Awesome Bill from Dawsonville: Looking Back on a Life in NASCAR

1

THE ELLIOTTS OF DAWSONVILLE

William Clyde Elliott as a toddler, circa 1957.

FOR A ROCKY PATCH OF EARTH, Dawson County, Georgia, sure does grow good roots. Elliotts have been calling this hilly section of rural north Georgia home for a long time—as long as I can remember, anyway. Our little corner of the county is just outside downtown Dawsonville on Route 183. When I was growing up, if you counted parents, spouses, kids, and Mama Reece, there were twelve members of the Elliott clan living in four brick houses alongside this winding, wooded country road.

While both Mother’s and Daddy’s families go back several generations here, I only really knew the last generation or two. I never knew my father’s father, Ervin Elliott. He died well before I was born. I do know that he was into farming, as was just about everybody back in those days. Daddy’s mom was a different story. I knew her quite well and loved her. Ruby Elliott lived into her nineties. In fact, up into her late eighties she was actually still driving a car. I guess that was a pretty good omen.

My daddy was born in nearby Lumpkin Campground in 1924. The Campground was a settlement that sprung from an old Methodist meeting ground. If you’ve ever seen one of those revival meetings in the movies, that’s what the place looked like: as country as it gets. George Elliott was the second of four children born to Ervin and Ruby. He and his siblings all came up the old-fashioned way: hard work, independence, and family. My aunt Louise was the oldest. She is about eighty years old now, but we rarely get to see her. Sadly, she lost her husband to suicide in the 1970s, and she’s been a bit of a recluse ever since. Then there was Daddy, one of the biggest influences on my life; much more about him in a moment.

After Daddy came my uncle Ralph. You want to talk about a tough guy. As a young man, Uncle Ralph worked in a rock quarry down in Cumming, Georgia. One day he was trying to clean out the bin where they store the rocks before they dump them into the truck. Well, he was in the bin when someone accidentally dumped the rocks. The load buried him alive. He just about died from that, but now in his eighties, he’s getting along reasonably well.

The youngest is Ethel Mae. If you ever go down to Gordon Pirkle’s Pool Room, the center of Dawsonville’s social scene, you’ll see three things. On the walls you’ll see all kinds of press clippings from my racing career. On the ceiling you’ll see the grill from a Thunderbird I wrecked at Martinsville a few years back, and across the room you might very well see Ethel Mae. She’s in her seventies now and she’s still a piece of work. A great lady.

Through military service and education, Dad traveled more than his parents or any of his siblings. By contrast, my mother, Mildred Reece Elliott, spent virtually her entire life in the Dawsonville area. Records show her childhood address simply as Route 2, Dawsonville. Mom was fiercely intelligent. She completed high school at the ripe old age of fourteen and was valedictorian to boot. We still have the original and meticulously handwritten manuscript of her valedictory speech. Here’s an excerpt taken from a section where she’s talking about graduation as the beginning of a voyage.

Whether that voyage will be prosperous or disastrous…God knoweth. But this we know: It will depend on ourselves—upon the use we make of the gifts and powers we’ve been given—upon the ends toward which we choose to work.

I happen to believe those words are universally true, but they would turn out to be particularly prophetic as far as her children were concerned. Mother was really a pioneer. At a time when very few women—particularly rural southern women—were pursuing higher education, she studied business and finished two years at North Georgia College. She was quite a lady. When people say I favor my mother, and I’ve heard that many times over the years, I take it as a great compliment. Whereas Daddy was businesslike—shrewd, quiet, and close to the vest—Mother never met a stranger. If she walked into a store and both the town drunk and the preacher were in there, she’d probably hug the drunk first, but she’d hug both before she left. She loved everybody. She and Daddy made a real nice couple, seemingly balancing each other out.

They married in 1943, shortly before Daddy’s military service took him to ports all over the United States and the South Pacific. After the war Daddy returned to Georgia and they had three boys: Ernie was born in 1947; Dan, in 1951; and me, William Clyde Elliott, in 1955. Born on October 8, in Forsyth Hospital in Cumming, Georgia, I was named for two relatives—William Elliott, a prisoner of war in World War II, and Clyde Elliott, who was killed in an automobile accident at the age of fourteen.

