Knott, 44, has learned to trust his gut over the years because it has been right more often than not. It led him to start his company and eventually leave a gig as sales rep for clothing maker Burberry Ltd. He lifted the name “Peter Millar” from an antique lawn-bowling ball his mom gave him because he thought it and the ball gave him enough of a story to hang a marketing campaign on, and he’s built it into one of the hottest brands in golf apparel. At the PGA Tour’s BMW Championship in Chicago last September, 12% of the competitors wore shirts made by Cary-based Peter Millar LLC, second only to Adidas’ 13%, according to Los Angeles-based Darrell Survey Co.

Though basic economic principle says prices rise with demand, Knott’s conservative approach has worked. After he started the business in his garage nine years ago, it grew to nearly $10 million in sales by 2005 and expects to gross more than $30 million this year. Peter Millar clothing is available in just over a thousand stores, with a goal of maxing out at about 1,500 by the end of next year. Its bedrock is colorful cashmere sweaters and knit shirts, and it’s been expanding offerings — from boxers to formal wear — in hopes of claiming a bigger share of every well-dressed man’s closet.

But unless you shop at Nordstrom, you won’t find Peter Millar in your favorite department store anytime soon. Knott, who focuses on design, and CEO Scott Mahoney have turned down $3 million orders because they think golf shops and other specialty stores are their best bets to protect their margins, cachet and focus.

It’s not a wildly popular strategy for coping with a weak economy, Knott admits. “In these tough times, to not take a $3 million order — nobody is doing that, that I know of.” But company executives worry about what will happen to their brand and their cozy niche if they get into a high-volume slugfest. “If you live for the minute,” Mahoney says, “and you take that $3 million order without understanding the impact it has on you two years down the road, you lose.”

Some people go their whole life without knowing what they really want to do with it. Many wait until college to make up their minds. Not Knott. He grew up on a tobacco farm near Fuquay-Varina, which was then “a lot like Mayberry.” By the time he was a teenager, he had learned to sucker and to pull a plant bed. That taught him the value of hard work and the reward it could bring, but it was hot and dirty in the fields and warehouses. He was drawn more to the world he saw each August when his mother took him to shop for school clothes at Ashworth’s Clothing, a family business that has been on Main Street since 1937. “That’s when the clothing business caught my eye.”

In his teens, he worked at the store after school and on weekends. “The Ashworth family instilled in me the idea of value and quality. They never chased a bubble, either. I was 16 years old and going with Steve Ashworth to New York on buying trips. We’d bunk with sales reps and go for $300 for the week. Today, you spend that in one day. I was lucky to see the industry at a very young age and said, ‘This is where I’ll be happy.’”

After earning a bachelor’s in merchandising at East Carolina University in 1987 — while working part time at a Greenville haberdashery, Coffman’s Menswear — he spent more than 10 years as a sales rep for lines such as Hugo Boss and Joseph Abboud. In 2001, while working as an independent contractor for Burberry, he found an underserved niche — cashmere sweaters priced below the market. In early 2002, he formed Barcelona LLC — he saw the word in a magazine and liked the way it looked and sounded — designed the sweaters and had them made in China. He shipped his first batch that August. They retailed for $250 to $275, undercutting British-made sweaters that sold for about $395. “I found a market but very quickly figured out that if you ship sweaters for fall, you don’t have any money coming in for spring.”

But spring is a fine time for knit shirts. Most of the good ones were from Italy and very expensive. “I saw the need for a knit shirt that washed the right way, looked the right way, was priced right, fit me the right way. I couldn’t find a knit I liked, so the next venture was into knit shirts.”

Many of the brand names he considered when starting his company were already in use or claimed by URL and trademark speculators. He had used the bowling ball as a prop for clothing shows as a sales rep and decided to use the name on it. He doesn’t know why the name was on the ball or who Peter Millar was, but, as with Barcelona, he liked the image it projected. One of the company’s early advertisements and promotional pieces featured well-dressed golfers on a seaside course with a hundred words of text that built on the idea that “Peter Millar was the emblem of an era. He was worldly, sophisticated, honest and unflappable. A modern renaissance man.”

Knott decided to sell his wares in stores like the ones he knew in his youth — Ashworth’s in Fuquay-Varina and Coffman’s in Greenville. But several of his sales reps around the country placed the shirts and sweaters in high-end golf resorts and pro shops, and the merchandise moved. “They’ve been right on target,” says Chris Dalrymple, the proprietor of The Gentlemen’s Corner in Pinehurst. “They understand their customer. They use color very well. I like to believe I sell nice clothes a man can play golf in. That’s what they do as well.”

The fashion world took notice — and so did Mahoney, then vice president for golf and tennis at New York-based Polo Ralph Lauren Corp. “Peter Millar seemed to crop up everywhere. They did surprising things — a cashmere outerwear vest, golf shirts styled differently from what everyone else was doing.” Mahoney liked the business and brand so much that in 2005 he joined Knott as a partner. That same year, Knott sold a 60% stake in the business to Sea Island Co., a real-estate and resort-management company in Sea Island, Ga. He and Mahoney split the remaining 40%, though they won’t say how it’s divided. The company name changed to Luxury Apparel Group LLC.

Last year, Sea Island sold its stake for an undisclosed price to Winona Capital Management LLC, a Chicago private-equity firm, and Luxury Apparel Group became Peter Millar LLC. In Winona, Peter Millar found a partner that didn’t want to change the apparel maker’s distribution strategy, Mahoney says. “One group that looked at buying Sea Island’s stake said that in six months they wanted to blow this thing out in major department stores. That’s not want we want to do.”

Recession hits specialty stores particularly hard, says Erin Ashley Smith, a retail analyst with Argus Research Co. in New York. But manufacturers can command higher prices and bigger margins there than in the major chains. “You’re kind of at the mercy of the big-box players. They’re going to say, ‘We’ll pay this amount.’ And if you want your product there, you have to go with it.”

Selling clothes through a specialty shop also gives manufacturers more ability to shape their image. They have more control over how products are displayed and more sales support in the store. “If you sell $39 fleece sweats, you can sell them anywhere, because kids can buy them,” Knott says. “But if you’re like Peter Millar and you’re selling $100 woven shirts, you have to be in places where the salespeople can romance the product a little bit. They can’t do that in a big-box store. They don’t have the wherewithal to do that.”

In building his brand, Knott tried to correct many of the irritants he had endured over the years. The company ships its shirts with stainless-steel clips instead of pins, and the pearl-colored shirt buttons are unbreakable. Labels for men’s boxers are sewn on the outside of the leg.

The company has worked hard to distinguish itself among its retailers, too. Boxes with Peter Millar shipments contain a mint and sometimes a voucher for a free cashmere sweater for whoever opens the box. “We want the guy in the stockroom or the shop owner to open our box first and get the product on display,” Mahoney says. “We work hard to make sure our paperwork is perfect. If the paperwork is screwed up, the guy in the stockroom will put off dealing with it. The magic’s in the little details.”

Though sales have flattened some in recent years, Peter Millar has held up better than many clothing makers, partly because of its consistency, Mahoney says. “A lot of companies are pigs with their margins. Chris priced everything below these Italian companies that were thriving in a hot economy, and he sourced things incredibly well. Then the last 18 months, the super-luxury world has plummeted. We’ve been positioned in this little sweet spot the whole time.”

