December 14, 1947 was a Sunday afternoon. Yes, most of the men who gathered in Daytona Beach, Fla. on that chilly, gray day were dressed in suits. But no, it was not a church service. Far from it. There was entirely too much brown liquor on the table and cigar smoke in the air for that. However, it was a christening. The roll-your-quarters beginning of a billion dollar business, 75 years ago today. The birth of NASCAR.
That Sunday was the first of four days of meetings attended by a revolving door of nearly 40 businessmen, promoters, race car owners and race car drivers. You’ll notice that “bootleggers” is not included in that list of occupations. That’s because pretty much all of them were, from white lightning dabblers to downright moonshine titans, they just didn’t want anyone to know it.
“The way y’all remember it now was like the pictures we took, that we were this cleaned-up-looking bunch of men who knew exactly what they were doing,” recalled attendee Raymond Parks in 2007, three years before his death and ten years before his posthumous election to the NASCAR Hall of Fame. “In reality, we were a bunch characters all there hoping to straighten some things out. If we didn’t, fine, we’d go back to do what we were doing before. But it certainly worked out. At least for some folks it did.”
Welcome to the Ebony Room
It was a rough-hewn continental congress of racers, summoned to the space-themed Ebony Room, a rooftop lounge atop Daytona’s still-new art deco show palace known as the Streamline Hotel, a venue then best known for hosting Al Capone and his wise-guy cohorts as they migrated south during World War II.
The curious attendees showed up having accepted an invitation, really a challenge, via an advertisement placed in the de facto bible of American motorsports, Speed Age magazine. That ad had been placed by a Daytona Beach businessman and racer-turned-promoter named William Henry Getty France, aka “Big Bill”.
Recalled Parks: “That’s the nickname you get when you’re 6-foot-5 and you’re around race car drivers all the time, because race car drivers are typically little people.”
France had spent the prior decade rising from house painter and gas station owner to part-time racer and, eventually, the overseer of racing on Daytona’s famous super-fast white sand beaches. The two years after the end of…
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