For where and whence Daddy came up—1920s rural north Georgia—he was an educated man. He’d seen the world. In the service he got a chance not only to travel but also to study math and physics at prestigious universities like the University of Pennsylvania and Cornell. He earned his bachelor’s degree at North Georgia College in nearby Dahlonega, Georgia, and studied toward a master’s in mathematics at Emory University in Atlanta.

Before he could complete his master’s, Daddy was offered a job with Burroughs Machine Company in southeast Georgia. While the new job meant a move from the Dawsonville area he always loved (he used to refer to it as the most beautiful place on earth), it also meant a better paycheck for the young couple and a move closer to the port city of Brunswick where Daddy could carry out his Naval Reserve duties (after the war, he spent many years in the Naval Reserve, ultimately retiring with the rank of commander). In 1952 Daddy returned to northern Georgia where his life, away from the racetrack anyway, was largely defined by his businesses. I was very young—too young to really remember—when he and Mother had a small feed supply business and some chicken houses, but they had gotten out of those lines as I was coming up. That’s when Daddy started Standard Building Supply. Located right on the main drag in our hometown of Dawsonville—nearly an hour north of Atlanta—we sold lumber, nails, concrete block, structural steel, you name it.

The building supply business was an extension of our home. It was even located amid our homes, diagonally across the street from my childhood home, which still stands today. Farther down the road was Grandma Reece’s house (I lived in the basement there for a few years in the mid-1980s). There are still lots of Elliotts in the area. My brother Ernie lived across the street from Grandma Reece for quite a while, and Dan lives right down the street from him. In fact, my daughter Starr lives in Grandma Reece’s house now.

The building supply was a simple retail operation, but it would become the focal point of nearly every waking hour of my childhood. Life in Dawsonville was pleasant, for sure, but if you were an Elliott you worked. Anyone around town will tell you that—dawn to dusk—if you ever needed to find one of the Elliott boys, you best look wherever there was wood that needed to be stacked, bricks that needed to be chipped, cows to be milked, parts to be hauled, or customers who needed assistance. If there was a chore to be done, we three boys were called on to do it—no questions asked.

Dad’s business model was simple. He would buy tractor-trailer loads of lumber or plywood or other materials and sell them as cheap as he could. Remember, there were no Home Depots or Lowe’s or any of that stuff around us at that time, so Daddy had people from every nook and cranny in north Georgia coming out to buy building materials from him. We even built our own windows, so if you wanted custom windows, we could do it for you. The key to the whole enterprise was that Dad had virtually no overhead. He paid Ernie, Dan, and me ten cents an hour if we were lucky. Mother worked, too, and we all did what we had to do to be productive and keep overhead down so he could sell material cheap.

This wasn’t exactly Saks Fifth Avenue. Early on Daddy didn’t even have a physical store, he just sold the wares right off a truck, but back then—particularly in north Georgia—everything was more basic than it is today. If you bought a bathtub from us, it was either going to be pink, blue, or white. The shapes and sizes were standard. Now you go into a hardware store and there are a thousand brands of bathtubs, with ten thousand designer styles and color options (I agree with a radio commentator I was listening to the other day: all we’ve done is confuse ourselves with all our options, and I don’t think we’re necessarily any better off for it).

Dad was a classic entrepreneur. In keeping with his sense of independence, he was not really a churchgoing guy. He never liked the structure of the church. I think he felt it was more important to live a good life, to work hard and to raise a family, than it was to go through the motions of Sunday services. He lived his beliefs. Sure, Daddy was a tough small-business owner, but he had a philanthropic side, too. He was stern on the exterior, with more of a soft touch than he ever let on. He and my mother always saw to it that no matter how busy we were we always looked in on my grandmother, Mama Reece, to cut her lawn or tend to her needs. His quiet efforts to build homes (and, later, finance cars) for people who couldn’t afford them was his way of doing the right thing and living a good life. He’d take surplus building supply materials and build low-income houses and rent them out cheap. He probably built forty or fifty houses around downtown Dawsonville throughout the years, many of them still standing. Over time, red tape and politics made these kinds of projects harder to do. That cynicism and the grind of modern culture would eventually wear Daddy down.