Today, Peter Millar has 30 employees and operates out of a 27,000-square-foot office and warehouse. Its headquarters bustles with energy from the youngish staff and exudes an informality that fits a company marching to its own beat. Flip-flops are fine, and employees get summer Fridays off to go to the beach or mountains. Mahoney and Knott are comfortable pitching their wares to sophisticated buyers in a formal club setting but also kicking back and having a sandwich with the guys in the shipping room.

But they can’t relax too often or too long. Though the economy seems to be on the mend and the company’s spring sales are projected to grow 30% over last year, Knott hasn’t forgotten something Dalrymple, a mentor and longtime customer, once told him: It’s not the bad times that will kill you — it’s the good times. “What he meant was that when things are good and you’re riding the wave, you don’t pay attention to the details. You lose sight of what made you good in the first place. Then when things turn sour, you’re in trouble.”

Lee Pace is a Chapel Hill freelance writer.

It is an article of faith in Wake County, where I live, that the Triangle’s economic vitality is due in no small measure to its progressive, nationally lauded school system. It naturally follows, then, that the recent election of a conservative-leaning school-board majority is a threat to that economic vitality — one so menacing that almost before the new board chairman had broken in his gavel, a group called Great Schools in Wake Coalition was formed to oppose the fresh majority’s revanchist drift. One of the coalition’s stated aims is to “examine how proposals of the new [board] might affect the economic growth of Wake County and our ability to attract new business.”

It’s certainly true that no economic good results from socio-political strife in a public school system. But the inverse of that fact — that economic growth flowers in areas where school boards are calm and the grades are good — strikes me as a shaky claim. And if I were so foolish as to take a swan dive into the particulars of the longstanding (and now endangered) Wake schools policy of busing students all over the county in the name of economic diversity, I would note that whatever industrial-recruitment benefit is gained from that progressive stance is likely balanced, and maybe even outweighed, by a hesitancy among corporate types to move to a place where their children, well, might be bused all over the county. But I don’t propose to adjudicate the wisdom of either the established diversity policy or the effort to overturn it. Instead, let’s ponder the school/business connection.

Wake County’s school system indeed is considered among the state’s finest. And it’s true that the Triangle has enjoyed a long period of economic prosperity, being awarded over the years the top spot on so many lists of the best places to [start a business, launch a career, etc.] that the local media long ago adopted a sardonic, yawn-we-made-another-list attitude every time a new ranking was reported. But the exact relationship between those two facts is elusive. It’s something akin to the connection between a smile and a seduction: The first seems to lead to the second, but there are way too many other factors to be sure. Besides, if Wake schools are better than most others in the state performancewise, couldn’t it be because the offspring of knowledge workers who’ve migrated to the Triangle boosted that performance? The relationship between the school system and business development might be, in fact, the mirror image of the one being promoted by school boosters.

Moreover, the North Carolina educational system that is used by some in Wake County as an example of one not to emulate — Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, which in 2002 dismantled its own busing-for-diversity plan — can hardly be accused of sparking economic hardship in the Queen City. Unless the argument is that Charlotte could today be the size of, say, Tokyo were it not for the school system’s burdensome decision eight years ago, that whole line of thought collapses under the weight of Mecklenburg County’s relentless prosperity.

Need more? OK, ponder this: When Dell was searching for a location in North Carolina for a computer-assembly plant and when Google was likewise looking around the state for a new server-farm site, they eventually settled on Winston-Salem and Lenoir, respectively. They conspicuously bypassed the Triangle, which not only has a laudable school system but also happens to be the state’s technology center. Maybe this was because the school systems in those other places were even more progressively dedicated to economic diversity than was Wake’s system. (Don’t laugh. It’s possible.) Or maybe it simply was because there were many other good reasons to locate their business operations in those places.

Everything above is theory and supposition, though. Because it’s always best to hear directly from the parties involved, I posed a question to a spokesman for Garmin International Inc., the Kansas-based manufacturer of GPS devices that announced in February it was opening an office in the Triangle: Why, I asked, did the company choose Wake County? The spokesman cited two reasons — the concentration of wireless engineers in the area, and the availability of office space. What about the schools? I asked. He didn’t know a thing about Wake schools and the current woes. That issue wasn’t even on Garmin’s radar.

Again, none of this is a judgment on Wake’s practice of shuffling students around in the name of diversity. Running the state’s largest school system is tough work. When other complications are added into the administrative algebra — budget pressures, philosophical quibbles, electoral shifts, the specter of resegregation, etc. — that job becomes monstrously difficult. In light of that, it’s a mystery why pro-diversity partisans would want to pile responsibility for economic development on the school system’s shoulders. Consider this a public service, then. We can take that argument off the table.

Scars fleck my flesh. Many were inflicted by folly, like the now nearly invisible one at the corner of my right eye, etched when I toppled into a toy box as a toddler. (A man’s reach should, indeed, exceed his grasp but not a 1-year-old’s.) Others, more precise, linger where scalpels once sliced skin. That both my hands don’t bear these in abundance is a testament to a surgeon’s curiosity, compassion and skill, but they make a mockery of the economics underlying American medicine.

Among the afflictions I’m heir to is one called Dupuytren’s contracture, which causes the fascia, a layer of tissue just beneath the skin of the palm, to harden and shrink, forming lateral cords that keep the fingers, especially ring and pinkie, from straightening. Eventually they bend, curling like claws. Rarely painful, it’s not malignant, but if you make a living with your hands — or as I’m doing now, pecking a keyboard — it becomes a major pain in another part of your anatomy. Even putting your hand in your pocket can be a trial.

Standard surgery involves cutting open the palm to excise the fibrous tissue. This not only requires stitches, splints and postoperative therapy but risks complications such as infection and nerve damage. Because there is a 50/50 chance the nodes will grow back, the resulting scar tissue makes another fasciectomy even more difficult. The first hand surgeon I consulted cautioned me to wait. Over the course of a decade, I watched my fingers — first on my left, then my right — tick down like the minute hand on a clock as the quarter-hour approaches.

Prowling the Internet, I read everything I could find about Dupuytren’s. That’s how I learned about needle aponeurotomy. Pioneered by a rheumatologist in Paris, the procedure is performed by few doctors in this country. Simply put, it involves poking a small-gauge hypodermic needle into the cords, fraying them until they can be snapped by straightening the fingers. A clinic in West Palm Beach, Fla., was not only doing it but training others. Clicking through its site, I came across a photo of Dr. Richard D. Goldner, an orthopedic surgeon at Duke University Medical Center. (Ironically, I could have found him in the pages of BNC, in our annual listing of the state’s best doctors. For the latest, see our November issue.)

In the fall of 2008, he spent nearly four hours freeing the fingers of my left hand. Last October, he spent two more on my right as we chatted — the procedure requires only local anesthetic, numbing just the skin — about the pros and cons of Obamacare. Then I drove to my brother’s house outside Hillsborough and, the next morning, home to Charlotte, losing only a day of work.

Needle aponeurotomy is tedious, especially for a surgeon of Dr. Goldner’s caliber, and it pays poorly. I know, because just the other day my insurance company sent a letter informing me, five months later, that it was my responsibility, as part of my annual deductible, to pay the provider the $285 it had approved of the $1,712 that was billed. If money had mattered that much to him, Dr. Goldner would have had an economic incentive to flay open my palms, a fasciectomy being much more lucrative for him and the hospital.

