June 22, 2010
By Allen Madding
Born June 5, 1914 in Dawsonville, Georgia, Raymond Parks became involved in stock car racing when his cousins Roy Hall and Lloyd Seay approached him requesting he sponsor their stock cars with his Atlanta Hemphill Avenue service station.
Parks had been a survivor, growing up in Dawsonville in a family of 16 children; he set out on his own at age 14 driving moonshine from the North Georgia mountain stills into Atlanta and surrounding areas. He was eventually caught by revenuers and served nine months in a federal penitentiary. Once out of prison, Parks settled on operating the Hemphill service station in Atlanta.
After some discussion, Parks entered a car in the Daytona Beach race in March of 1940 for his cousin Roy Hall. The pairing won the event and Hall set a new record of 76.53 mph on the old beach course.
In 1941, Parks sponsored both Roy Hall and Lloyd Seay in the beach races at Daytona. In the first March race, Hall won and Seay finished seventh. In the second beach race that month, Hall finished second. In July, Seay finished fourth and Hall finished eighth. In the August beach race, Seay recorded the win. Seay also won the Champion Stock Car Race at Lakewood Speedway near Atlanta giving him the first stock car championship, albeit an unofficial championship.
Less than 24 hours after winning the Lakewood race, Seay became involved in a heated argument with one of his cousins on the front porch of his Dawsonville, Georgia home. His cousin pulled a pistol and shot him dead. Legend has it the argument was over the operation of their moonshine business.
World War II halted racing in the United States as all of the country’s resources were turned to support the troops. Parks served with the 99th Division of First Army at the northern corner of the Ardennes salient at the Battle of the Bulge. Upon the conclusion on the war, Park picked up where he left off. His teams won all of the Daytona Beach races in 1945 and 1946.
In 1947, Bill France was promoting his first racing sanctioning body, the National Championship Stock Car Circuit (NCSCC). Fonty Flock won the championship title and $1,000 driving a Ford owned by Raymond Parks. That prize marked the first time in stock car racing that a driver had been paid after the season was over. Bill France called a meeting in Daytona Beach, Florida at the Steamline Hotel. Parks was one of the men invited to the meeting. When the meeting adjourned, NASCAR had officially been formed.
In 1948, NASCAR was incorporated. Red Byron won the NASCAR Modified Championship driving for Parks. Byron won 11 of NASCAR’s 52 events that year.
In 1949, Red Byron won the NASCAR Strictly Stock championship (the series would later become the Grand National Division, then eventually the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series) in the first year of the series driving Parks’ 1949 Oldsmobile 88 in six of the season’s eight events, winning two races, the championship title, and was awarded $5,800.
After the 1951 season, Parks sold out of the racing business and returned to his Atlanta business. “We couldn’t make a living just racing back then”, he would later say, “so I had to bow out.”
Raymond Parks was one of the first men inducted into the Georgia Racing Hall of Fame in 2002. He was inducted in the International Motorsports Hall of Fame in 2009.
Raymond Parks died at his home in Atlanta on June 20, 2010 at the age of 96.
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