The cinder-block outbuilding that ultimately housed Standard Building Supply was largely built by Elliott men. I can remember hauling dirt in there and tamping it down as a kid. Some of that structure still exists today. A couple hundred yards down from our house Dad also had another building. That’s where the Speed Shop business was located. Originally the Speed Shop just sold auto parts and accessories to local dirt racers, but Dad kept buying more and more equipment for the shop, and soon that little side business evolved into a full-fledged motor shop that my older brother Ernie took over. As Ernie built a reputation for constructing motors—starting out on 311s and 302s; small-block V-8s were popular, too—the shop expanded into building performance cars.

Finally, in 1970 Dad brought the first Ford dealership, Dahlonega Ford Sales, into the area. It’s not like he went out and bought a franchise; that would have cost way too much money. But since Chevrolet was so dominant in the area at the time, Ford decided they just had to have some presence in the market. Dad was a good businessman who had a strong interest in cars and was well known among local car enthusiasts. The guys in Detroit decided he was the right guy to represent Ford in our neck of the woods.

At the grunt level, the dealership just meant more work for me, Ernie, and Dan, but we were like mules. We didn’t even think about it. You just did what you had to do. Hard work was a given, not just for us Elliotts but for just about all of the five hundred people who lived in Dawsonville. In the beginning, Daddy had a few people come through and run the dealership, but none of them did a good job, so he finally ended up managing it himself. When that happened, Mother took the reins of the building supply business and I pretty much worked for her. She was always a little bit softer than Dad—people say I take after her—but, trust me, you didn’t cross her, either. You’d get the verbal two-by-four between the eyes just as hard from her as you would from him.

In 1972 Daddy ended up selling the supply business, and I started working a few hours at the dealership during my senior year of high school. I did everything: sold cars, cleaned cars, stocked parts, swept floors. I’d do repair jobs, too. I was truly a jack-of-all-trades. You had to be because it wasn’t exactly easy to sell a Pinto, if you know what I mean. Sometimes it occurs to me that somewhere someone is probably driving around in a car I worked on back then. That’s scary.

As time went by Ernie was increasingly busy with the Speed Shop, and I started spending a lot of time working for him, helping him build cars and soup them up and so on. That was great. Not only did I enjoy the work more than I had enjoyed lugging cinder blocks or pushing Pintos, but Ernie paid well. I could make $100 a week working for him. Back in 1972 that was big money in Las Vegas, much less Dawsonville. Soon the Speed Shop was selling parts and supplies not only from the shop itself, but also on the road. We went mobile. I would travel with Ernie in a cab-over truck that had a van body and pulled a trailer. We’d make the rounds at the dirt tracks every Friday night, Saturday night, Sunday afternoon, and Sunday night, selling parts and tires to racers. We’d work Cherokee Motor Speedway over near Cartersville. We’d go to Canton, Woodstock, Douglasville, Rome, and Macon. Once we got to the tracks we’d do whatever the racers needed. We sold dirt-racing tires. They start out totally slick, so you had to groove them on a machine. So that’s what I’d do—groove tires in the back of the truck and then mount them. I’d sell parts, grind cylinder heads, hone engine blocks, put headers on street cars, stuff like that. I helped Ernie build engines and eventually I helped him build complete race cars. We all did whatever had to be done and we did it pretty well, too.

