Junior Johnson, the moonshiner turned NASCAR legend, has just died. Although I am not a big auto racing fan, I feel compelled to call attention to the life and activities of this amazing character, a person I have known about since I was a kid.
Stock car racing originated in bootlegging during prohibition. Drivers ran bootleg whiskey that was made primarily in the Appalachian region of the country, where I currently live. As they transported this illegal liquor to “the markets,” these moonshine runners used small, fast vehicles to outrun the “revenuers”—the “law.”
Junior Johnson, whose family farmed and made moonshine, became one of the best and best-known whiskey runners. He invented the Bootleg Turn, a maneuver that spins the car into a quick 180-degree turn and sends the car speeding off in the opposite direction. This was designed, of course, to shake the revenuers.
Johnson was never caught in a car by the revenuers; however, he was captured working at his father’s still and served nearly a year in federal prison.
By the late 1940s, owners and drivers of these cars began to race them—for fun and increasingly for profit. These races became more organized, and in 1947 the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing (NASCAR) was born.
In the mid-1950s, Johnson joined NASCAR and quickly made his mark. He is credited with discovering drafting, where a driver uses the slipstream of the car directly in front to keep up or to slingshot past.
Johnson was one of the first NASCAR drivers to make the Hall of Fame. And he is almost certainly the last of the moonshine runners to join and succeed in NASCAR.
Back in 1973, a movie depicted his life. It was titled The Last American Hero.