Thunder Road Race 2006
Concourse Results | Race Results | The Entries | Photos | The Ballad of Thunder Road | Thunder Road Plot Summary | Movie Trivia | Knoxville and Moonshine
Inspired by the 1958 movie, Thunder Road, the MGPMRC held a one-time event, the Thunder Road Race. The movie, starring Robert Mitchum and Gene Barry, concerned booleggers... "moonshine" runners. (See the plot summary for more details.) The moonshine runners tuned and modified their cars to outrun the law. These are the roots of modern day NASCAR.

The rules for the race required a plastic model kit in 1:24 or 1:25 scale mounted to an original ProTrack chassis. The cars represented could be any American-made sedan or pickup truck from 1932 to 1962. Participants could create either a moonshine runner or a law enforcement car.

Prizes were awarded for the first four places in concourse and in the race. The awards consisted of quart Mason jars with a Thunder Road logo. First place in the road race also received a quart of 100 proof white lightning. All entrants received a small plaque and a Moon Pie.


Concourse Results
First: Gary V. - 1949 Mercury State Trooper 
Second: Mark - Edsel
Third: Gordon - 1957 Chevy
Fourth: Gil - 1932 Ford


Race Results
First: Jim (1959 El Camino)
Second: Mike Z. (1962 Pontiac) 
Third: Mark (Edsel)
Fourth: Gil (1932 Ford)


The Entries
Paul1949 MercuryHighway Patrol 
MarkEdselMoonshine runner 
Mike P.1932 FordMoonshine runner 
Mike P.1958 PlymouthMoonshine runner 
Mike Z.1962 PontiacMoonshine runner 
Gil1932 FordMoonshine runner 
Gordon1957 ChevyMoonshine runner 
Jim1959 Chevy El Camino Moonshine runner 
Scott V.1955 ChevyPolice 
Tom1928 FordMoonshine runner 
Gary V.1949 MercuryHighway Patrol 


Photos

Lined up for concourse.
First row on the track.

L->R 1932 Ford, 1928 Ford, 1949 Mercury
 
Second row on the track.

L->R 1959 Chevrolet El Camino, 1958 Plymouth Belvedere, 1932 Ford Coupe
 
Third and fourth rows on the track.

Front L->R 1957 Chevrolet, 1961 Pontiac
Back L->R 1955 Chevy and an Edsel)
 
The long arm of the law

L->R 1955 Chevrolet [with a blower! - talk about your pursuit interceptor], 1949 Mercury, 1949 Mercury)
 
Gary's 1949 Mercury police car. First place in concourse. Complete with road grime, debris in the grill, and two shotgun slug holes in the front window!
 
Tom's 1928 Ford Coupe.
 
A trio of Ford Coupes. (l-r, 1932 by Gil, 1932 by Mike, 1928 by Tom)
A bevy of red cars.

L->R 1959 Chevy El Camino - [first place in the road race], 1957 Chevy, 1958 Plymouth Belvedere)
 
Gordon's 1957 Chevy.
 
Mike Z's dusty 1962 Pontiac.
 
Mark's Edsel.
 
 
Robert Mitchum's 1957 Ford, from Thunder Road.
 
The engine of Mitchum's 1957 Ford.


The Ballad of Thunder Road

Let me tell the story, I can tell it all
About the mountain boy who ran illegal alcohol.
His daddy made the whiskey, son, he drove the load
When his engine roared, they called the highway Thunder Road.

Sometimes into Ashville, sometimes Memphis town
The revenoors chased him but they couldn't run him down
Each time they thought they had him, his engine would explode
He'd go by like they were standin' still on Thunder Road.

(CHORUS)
And there was thunder, thunder over Thunder Road
Thunder was his engine, and white lightning was his load
There was moonshine, moonshine to quench the Devil's thirst
The law they swore they'd get him, but the Devil got him first.

On the first of April, nineteen fifty-four
A Federal man sent word he'd better make his run no more
He said two hundred agents were coverin' the state
Whichever road he tried to take, they'd get him sure as fate.

Son, his Daddy told him, make this run your last
The tank is filled with hundred-proof, you're all tuned up and gassed
Now, don't take any chances, if you can't get through
I'd rather have you back again than all that mountain dew.

(CHORUS)
Roarin' out of Harlan, revvin' up his mill
He shot the gap at Cumberland, and screamed by Maynordsville
With T-men on his taillights, roadblocks up ahead
The mountain boy took roads that even Angels feared to tread.

Blazing right through Knoxville, out on Kingston Pike,
Then right outside of Bearden, they made the fatal strike.
He left the road at 90; that's all there is to say.
The devil got the moonshine and the mountain boy that day

Thunder Road Plot Summary

Luke Doolin (Robert Mitchum), a Korean War veteran, returns home to the Appalachian mountains and takes over the family's moon shining business. He runs the loads and has to battle big-city gangsters, trying to muscle in and take over the business, and the police.

Movie Trivia

Robert Mitchum co-wrote the screenplay and produced the movie. He also contributed to the direction.

Some of the movie scenes were filmed in Asheville and Lake Lure, North Carolina.

Robert Mitchum wrote and sang the song, "The Ballad of Thunder Road."

The movie is loosely based on incidents around Knoxville... but there is not specific crash of a moonshine runner that matches the details of the movie or the song.

Knoxville and Moonshine

Excerpted from The First of April, 1954..., written by Jack Neely

A half-century ago, Knoxville was a city of about 120,000, and shrinking. Factories, once the core of Knoxville’s economy, were closing one after another. West Knoxville ended at Sequoyah Hills. Bearden was a suburban community with a couple of residential neighborhoods and a few restaurants, drive-ins, beer joints: Dixieland, Bill’s, Zesto, the Wayside, the Spanish Gardens. Beyond Bearden, Kingston Pike was mainly a tourist route through farmland dotted with motor courts catering to long-distance tourists.