So with straightened hand, I salute such healers. But this I must confess: I sometimes catch myself yearning to use it to slap the mouths of those who say this flawed health-care system is the best there is and that we should just let it be.

Due to a data-entry error by the North Carolina Golf Panel, Hope Valley Country Club in Durham was omitted from the top 100 golf courses in the March issue. It ranks 53rd. The corrected list can be viewed at www.ncgolfpanel.com.

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For several years, John Davis has been saying that the General Assembly is becoming less friendly to business. It’s easy to dismiss such talk from the man who once headed NCFREE, at one time big business’s go-to organization for political analysis and advocacy in Raleigh. Centrist Democrats still dominate the legislature, particularly the Senate. President Pro Tem Marc Basnight, arguably the state’s most powerful politician the last two decades, has been a champion of business interests, as have his key lieutenants in the chamber.

Now, those lieutenants have departed or are leaving, and Basnight, who will turn 63 next month, has health problems, a nerve disorder that affects his balance and has slowed his speech. Even as he continues to plot Democratic strategy and immerse himself in his favorite pastime, reading early-American history, the Basnight era may be drawing to a close. Could Davis’ view of the place finally havesome validity? Could those moderate, business-friendly Democrats walking into the marble maze that is the Legislative Building find that they no longer hold sway over what happens within its walls?

Davis argues that the shift has been under way for some time, that the Senate’s leadership has been the only thing ensuring that legislation takes place with the larger interests of the state’s business community in mind. “That leadership is what has kept things in balance,” he says. In his view, the rank and file are no longer predictable allies for a simple reason: Since the 1980s, fewer of them have run a business. “We determined in the 1980s that the No. 1 predictor of an ally is occupation,” Davis says. “It didn’t matter about race. It didn’t matter about gender. If you ran a business, you were going to be a predictable ally.” He’s not saying that the legislature has suddenly become populated by tree-hugging lefties out to do in the business world. Anyone taking in a typical House or Senate floor session, with its staid debate and even more staid dress, would laugh at the notion.

But he is saying that many of the Democrats in positions of power — outside of Basnight and his inner circle — aren’t thinking about business first. Other than Basnight, Gastonia businessman David Hoyle and Fayetteville lawyer Tony Rand have been the Senate’s key power brokers over the last decade. Hoyle, co-chair of its powerful Finance Committee, is a developer with global business interests. Rand, who has been the chamber’s majority leader and architect of the state budget, made a fortune as partner in a company that goes around the state zapping people’s kidney stones.

Rand is gone, vacating his Senate seat to head the state parole commission. Hoyle says he has had enough and won’t run for another term. Basnight will. With 13 terms under his belt, the Manteo restaurateur says he’s good for another five. But he isn’t just losing a lieutenant in Hoyle. They’re close friends. Rand’s replacement as majority leader is Martin Nesbitt, an Asheville lawyer who approaches politics with a streak of mountain populism. Last year, he was joined in the Senate by an old friend of his own, former House Speaker Dan Blue. The Raleigh lawyer is the only African-American to hold the office. It didn’t take long for the chatter to begin about whether they might be on their way to becoming the new power team in the Senate.

But even if that scenario plays out — if Basnight steps aside in the near future and Democrats hang on to their majorities in both chambers despite an uneasy electorate and an invigorated Republican Party — would some seismic shift take place? Would bankers and utility execs suddenly find doors shut in their face? Hardly. Just look at what happened in the House when a liberal lawyer from Orange County named Joe Hackney took up residence in the speaker’s office. During the session, lobbyists representing businesses of all shapes and forms still wait patiently outside that door. Hackney still allows them inside to make their case about this bill or that. Quite often, their arguments hold sway. The reason that they’ll continue to succeed has nothing to do with liberal or conservative. It’s because often what’s good for business is good for labor. Politicians of all stripes understand jobs.

Davis is correct that the legislature is changing. But the most significant shift is that it’s getting older, filled with retirees who have the time and means to actually do the job for the pittance legislators are paid. As the Basnight reign inevitably winds down, other changes will come, too. But predicting what that world will look like, how the new leadership will behave, is a tricky game, with the rules more complicated than someone’s bio or whether there’s a D or R beside the name.

Scott Mooneyham is the editor of The Insider, www.ncinsider.com.

His critics claim that Rogers is talking out of both sides of his mouth. Inside, accepting an award from the Charlotte Chamber, he puts it another way. “I am where I need to be,” he tells the crowd. “In the middle of the road.” He knows what direction that road is headed: to a “low-carbon world.” And he’s determined that Duke will have a say on the best way to get there. It’s not going to be an easy journey. Investing in new, cleaner power generation is putting pressure on its low rates. Complicating matters is an economic downturn that has pummeled industrial sales. He describes himself as “a passionate pragmatist.” To him, building Cliffside, promoting carbon legislation, developing smart-grid technology — it is all of a piece. “I’m pragmatic about the tradeoffs that have to be made.”

Our carbon footprint as a company is defined by three numbers — three, 12 and 41. We’re the third-largest emitter of CO2 in the U.S. We are the 12th-largest in the world. If we were a country, we’d be 41st.” This is how Rogers, 62, begins many speeches. “It’s almost confessional,” he admits. “‘Yes, I have a huge carbon footprint. I am for carbon regulation, and this is how we want to go about doing it.’ It gives you credibility to talk about it.” He’s talked about it in just about every place people are discussing clean energy — from the Copenhagen climate summit to the halls of Congress. This winter morning he’s ready to talk about it again, albeit on little sleep. He had flown in late the night before from Washington, where he’d had dinner with former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, a top adviser to President Obama. That’s the sort of company Rogers keeps these days. He has spent much of his four years as Duke CEO trying to shape carbon legislation. “It’s the single largest issue facing our customers and the future of our company.”

To prepare for a speech he will give in a few hours, he has been jotting down ideas he got at dinner last night. He settles into an upholstered chair in an office he’ll be leaving later this year when Duke moves from its bunkerlike headquarters to a 48-story tower going up across the street. The utility will be leasing 21 floors from Wells Fargo & Co. — what was going to be Wachovia Corp. headquarters soon will be Duke Energy Center. It’s a high-profile move for the utility, whose CEO is always moving at full speed. Rogers “seems like a man on a mission,” says John Gartner, senior analyst with Pike Research. “He values his legacy and wants to be seen as someone who helped lead the company into a key transition. … He wants to be perceived as an agent of change.”

Rogers jumps up to retrieve his Blackberry from his desk. “This is another way to think about us,” he says, punching buttons. He finds the numbers he’s looking for: Duke is third in the Americas in producing carbon-free electricity — thanks to its international hydroelectric plants, three nuclear plants and small but growing wind-power production. That’s going into his speeches, he says with a smile. “I’m constantly recutting the numbers, retelling the story.”

