman of his time, and for it to be color footage which didn’t start until less than a decade before that. Raymond Parks did everything first class, and when you look at something from 1941 when he’s 27 years old, I think it puts an exclamation point on that.”
Parts of the footage, presented here for the first time, will be on display in Parks’ induction video and in his spire in the Hall of Honor. It augments the stories depicted in last year’s three-part series, “NASCAR: The Rise of American Speed,” which introduced Parks and his drivers to a new audience and helped fuel support of his Hall of Fame candidacy.
Now there are real-life corollaries to the re-enactments — Parks driving his Cadillac on the Daytona sand, France joking with bystanders in the makeshift pit area, all three drivers as trail-blazing daredevils with automotive feats of derring-do.
“This is a chance for a fresh look at some things. That’s what I love about it,” Martin says. “We’re opening a door to another chapter of our history that as documentarians, we have great stories to tell but if there’s no footage, it makes it kind of tough. Ken Burns told the story of the Civil War with no footage, but it’s a much different event with photographs and things. For us, we’re talking about moving cars and dynamic people, so when we can show them at their peak, that’s what I love.”