While you could define Dad as a veteran, a family man, an entrepreneur, a community leader, or even a coin collector (after a customer bought a car from my father and paid with a rare coin, Daddy became an avid collector of three-dollar gold pieces), the one label that most suited him was race fan. He loved racing. He loved it up one side and down the other. Daddy was on the cutting edge of a generation of young southern men who propelled stock car racing from its roots in Prohibition to its glory days of Winston Cup. Just as he got out of the service, a bunch of factors were coming together to push racing into the mainstream. First, since the introduction of Henry Ford’s model T in 1908, cars had become more affordable and increasingly necessary in rural areas. Second, a car meant mobility and freedom for young men like Dad who had been raised in the Great Depression and who had just exited military life. Third, by tending 24/7 to the boats and planes and tanks on which their lives depended in wartime, Daddy and his generation became real familiar with the workings of motor vehicles. Fourth, cars had become the workhorses of the South during the boom years of the moonshine trade. Rural bootleggers relied on souped-up cars to outrace federal revenuers, but even as moonshining began to fade, the region’s appetite for fast cars continued.

Finally, for Daddy, there was the key element: passion. As an entrepreneur with a growing business and a growing family, my dad had a lot on his mind, but stock car racing was his favorite escape—his way to take his mind off those pressures. Later on I think it became a way to spend time with his sons, but first and foremost it was his passion. Daddy, who passed away in 1998, owned race cars all the way back to the late 1950s. That was back when they’d take a stock car (literally a car from dealer stock), rip the interior out of it, put some roll bars in it, beef up the suspension, put a motor in it, and head for the nearest track. When he was running his building supply business, the weekend would come around and he’d take one of his trailers down to the loading dock, put on a race car or two, trailer them to a track, and run ’em. Sometimes he’d help out other local racers by trailering their cars to places like Daytona.

It was nowhere near as expensive to race in the 1950s and 1960s as it is today. Still, it wasn’t cheap. To this day, I don’t know how Daddy afforded it, but he lived for the sport. In those days, the greater Atlanta area was a real hotbed of racing, almost the equivalent of what Charlotte is today. Daddy never drove the cars; instead he’d show up at tracks with his cars in tow and pay different guys to drive them. His passion evolved into a business in the late 1960s when he opened up the Speed Shop, but Dad continued to race his cars—always, always Fords. Chevrolets were more popular then. Wherever you went, whether it was a Main Street drag race or Charlotte Motor Speedway, you’d see a thousand Chevrolets and one lonesome Ford—seemed like it was always Dad’s. Given the predominance of Chevys, the odds of the Ford winning a given race were slimmer than the lottery, but he was a Ford man through and through. If a customer so much as drove up to the building supply in a Chevrolet, Daddy would literally take it as a personal affront. I’ll tell you how bad he was. A customer would come to the store in his Chevrolet truck, and Daddy, who always had a hopped-up motor in his Ford truck, would challenge the guy to a drag race on the spot—up and down the street in front of the shop—just because he was certain that the Ford was a better vehicle. He’d give the guy so much lip it’s a wonder some of these people ever came back. But in both the dealership and the building supply Daddy built up the kind of customer loyalty that most retail operators would die for. That’s just the way he was. He was a real good businessman; a real tough guy but a good person. To this day you won’t find many people who ever knew Daddy who’d speak a bad word about him (or his Fords).

Daddy saw the future of stock car racing long before most people. He knew all the guys who formed the early backbone of NASCAR. He attended what were then called Grand National races (in 1970 this series would be christened the Winston Cup series and ultimately in 2004 renamed the Nextel Cup). He knew Bill France long before he became Bill France. He knew Bobby Allison and the founding fathers and early legends of the sport pretty well. He was friendly with Bill Gazaway, NASCAR’s competition director in the 1970s, and a man who would play an important role in my elevation to Winston Cup racing. In the late 1960s and early 1970s when he was already into the sport on the competitive side, Daddy got into the business side of racing. He leased a racetrack over in Commerce, Georgia. I sold tickets at the gate and hot dogs at the concession stands. He was part of a group of guys who managed Jeffco Speedway in Jefferson, Georgia, and who came close to buying Atlanta Motor Speedway back when it was having real financial troubles. Looking back, I’m pretty sure that these were not simply entrepreneurial efforts, but they were also Daddy’s way of trying to grow the sport he loved.