Burning fossil fuels such as coal spews out sulfur dioxide, mercury, fine particles and other pollutants that can create smog, damage health and fall to the ground as acid rain. State and federal laws have tried to rein in air polluters. In the late ’80s, as a utility CEO in Indiana, Rogers stood apart from his industry to support national Clean Air Act amendments that required utilities to cut sulfur-dioxide emissions. He liked the market-based, cap-and-trade approach to regulation in which total emissions of a pollutant are set and companies get credits to emit a certain amount. Companies that cut emissions below their allowances can sell the excess to others. Supporting the legislation turned out to be a good move, he says. Emitters got room to maneuver as they installed costly pollution scrubbers, and acid rain lessened.

Attention turned to greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide, that trap heat in the atmosphere. The scientific evidence was mounting that they were causing potentially disastrous climate change. But technology to remove and store carbon is years away from being workable, if it ever will be. Even coal plants with the latest pollution controls pump tons of carbon into the air every year. It seemed to Rogers just a matter of time before legislators or regulators take action. Maybe what was done with sulfur dioxide could be repeated with carbon — a cap-and-trade system that would be good for the environment and, if he and his industry could work it right, not a costly nightmare for them. Rogers began calling for a cap on carbon. Better to do it sooner than later, he says, because uncertainty is bad for business. Utilities will have to develop new technologies and energy sources, and that takes time.

These days, he is no longer alone. Other utility leaders are also pushing for legislation and planning accordingly. But none has sought the spotlight like Rogers. That doesn’t endear him to colleagues, says analyst Roger Gale, CEO of GF Energy LLC. “He is insightful and does see the future better than a lot of the CEOs do. But most of them dislike him pretty intensely because he’s always got to be right. He’s got to be ahead of everyone else.” As Rogers sees it, if this is the journey utilities have to take, he wants to be in the driver’s seat. “He doesn’t like to leave stuff to chance,” Duke spokesman Tom Williams says.

When Obama came out last year in favor of a cap-and-trade system in which carbon emitters would have to buy all their allowances, Rogers hit the airwaves in protest. He popped up on Larry Kudlow’s show on CNBC and Rachel Maddow’s on MSNBC to plead his case for free allowances. Critics say this would reward major polluters such as Duke. Rogers counters that forcing coal burners to buy allowances at auction would drive up electricity prices sharply. Free, diminishing allowances would give utilities time to transition away from emitting carbon.

He has joined with other CEOs and environmental leaders to form the U.S. Climate Action Partnership. It put together a policy framework that served as a basis for the energy bill the U.S. House passed last June. Through USCAP, Rogers works with allies such as Fred Krupp, president of the Environmental Defense Fund. Duke and EDF have battled on many fronts — even to the Supreme Court, which ruled unanimously three years ago that Duke had violated the Clean Air Act by failing to install pollution controls when it upgraded some coal-fired units. “I appreciate that Jim represents the company’s interest, which is different from EDF’s,” Krupp says. But where their interests unite, they come together. The coal burner and the environmentalist have paid visits to Congress members to pitch carbon caps, timelines and free allowances. “It gets back to, let’s get something done, OK?” Rogers says. “And they want to get something done.”

Another USCAP member, Eileen Claussen, president of the Pew Center on Global Change, got a call from Rogers, who had been home sick and done a lot of thinking, he told her. Now he wanted to bounce ideas off her. Such a call isn’t unusual, she says with a laugh. “He’s always thinking about, is there a new way to frame this issue? Is there a new way to talk about this? What are the practical realities not only for my company but also for other companies? He asks himself questions all the time about whether the path he’s on is the best path.”

His company’s path began more than a century ago on the Catawba River, where tobacco tycoon James B. Duke and his partners produced hydroelectric power for the region’s textile mills. As demand heated up, Duke Power Co. built coal-fired plants that provided low-cost electricity to the Piedmont’s growing post-World War II economy. In the ’70s, Duke added its first nuclear plant. As CEO, the late Bill Lee — grandson of the company’s original engineer — was a champion of nuclear power. The company’s 1997 merger with PanEnergy Corp., a natural-gas distributor, brought a new name — Duke Energy — and the first step to becoming a broad-based energy company. But when industry deregulation derailed, Duke’s aspirations under Rick Priory to be a global powerhouse flickered out. In financial trouble, it brought in Paul Anderson, who cut loose ambitious ventures such as energy trading to refocus on the core power business. Anderson soon began looking for a like-minded CEO to team with.

He found him in Rogers, then chief executive of Cincinnati-based Cinergy Corp., whose coal-fired plants powered a slice of the industrial Midwest. “We saw a convergence of ideas and philosophies,” Anderson says. They both saw a consolidating industry, a tough future for coal and a potentially bright one for nuclear. They merged companies, and Rogers succeeded Anderson, who left to run the spun-off natural-gas operation. Within days of the merger announcement, Duke had issued another release: It planned to build two coal units at Cliffside. This was in the works before Rogers’ arrival, but he decided to go forward with it, and the N.C. Utilities Commission green-lighted one unit. As other utilities abandoned similar plans because of increasing costs and looming carbon restrictions, the green-talking utility CEO embarked on building a coal-fired unit.

Near a tiny town tucked in the foothills on the Rutherford-Cleveland county line, big trucks rumble down the road past a redbrick shell of an abandoned textile mill. They are headed to a construction site carved out of the woods along the Broad River. Beyond the large fields of metal parts and arching cranes rises the hull of a new coal boiler at Cliffside Steam Station. Here, some 2,200 workers, whose numbers will swell to more than 3,000 this summer are building unit No. 6, which towers over four older, soon-to-be-retired units nearby.

Cliffside has become a flash point for Rogers’ critics, who say it contradicts his claims that he wants to clamp down on carbon. Protestors have picketed Duke’s headquarters and even gathered on the lawn of Rogers’ home. Environmental watchdog groups have taken the fight to the Utilities Commission and to court. Rogers defends the $2.4 billion project: Duke hasn’t built a base-load coal or nuclear plant — the backbone of its power generation — in more than two decades. The goal, he says, is to “modernize and decarbonize.” By 2050, as its plants age and pollution limits become more stringent, “every power plant we operate today will have to be retired and replaced. So the question is, what is the right sequence?” No. 6 will boost output at Cliffside while reducing many of its toxic emissions. “The simple fact is, we build [a unit producing 825] megawatts that is far more efficient and shut down 1,000 megawatts. Our pollution footprint is much smaller because of that.”

But even with its pollution controls, Cliffside is still a traditional coal-burning plant that comes with what that entails — such as coal-ash ponds that can threaten water supplies, damage to the Appalachian mountaintops where coal is mined and the release of tons of carbon dioxide. The Southern Environmental Law Center has sued Duke, challenging its air-quality permit. “We are definitely in favor of seeing older coal plants retired,” says Gudrun Thompson, a senior attorney with the center. “But we think there are cleaner alternatives than building a new coal plant that’s going to lock in 40 or 50 years of very high emissions of carbon dioxide and other pollutants.”

One alternative is natural gas, which pollutes less than coal. Raleigh-based Progress Energy Inc. is shifting from coal to natural gas. But natural-gas prices are volatile, Rogers argues, and Duke is already building two units at its Buck plant in Rowan County and Dan River plant in Rockingham County as part of its modernization plan. At the core of that effort are two coal-fired units, one in Indiana that will convert coal to a cleaner synthetic gas, the other at Cliffside. When they open in 2012, Duke will shut down some older coal units. Duke is investing up to $15.2 billion over three years in capital expenditures, committing much of that capital to finishing the new plants, adding pollution controls to older ones and projects such as installing smart-grid technology.