Twenty years after the end of national prohibition, liquor sales were still illegal in Knoxville, which some claimed was the biggest dry city in America; suburban country clubs and downtown nightclubs depended on bootleggers who were more prosperous than some professionals in this melancholy town. But it was more than a local trade.

The plot of the “The Ballad of Thunder Road” is at least plausible. Moonshine is a boutique item today, offered by droll party hosts and, sub rosa, by friendly countermen. Most of us indulge in ritual amounts, kind of like we take communion. However, Knoxville once had a reputation as a clearing house for industrial-sized quantities of moonshine, as Ernie Pyle had mentioned in his nationally syndicated column not quite 20 years before the movie came out. As late as the 1950s, there was still significant moonshine commerce in East Tennessee; by one 1955 survey, 82 percent of the illegal moonshine stills in America were within 200 miles of Knoxville. The FBI suspected that most of it was funneled through Knoxville, which had rail and highway connections to the rest of the country. Knoxville also had a reputation for lawlessness. In 1951, Knoxville had made Look magazine’s short list of “BAD” American cities, condemned for its “open toleration of sin.”

Bootleggers in souped-up cars did sometimes take police on high-speed chases through town. We know that much. But it has long been taken as a matter of faith that “The Ballad of Thunder Road” is a literal description of a real bootlegger’s cracking up in a specific spot on Kingston Pike, near Bearden. Specifically, a bootlegger who crashed into an electric substation, just like in the movie. Some recall an electric substation on the west side of Bearden Hill, near the intersection of Papermill Road and Kingston Pike, a spot which would be a logical place for a police roadblock. A lot of folks say they know somebody who knows somebody who remembers the fateful accident vividly. But finding the actual witnesses has proven to be maddeningly elusive. Several researchers that I know of have tried, and failed to nail down names and dates.

But just for fun, I went back and looked at the allegedly fateful first days of April 1954. If there’s no record of a bootlegger’s spectacular crash, there’s some interesting color, and some peculiar coincidences.

If we don’t have a record of that particular fatal car wreck, we have records of others. In the first three months of 1954 alone, a total of 17 people had been killed in car wrecks in Knox County.

Bootlegging was a major municipal issue in 1954. On the third of April 1954, Mayor George Dempster boasted that major bootleggers had been “forced to move their headquarters outside the city.” The same day, a 1953 Lincoln was stopped in a speed zone, and one Charlie Hall of Knoxville, where a glass of wine was illegal, was found to be carrying 50 cases of whiskey. He was fined $2. Not much compared to the loss of the confiscated whiskey.

On the second of April 1954, police joined a high-speed chase on Clinton Highway. Two men were racing down the highway at speeds of well over 100 mph. Police collared only one of them. Among Knoxvillians of a certain age, illegal racing was epidemic. After midnight the following night, four teenagers were arrested for racing on a blocked-off two-mile stretch of Chapman Highway. One of them was clocked at 90.

Perhaps the strangest coincidence of all was a perfectly legal event that happened on the fourth of April 1954. Bootlegging has always been cited as the evolutionary origin of stock-car racing. The connection between Thunder Road and NASCAR is acknowledged on both sides. Some of the early champions of NASCAR had day jobs, or night jobs, as bootleggers.

As it happens, what was billed as the first NASCAR event ever held in Tennessee was held on the fourth of April 1954—at the Broadway Speedway, the half-mile track just north of Fountain City. The fabulous purse of $2,000 drew champion stock-car racers from seven states. The champ that day was Bobby Myers, of Winston-Salem, N.C. (The NASCAR pioneer was killed in a race three years later.)

Later that year, Mitchum would work with a former Knoxvillian who was working as a screenwriter on a new movie, A Night of the Hunter. Though James Agee was reportedly intoxicated for most of the period when Mitchum might have been around him, maybe the errant author offered Mitchum some lively stories about his hometown. Agee, whose family was from LaFollette, would have been familiar with the route from Corbin through Maynardville, and he’d likely heard some stories.

That’s just speculation, but so is everything else connected to this story. Gabbard attempted to reach Mitchum for his book, to find out what his inspiration for the specific times and places mentioned in the song, but without success. Robert Mitchum died in 1997 without ever explaining where he came up with the details in the song. A recent biography mentions his inspiration for the song, but only its tune. It was, he said, an old Norwegian folk-dance tune his mother used to sing to him.

He could have gotten most of the geographical details off a map, of course. In those days, Bearden was a separate town, and indicated as such in national atlases. But the phrase “Kingston Pike” mainly just shows up on local maps; on national and state maps, it was just highway 11/70.

We do know, via the colorful 2001 biography, Robert Mitchum: “Baby, I Don’t Care,” that Mitchum had been considering what he called a “moonshine adventure,” and in a rare fit of scholarly research, spent some days scouring ATF files in Washington and later, on location, in Asheville, supplementing his research with interviews with law-enforcement officials. My colleague Brooks Clark, who once researched the available sources for a feature story in another publication a couple of years ago, told me he thinks it was in these interviews that Mitchum learned how to pronounce Bearden and gathered certain details of a bona fide bust: just not necessarily one in Bearden on April 1, 1954. One West Knox Countian, John Fitzgerald, says he remembers a similar crackup a half-mile farther west, near Morrell Road, involving a bootlegger named Tweedle-O-Twill. Clark has learned since the publication of his article that some readers believe that Tweedle-O-Twill was one Buddy Mathis.

Source: http://www.metropulse.com/dir_zine/dir_2004/1414/t_gamut.html