My dad worked extremely hard. He was incredibly focused, extraordinarily disciplined. Racing was an outlet for him—about the only outlet he allowed. We never went to Atlanta Braves games or Falcons games. He didn’t much go for that stuff. My brothers and I weren’t allowed to play Little League baseball or other organized sports. Mother and Daddy wouldn’t let us (they did make me take piano lessons, however). It’s not that they were opposed to sports per se, but we were preoccupied with work. To this day I’m not that good in other sports. I’m an avid skier and I can snowboard pretty well, but other than that it’s dicey. I’ve never played much golf in my life, but I do enjoy teeing it up from time to time with old friends like Curtis Colwell. I can break a hundred on a good day. I have good hand-eye coordination. I can shoot a basketball now and then, or I can hit a baseball with my son, Chase, but as far as being formally good at sports—no sir. In fact, NASCAR used to stage benefit baseball games, and they usually kept me in the dugout. I was a benchwarmer (they probably still have those games and they just know better than to invite me).

That reminds me of a question I’m often asked: Is stock car racing a sport? I think the answer is obvious. Anything that requires a unique set of physical and mental skills and is done in competition with others is a sport. I think there’s always been some misperceptions about the role of the driver versus the role of the car. Skis are what move skiers down the mountain, but no one questions skiers’ athleticism. Anybody who’s ever driven a race car knows that it takes a lot to do it and a lot more to do it well. Just about any element you’d need for success in other sports—coordination, stamina, concentration, preparation, anticipation—is required for stock car racing. In fact, all those abilities are stressed in NASCAR more than in other sports. If an NBA player has a lapse in concentration, he may miss a free throw. If we lose focus, people can get hurt or worse. My question is, why wouldn’t it be a sport?

Anyway, there were times in my childhood when I wished I could have played around more—been on football and baseball teams like other kids—but in that day and age, and particularly under my parents’ reign, you took what they said and respected it. Question them on something? Talk back? No way. As kids, our fun was provided by our folks: driving over to Gainesville and unloading a tractor-trailer full of lumber and driving back home. I’m not kidding. When I was twelve years old I was driving a delivery truck—a tractor-trailer—to places like Dallas, Georgia. I had a learner’s permit and Ernie’s wife, Sheila, would ride shotgun.

Our big escape came on the weekend—every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday—when we’d go to the races. We hit just about every track in the state of Georgia. Either Daddy would have a car in the race and we’d work on it, or Ernie and I would sell parts and services from the van. Whether these outings were actually fun or just more work is still a little unclear. In an interview a few years back my brother Ernie said, I couldn’t tell you I was real interested (in racing) in the first place, but if they take you every weekend you either start to love it or despise it.

I began to take to it. Even though we were working, the races were an exciting change of scenery. As a kid (or even as a fifty-year-old veteran), you can’t help but get excited by the sights, smells, and sounds of a raceway. There’s buzz, noise, a lot of action, and new faces. Just like any kid who tags along and gets interested when his dad is golfing, shooting, hiking, or whatever, racing began to rub off on me. But even at the races, Dad was all business. Friends who know that I enjoy a good laugh often ask me if Dad had a sense of humor. I tell them what you’ve already sensed: he was a pretty focused, serious, disciplined guy. I don’t have a lot of memories of hootin’ and hollerin’ with Daddy, that’s for sure. Mother sort of provided a refuge from his intensity.