New nuclear power is also in the works. Duke has filed for a federal license to build two reactors near Gaffney, S.C., and is evaluating sites for another in Ohio. Rogers sees nuclear as key to a low-carbon world. Duke hopes to have the South Carolina plant running by 2021, although the challenges are big — both regulatory and financial. The price tag to build both reactors could reach $12 billion, and finding financing will be difficult. It’s looking for partners to split costs.

The long-term investments are banging up against a hard here-and-now. A dwindling manufacturing base and sluggish economy are dampening demand for electricity. Last year, sales slipped 4%, with those to industry dropping 14%. Industrial demand seems to be steadying, but Duke doesn’t see a rebound anytime soon. It’s also being squeezed by competitive pressures in Ohio, where it has lost customers. The company earned $1.1 billion last year, down from $1.4 billion the year before. To ease the pinch, it cut expenses by $150 million. This year, it is offering employee buyouts and streamlining corporate operations to trim $200 million in costs.

Duke is not waiting to flip the switch on its new plants to start recovering costs from customers. An N.C. law it lobbied for three years ago allows it to earn off its investment in plants while they are under construction. In December, Duke got approval for its first base-rate increase in North Carolina in nearly two decades, in part to cover costs for Cliffside. South Carolina and Kentucky also have approved rate hikes. And more are coming. A priority this year — and crucial to going forward with its nuclear plant, Duke says — is pushing for legislation in North Carolina that will allow it to recover nuclear-plant financing costs from customers without having to request a general rate increase. And Rogers has more change in mind. “I think we need to totally rethink how we’re regulated,” he told analysts at Duke’s investor conference in February. In each state, Duke will consider pressing for regulatory changes that could boost returns.

On top of all that, it might be digesting an acquisition soon. It’s rumored to be a bidder for two Kentucky utilities put on the block by their German owner. Such a deal would fill in Duke’s footprint, but it won’t comment.

Spread across the flat top of a National Gypsum Co. wallboard factory in Mount Holly are some 5,000 solar panels. When it’s sunny, they can generate 1.2 megawatts of electricity, enough to power 700 homes. Duke leased the space and installed the panels as part of its distributed-generation pilot project, one of the largest in the nation. By next year, the company expects to generate 10 megawatts of power from the rooftops and grounds of homes, offices and factories around the state. With projects like this, Duke is building its renewable-energy portfolio, which must reach a state-mandated 12.5% of its production by 2021. Duke’s wind farms, primarily out West, are expected to produce about 1,000 megawatts this year.

Duke also has stepped up energy-efficiency efforts. The problem, however, is motivating a company that sells energy to sell less of it. Rogers thinks he has found a way around that with Duke’s save-a-watt program, versions of which have been approved in four of the five states it operates in. What separates save-a-watt from many utilities’ plans is its “avoided cost” model. As it helps customers reduce energy use, Duke will earn a return off a portion of the cost of the power plants it won’t need to build. The savings will be independently confirmed, and customers will see a monthly charge on their bills. “I am trying to change the regulatory paradigm,” Rogers says, “where we make as much money investing in energy efficiency as we do a power plant.”

The part about changing the regulatory paradigm concerns Richard Sedano, a director of The Regulatory Assistance Project, which advises public officials on energy issues. How do you fairly determine what an avoided cost is? Would a utility have built a coal plant or a nuclear plant? Added a transmission line? “There’s a huge amount of uncertainty that you don’t have if you simply say, ‘OK, we are going to compensate you based on your costs.’” When Duke proposed save-a-watt, it was slammed by critics who said it would earn too much for a meager effort. But Rogers campaigned loudly for it. “He’s willing to come up with an idea that’s unusual and put himself out there to test it,” Sedano says. “He’s willing to be a lightning rod.” Duke reworked the North Carolina plan with the Utilities Commission’s Public Staff, representing consumers’ concerns, and with environmental groups. The settlement kept the avoided-cost model but limited Duke’s return and tied it to meeting its targets.

Under save-a-watt, Duke could reduce North Carolina energy sales close to 2% over four years and up to 8% in the next decade. That would be a big leap for Duke, Thompson says. “By setting these goals, they are positioning themselves to be as aggressive as utilities that are leaders in the industry who have been achieving some substantial energy savings already.” Some of what Rogers envisions for Duke consumers can be found in the houses of about three dozen families in the McAlpine neighborhood of Charlotte. In a pilot project, devices were installed that could communicate with their appliances, delaying the dishwasher’s start for a few seconds, for example, or cycling down the refrigerator. The families were surveyed weekly and saw no change in the quality of service while reducing their energy usage 20%. Rogers “is propounding the vision of the utility as a service company,” Sedano says, “in a way that stretches our imagination.”

As an assistant attorney general in Kentucky, Rogers opposed a local utility’s request to put a pollution scrubber on the back end of its coal plant. His job was to be a consumer advocate, and this was the ’70s, before federal regulations required emission controls. It seemed too high a price for the utility’s customers to pay. He lost the case, but it got him thinking.

Son of a Kentucky lawyer, he had worked his way through the University of Kentucky writing for the local newspaper and also earned a law degree there. He soon headed to Washington, where he worked at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and in private practice. Rogers left law to manage the gas-pipeline business for Enron Corp. in Houston. In 1988, his career took another turn. PSI Energy Inc., an Indiana-based utility, was reeling from its $2.7 billion write-off of a scrapped nuclear plant. Earnings were tanking, and morale was low, recalls Larry Thomas, a PSI executive then. “We did not know what our future was going to be.” In came Rogers as CEO, a 41-year-old lawyer from the gas industry with no experience managing an electric utility. “He was the right guy at the right time,” Thomas says. “… Other companies with a failed nuclear plant had either gone into bankruptcy or had to lay off people. We did neither.”

Rogers negotiated with regulators and bankers, engaging anyone who would help determine PSI’s fate. Jim Turner, a young consumer advocate in Indiana, got a call from Rogers. A huge ice storm had hit, knocking out power to several hundred PSI customers. Would Turner like to take a helicopter ride with him to see the damage? Yes, he would. Turner still fought PSI’s attempt to recover its storm costs, but he was impressed by Rogers’ openness, which filtered down the ranks. “It was just a different feel that you got from [PSI], and that really served him well,” says Turner, who is now president and chief operating officer of Duke’s U.S. franchised electric and gas business. That engagement was invaluable when Rogers began trying to merge PSI with Cincinnati Gas & Electric Co. An Indianapolis utility offered a higher price, but Rogers worked his relationship with investors, consumer advocates and others to fend off the hostile bid and get the deal he wanted. In 1994, he took the top job at the newly merged Cinergy.

Over his two decades as a CEO, Rogers has honed an unorthodox management style. To keep his staff challenged, he likes to shuffle the organizational charts. “It’s very unsettling for some people in the management team,” Turner says. “And I have to admit there have been times it’s been unsettling for me.” He was moving up the ranks at Cinergy when Rogers invited him to investor road shows to talk about regulatory strategy. Then Rogers named Turner — a lawyer with no financial background — chief financial officer. At first, Turner admits, “it scared the hell out of me.” It turned out to be an event-filled year — Cinergy began holding quarterly earnings calls, issued $200 million in new equity and prepared to merge with Duke. “It’s made me a much better executive for having gone through that experience,” Turner says.

Rogers employs what he calls scouts — consultants who report directly to him — to bring him the latest thinking. And he doesn’t hesitate to pick up the phone and call someone four layers down to talk him through some issue. Inspired by a book — Rogers has given his senior staff Kindles so that they can download his constant stream of reading suggestions — he wrote a letter last year to his board of directors asking: What if I’m dead wrong? What if carbon emissions aren’t causing climate change and the EPA or Congress never limit them? What would Duke Energy do differently over the next five years? Not much, he concluded, perhaps unsurprisingly. He would still be retiring and replacing his plants and investing in energy efficiency and renewable energy, he says, because the battle over scarce global resources will only increase. The exercise, he says, “gave me as a businessperson more confidence about our strategy, because it was robust enough to stand if you took carbon off the table.”

Rogers glances behind his chair to where a painting used to be. He traveled to China last year and came away with deals to collaborate on commercial solar-power projects and clean-energy technology. He gave one of his Chinese partners the painting — of Menlo Park, home of Thomas Edison’s idea factory. Rogers says he is going to have a new one done. “I’ve always liked the idea of thinking of myself as an inventor, someone who is innovating in public policy.”

Carbon isn’t coming off the table, he says, and the faster the country addresses it, the better off Duke and its customers will be. Rogers knows the chances of a cap-and-trade bill passing the Senate this year are low, but he is still strategizing, still making his pitch. “He has this burning sense of urgency inside him,” Turner says. “I think he’s feeling that the changes that are on us, the transformation that the industry has embarked upon is sooner than we think.”

Smith had similar dreams. Even as a very young man, he successfully challenged France’s domination of stock-car racing in the region through his Charlotte-area promotions under the rival NSCRA umbrella. The NSCRA gave NASCAR and France serious competition — especially in Georgia, South Carolina and the Charlotte area — in the late ’40s and early ’50s until the Army drafted Smith during the Korean War. By the time Smith returned from the service, France had effectively broken the NSCRA, and the competing series had gone out of business, with the tracks that hosted its races and the vast majority of its star drivers now in the NASCAR camp. Smith began promoting races in the Charlotte area under the NASCAR umbrella with a good bit of success. However, he also saw himself as a peer of France’s, and the construction of a major speedway in Charlotte would prove his bona fides as a major player in the sport.

Although Turner and Smith had grandiose visions for what their projects could do for their sport, for the Charlotte area and for themselves, they had much more in the way of dreams and pure chutzpah than they had in capital and other resources required to complete such a project. As Turner biographer Robert Edelstein observed, both Turner and Smith were “playing poker with less-than-stellar hands.” Both soon realized that the odds of success for their individual projects were much lower than if they partnered. While neither cared to share the limelight with the other, they decided to pair up and focus their efforts on a tract of land to the northeast of Charlotte just over the line in Cabarrus County.

Turner and Smith began a frantic chase for money to finance the project in the summer and fall of 1959 as the duo announced that they would hold the first race at the track — an unprecedented 600-miler — the same day as the Indianapolis 500 in 1960: Sunday, May 29. Both hit the road selling stock in their corporation, “literally,” as Humpy Wheeler recalled, “out of the trunks of their cars for $1 each.” The corporation also made commercials and sent out mailings advertising its stock. The mailings in particular drew the attention of the Securities and Exchange Commission. Turner also sold several tracts of timber to finance construction and, ever the creative and outlandish businessman, even pursued schemes to commercially produce rockets to send satellites into space and explored the possibility of selling advertising on the margins of U.S. currency.

Problems arose almost as soon as construction began in late 1959. One of the wettest on record, the winter of 1959-60 turned the site into a sea of mud and considerably slowed construction. The biggest setback came, however, when what the core-drill report termed as scattered “boulders” turned out to be “half a million yards of solid granite.” Immediately, the cost of excavating the site rose from 18 cents a yard to $1.00 a yard, “TNT not included.” “If they’d searched North Carolina for the worst possible place to build a racetrack,” mechanic Smokey Yunick recalled, “that’s where they built it.”

At this point, however, they had put too much money and prestige on the line to turn back. While Smith tried to keep the contractors moving — often with empty promises that they would be paid soon — Turner flew around the country calling in favors, selling stock and timberland and trying to get loans. As Edelstein observed, Turner began “a unique practice of exhausting desperation: He’ll write paychecks on a Friday evening and then spend the weekend in a mad flying rush around the country, collecting money to cover checks and be at the bank the moment it opens Monday morning.” At one point as the race date approached, contractors threatened to cease work until Turner and Smith paid their debts. Turner flew to Memphis, where he got a “Mafia guy” to give him a “phony cashier’s check” made out to Turner for $250,000 and drawn on the fictitious “Bank of New York.” “It was a nice lookin’ check,” Turner recalled. Turner took the check to a meeting with contractors, allowed them to examine it, but told them that he would not pay them until they completed their work. The ruse worked, and the contractors resumed operations. The delays did force Turner and Smith to ask NASCAR to move the date of the race to June 19, but it looked as if their gambles might pay off.

However, one week before scheduled qualifying runs, excavation contractor Owen Flowe threatened to shut down the entire operation. He had his men move heavy equipment onto the track, blocking paving of the last section, and refused to move it unless Turner and Smith paid $600,000 owed to his company. A phony cashier’s check would not do the trick this time, and Turner and Smith did not have the money; they had even struggled to come up with money to place in escrow to guarantee the $106,775 purse, a NASCAR requirement. In the most audacious, and most dangerous, of their gambles yet — one right out of stock-car racing’s wild and woolly bootlegger past — Turner, his brother Darnell, Smith, Acey Janey and driver Bob Welborn confronted Flowe and his workers armed with shotguns. While Turner and Smith held the men at bay, Darnell and Janey hot-wired a Caterpillar tractor, and Welborn used it to push the equipment off the track. They set up lights and an armed guard for the night to prevent further sabotage, and the next morning contractors completed the paving.

While the track was ready for racing, Bill France threatened to pull the plug unless Turner and Smith came up with the remaining $75,000 in prize money for the escrow account. Turner flew to Lynchburg, Va., where he persuaded a banker friend to lend him the money on a three-day note “guaranteed against gate receipts,” and Turner and Smith turned over a check for the NASCAR-record purse to Pat Purcell on the Thursday before the Sunday race. NASCAR officials rushed the check to the bank to make sure it cleared before the race.

As drivers began to test their cars in preparation for the Thursday, June 16, qualifying runs, the track began to come up in large chunks — particularly in the 24-degree banked turns — a result of both the haste in finishing it and attempts at cutting costs. Reporter George Cunningham of The Charlotte Observer argued that after Wednesday practice the track “looked like a post-invasion Okinawa.” Turner’s buddy Joe Weatherly weighed in with his tongue-in-cheek assessment that the track was “just like the guy who built it [Turner], rough as hell.” After qualifying, Tom Pistone observed cynically, “The people want blood, and I’m afraid we’ll give it to them on Sunday.” The pole-winning qualifying run by Fireball Roberts at better than 134 mph, however, helped build excitement for the coming race. Turner qualified third in a Holman-Moody Ford and desperately hoped to win the race, not only for the publicity it would generate but also for the prize money he could recoup and pay to creditors. More bad news came on Friday’s second round of qualifying when “at least 20 cars had windshields shattered by flying rock from holes in the track.” Drivers and reporters speculated that the race would never go the announced 600 miles. Buck Baker observed, “The places that have been weak are getting worse. I think we’ll be real lucky to get in 300 miles Sunday.” Possum Jones — who hit one of the track’s holes and bent a sway bar designed for a 2-ton truck — predicted that if it did go 600 miles “the winning speed won’t be 100 miles an hour. They’ll be plenty of action, though, with 55 cars trying to dodge holes and win a race at the same time. Gosh, if I’d known all this I’d built my car for dirt instead of asphalt.”