Dad was always respected in the community, but as his son (and his source of what I have jokingly referred to as slave labor), I could only see that in retrospect. About my only interaction with Dad was his telling me what to do. If you ask anybody who knew him, he was a matter-of-fact guy—all business all the time. He didn’t drink or smoke and was pretty much bewildered by those who did. He’d say, I can see why a guy drinks, but I’ll be dad-gummed if I can see why anybody smokes. If you came up to the building supply and you were smoking and driving a Chevrolet, you had to want something really bad. As one of George Elliott’s sons, you would literally have to be insane to take up smoking or drinking. You would have to have a death wish. To this day none of us—Ernie, Dan, me—smokes or drinks. Lord, no. Even with Mother and Dad long gone I’m not about to start. I have no doubt that they’d come out of the grave and collar me if I lit up or mixed a cocktail. In fact, the only time I can ever remember going to church as a youngster was when I was seventeen or eighteen. One Saturday night I went out with some friends, snuck a few drinks. Dawson County was a dry county but there was a guy who used to sell booze from his house. Almost like a drive-through. Well, we bought some beer, got soused, and then I made the mistake of coming home drunk. Well, Mother and Daddy literally beat the hell out of me and dragged me to church early the next morning. Sitting in the pew with a hangover was not a pretty picture. That was pretty much the end of my drinking days. Sure, I’ve drunk some since—a beer here or a glass of wine there—but I know better than to do much. It’s deeply instilled in me, but I’m not as adamant about it as Daddy was.

Even when it came to racing, which was his true passion, Daddy never showed much emotion. He wasn’t in the moment with us, but then again, I think that in those times fathers were typically a little more removed from their kids. When I was coming up, dads didn’t go jump motorcycles and ride four-wheelers like they do with their kids today. When we went to a track, whether it was to sell parts, push concessions, or eventually race, we were there to do our thing. He was that way in all the years that he owned cars, before I ever started driving and throughout the years when I drove for him. Very cool, very detached. He never let his guard down. He was a man of few words. If you were doing something he liked, well, that was simply expected behavior and didn’t really warrant comment. If you were doing something he didn’t like, Dad didn’t hesitate to take you to the woodshed.

That’s not to say he didn’t find ways to show his approval. He did. He had his subtle ways of patting me on the back and pushing me along. He always anticipated the next step. He was always ahead of us. I didn’t always think I was ready for everything that came along, and in a lot of ways I wasn’t, but Daddy had vision. He knew where both the sport and his sons were headed, and subtlety was not his forte. He would come up and say, I just bought this car and it would be nice if you’d run this race. Not exactly a father-son pep talk. And no matter what you really felt like doing, you simply could not tell the man no.

The first Cup car we ever had was a haggard 1972 Torino that Daddy bought from Bobby Allison in 1975. It had been driven hard by Richie Panch in 1972–73 and it was really, truly a piece of junk. Daddy just showed up with it one day, and that was his way of telling me what we were going to do next. There was no discussion of a master plan. I didn’t know exactly where he was leading me or why, but mine was not to question. Mine was just to do.

As a parent of three kids myself I look back on Daddy and Mother and I appreciate them more than ever. They gave all of us a great work ethic. I’m proud of the fact that virtually all of what Dan and Ernie and I were able to accomplish in racing stemmed not from some corporate sponsor’s deep pockets, but from one family’s plain old hard work. There’s no doubt in my mind that I would never have gotten where I am today without that kind of dedication and self-reliance. Look at anyone who accomplishes things in life. It takes certain things to mold that person to become what they are. With me, I never was the smartest cookie in the world, but I always worked hard, paid attention, and focused on a goal. I learned that from Mother and Daddy.

I’ve tried to pass that work ethic on to my family, but a lot has changed. Advances in technology have made modern life much easier and much more complicated. When I was growing up we had our own garden. We grew our own food, we had our own cows, we had our own chickens, got our own eggs, milk, beef, the whole bit. We were virtually self-sufficient. All of our neighbors lived that way, too. All of a sudden—less than thirty-five years later—all that’s changed. How many people live that way today? Now you just go down to the 7-Eleven or the Publix and pull it off the shelf. People don’t even think about (I’ll bet a lot don’t even know) where half of these foods come from. In one generation we went from a society that had many like us, to a society that has very few. How do we or why should we teach kids about the fruits of the land or rugged independence when they’ll have such little experience with either one? I think all you can do is do the best you can. Teach them right from wrong, teach them respect for others, and teach them to work for what they get, but things come so easily now.

Take my son, Chase. He’s ten years old, and he has flown all over the United States with me. He’s seen so many things and so many places by age ten, most of which I didn’t even see until I was in my twenties or