Despite all the obstacles, the race went on as scheduled. In preparation for the track conditions, drivers tried to do whatever they could to protect their windshields and radiators from debris. Cunningham reported, “Mechanics were busy installing added safety precautions on all cars to guard against the expected flying rocks which are anticipated from track holes. Shields were mounted on the hoods to deflect rocks from the windshields, fender flaps were installed behind rear wheels and wire screens were put over the grill work to protect the radiator and motor.” Lee Petty cracked, “Most of the cars looked like army tanks.” On another front, Turner had to post a $20,000 bond in a local court to hold off an attachment order placed on the property two days before the race by an advertising agency that claimed the speedway owed it $10,000. On the day of the race, the headline of the lead story in The Charlotte Observer sports section read, “600 Reality Today, If Track Holds.”

The adverse publicity, however, did not seem to deter fans as they jammed Highway 29 in both directions Sunday morning. Although the numbers did not reach the predictions of promoters — 80,000-100,000 — or even the announced numbers of 78,000 by one account and 60,000 in another given out by Turner and Smith, probably 35,000 showed up, enough paying customers to at least satisfy the most immediate demands of creditors. Turner stuffed $75,000 from gate receipts into a milk can and had an aide fly it to Lynchburg the next morning to pay off the bank loan he had secured for the purse escrow account.

The race itself was not the classic that Turner and Smith hoped would secure their and the track’s future, though fans who loved to see crashes had their fill. As many had predicted, the race turned into a virtual “demolition derby” or “obstacle course race” — both descriptions used by the Observer in headlines. Fortunately, none of the accidents involved serious injury, and the race did not turn into the bloodbath predicted by Pistone. Johnny Wolford lost control on the 10th lap and caused a three-car pileup involving Cotton Owens and Johnny Allen. Polesitter Fireball Roberts led much of the early going but lost a wheel, hit the fourth-turn guardrail and slid into the infield. Pistone led a number of laps but retired with a broken axle. It looked as if veteran Jack Smith would cruise to victory, as he led by five laps with only 48 to go. However, a large chunk of pavement knocked a hole in his gas tank, handing the lead to journeyman Joe Lee Johnson, who won by four laps. Only 23 of the 60 cars that started made it to the finish line.

The aftermath proved almost as ugly as the race itself. In a bizarre move even for NASCAR, officials disqualified Richard and Lee Petty, Bob Welborn, Junior Johnson, Paul Lewis and Al White for making “an illegal pit entry” by cutting across the infield. The disqualification cost the Pettys more than $6,000 and dropped them from first and second in the point standings to fourth and fifth. Bruton Smith decried the decision, particularly since the infractions occurred early in the race and NASCAR had black-flagged none of the alleged violators. “We at the Speedway think it is ridiculous to disqualify a man for such a minor thing.”

Press reports of a “near-riot involving an estimated 6,000 surging, yelling spectators” at 3 a.m. in the infield the night before the race did not help with Turner and Smith’s public-relations problems, especially when the incident involved the arrest of two teenage girls, a “negro band,” rocks thrown through a police cruiser’s windshield and threats by police to use tear-gas bombs. The news of the goings-on seemed especially ironic at a time when the Observer featured daily front-page accounts of local evangelist Billy Graham’s Washington, D.C., crusade, where he preached, “We Americans have committed every sin in the book and broken every commandment of God.” Indeed, if Charlotte’s respectable sorts were not convinced of the truth of Graham’s statement, they only had to look to their new local speedway to witness the breaking of probably nine of 10 of those commandments — there were no reported murders.

The Turner-Smith era at the speedway lasted for only two more races, the National 400 held in October 1960 and the second World 600 in May 1961. Both races were a relative “parade of blowouts and crack-ups,” with only 25 of 50 cars finishing the October race and 25 of 55 finishing in May. The National 400 featured a near fatal accident when Don O’Dell suffered a puncture wound in the neck when his Pontiac hit Lennie Page’s spinning Ford. Fortunately for O’Dell, Chris Economaki was taking pictures for National Speed Sport News near the scene of the accident; he rushed to the car and used his shirt to apply direct pressure to the wound until an ambulance arrived. Richard “Reds” Kagle was not so fortunate in the World 600. His car hit a guardrail that had been improperly installed. When the guardrail sheared off, it cut into the car, causing severe damage to Kagle’s left leg, which surgeons later amputated.

Even though the track earned close to $400,000 with the second World 600 and its preliminary events, the speedway still owed more than $800,000 to creditors, who became increasingly impatient. Businessmen James McIlvaine and Henry Morgan, who held a second mortgage on the property, threatened to foreclose on the track and put it up for auction unless Turner and Smith resigned and the board of directors put new management in place. After several days of behind-the-scenes wheeling and dealing — with differing accounts and competing allegations from Turner and Smith allies still flying around — the board fired Turner as president in a 4-3 vote. It retained Smith as director of promotions, but he lost his position and seat on the board when the track filed Chapter 10 bankruptcy.

Determined to regain control of the speedway at all costs, Turner made his riskiest bet yet: He tried to organize NASCAR drivers under the Teamsters Union. William Rabin, an accountant and lawyer hired to handle financial affairs for the speedway, had introduced him to union officials. Rabin had a number of wealthy and influential friends and clients, including Teamsters President Jimmy Hoffa. Prior to Turner’s ouster, Rabin and Teamsters Vice President Harold Gibbons offered him an $800,000 loan if he agreed to lead an effort to unionize drivers. Turner refused, but after losing his position, he called Gibbons to see if the deal was still good. Gibbons put him together with Teamsters organizer Nick Torzeski, who headed an effort to organize professional athletes under the affiliated Federation of Professional Athletes. NASCAR drivers would be the first major group brought under their umbrella, or so the Teamsters hoped.

Turner had a fertile field in which to sow the idea, as NASCAR drivers had plenty of complaints. France’s dictatorial powers and the seeming capriciousness of many of his decisions topped the list. Few drivers had not experienced some sort of penalty from NASCAR, with the catch-all charge of “actions detrimental to auto racing” frequently coming into play to cover any penalty NASCAR and France wanted to assess. In a 1959 Charlotte News article on France’s unquestioned power within NASCAR, reporter Max Muhleman quipped that since deposed Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista had moved nearby, “now there are two dictators in Daytona Beach.” France seemed intent on demonstrating the accuracy of Muhleman’s assessment when he flew his airplane to Charlotte and unsuccessfully attempted to convince the editor of the News to fire the reporter.

The rising expenses of racing and the lack of correlation between gate receipts and race purses also drew the ire of drivers. As NASCAR Grand National racing grew in popularity and with the withdrawal of the factories — at least from open sponsorship — racing became more expensive for drivers and owners. “Ten years ago, NASCAR was paying $4,000 purses for 100-mile races,” Turner complained. “Then it cost $3,000 to build an automobile. Today, NASCAR is still paying $4,000 purses for 100-mile races. But it costs $6,000 or $7,000 to build a first-class automobile.” Observer reporter George Cunningham estimated that a 1961 race at Bristol, Tenn., attracted 25,000 fans who paid on average $8 a ticket to produce gross revenue of $200,000. “Forty-two drivers divided a purse of $15,000, which included about $4,000 put up by manufacturers.” The industry standard in auto racing had long been that the purse should comprise 40% of the gate. When Marshall Teague as NASCAR’s first secretary and treasurer tried to get the sanctioning body to meet the standard, France suspended him from racing and relieved him of his position. “We weren’t making no money,” Tim Flock observed. “We were only getting a thousand dollars for first place in most races. They were probably paying about 7% of the gross.”

Drivers also became increasingly troubled about inadequate insurance coverage, especially given the inherent danger of the sport. When Bobby Myers crashed head-on into Fonty Flock’s stalled car at the Southern 500 at Darlington in 1957, he had little to show for his long career as a NASCAR driver. “When my dad died, he didn’t have any insurance, didn’t have anything,” his son recalled. “I can remember someone bringing a bucket of change into the house. NASCAR gave us whatever they could collect in a five-gallon bucket. So the day after my dad got killed, we moved in with my grandmother and lived there.”

Poor track conditions concerned many drivers. Ned Jarrett noted that “the promoters made very little effort towards the care of the tracks.” Dirt tracks often had huge holes, mud and blinding dust. “Dust … was our worst problem, in one form or another.” Richard Petty recalled, “When a race started, there was always mud, because they had just watered the track down. You’d have to reach outside the car and try to wipe it off the windshield. Then by the time you’d run 50 laps, it got so dusty you couldn’t see a thing. There was as much dust on the inside of the windshield as there was the outside, so you had to wipe off on both sides. You finally just had to take your goggles off, because the dust would get on the inside, and you’d sweat and that turned it to mud. My eyes were as red as the clay for two days after a race.” Drivers fared little better on many of the paved tracks, as the first World 600 and the ongoing problems with the Charlotte track proved, although Curtis Turner could not exactly complain about that.

When he first approached drivers about joining in August 1961, he found an eager and willing audience. He told his fellow competitors that union membership would bring higher purses, “a pension plan, death benefits, health and welfare benefits, a scholarship fund for children of deceased members, strong and meaningful complaint procedures and assurance of adequate safety conditions.” Within weeks the top drivers in NASCAR — including Fireball Roberts, Tim Flock, Ned Jarrett, Junior Johnson, Glen Wood, and Rex White — signed union cards. “The way Turner explained it to me, it sounds like a good deal for drivers, car owners and racing in general,” Wood told a reporter. “It will only cost me $10 to find out. I have been at races before when drivers would want to strike because of a low purse and a large crowd.” The only major holdouts were three-time Grand National champion Lee Petty and his son, rising star Richard, primarily because of their antipathy for Turner, Lee Petty’s bitterest racetrack rival. Despite the unwillingness of the Pettys to join, the union movement appeared unstoppable.

Turner and the Teamsters, however, had underestimated the determination and force of personality that Bill France would bring to opposing the union and protecting the sanctioning body he had birthed, nurtured and owned. The Glen Woods of racing soon found out that union membership would cost them much more than $10. Although France had grown up in the Washington, D.C., suburbs and lived in Daytona Beach, Fla., in his years promoting races in the Piedmont South he had learned a great deal about control of labor from the region’s mill owners. Indeed, the NASCAR boss employed practically every tried and tested method of keeping unions out, from threats and intimidation, to “yellow dog” contracts, to accusations of communism, to blacklisting.

When Turner went public with the union, France immediately flew to Winston-Salem to confront drivers before the Aug. 9 race at Bowman Gray Stadium. During an hour-long meeting he announced, “Gentlemen, I won’t be dictated to by the union.” Before he had “this union stuffed down [his] throat,” he swore he would shut down all the tracks in which he had a direct interest, plow them up and plant corn. He also pledged that no known union member could work in his organization. “And if that isn’t tough enough, I’ll use a pistol to enforce it. I have a pistol, and I know how to use it. I’ve used it before.”

France banned union members from competing in the next scheduled Grand National race at Asheville-Weaverville Speedway. He pointed out the problems unionization would produce: “If you unionize, any support from the factories will be withdrawn. And all of you car owners if you hire a mechanic, as you will, then you’ll have to pay him time-and-a-half on Saturday and double time on Sunday.” He argued that drivers were not employees of NASCAR but “independent contractors” and therefore responsible for their insurance and pension. France defended his actions by arguing that banning the union was a safety measure: Union drivers might threaten nonunion drivers during a race, coercing them to join. “A Fireball Roberts or a Curtis Turner will drive alongside you on the track and say, ‘Hey, you signed up yet?’ I’m not going to allow that to happen. I’m protecting NASCAR drivers by not letting union members compete.” Finally, he dropped a bombshell when he revealed that Turner and the Teamsters planned to bring pari-mutuel betting to NASCAR racing. “As far as pari-mutuel betting is concerned, we know it won’t work with auto racing. Auto racing is a clean sport. We’ve never had a scandal. And I will fight any pari-mutuel attempt to the last tilt.”

According to Turner biographer Robert Edelstein, Turner and Tim Flock stood listening to France’s tirade outside an open window. At one point France averred that if a union was such a good thing then he’d join himself. Turner reportedly slid a union card through the window and said, “Here’s your application.” France shut and locked the window.

France offered drivers a chance to sign cards nullifying their union membership and proceeded to set up a special grievance board of drivers, promoters and car owners to deal with complaints. Almost all the drivers who had joined the union immediately pledged their allegiance to NASCAR and dropped out of the FPA. “I joined this union. And I’ve been thinking about it ever since,” mused 1960 Grand National champion Rex White at the time. “Drivers have legitimate beefs. And the drivers want a fair deal and more money. But let’s let this board France has appointed decide what’s good for racing, not some union.” When asked if his offer of amnesty applied to union officers Turner, Roberts and Flock, France replied, “Maybe. Just maybe. If they make an affidavit and swear on the Bible.”

France also launched a public offensive and issued a prepared statement that characterized his fight against the union as a defense of the nation and the Constitution. “A recent newspaper story suggests that I might be some rootin’, hootin’, shootin’ cuss, waving a pistol and itching to shoot up anyone who might disagree with me. Honest, I’m nothing like that. But I am an American who believes our constitution and our laws — and that bearing arms to repel invasion is a part of our great American Heritage.” To reporters, he clarified what he meant by repelling invasion: “I don’t think people realize the seriousness of this Teamsters move. There is only one promise I’ll make. And that is that I will always do everything I can to keep them from taking over the country. The ultimate aim of that man that’s heading the Teamsters [Jimmy Hoffa] is to control the country.”

In defense of the union movement, Roberts fired back: “Curtis and I fully realize just how far we have our necks stuck out. We know our careers in auto racing are at stake, but we’re not backing down. We’ve made no demands, made no moves other than to try and sign up drivers for the union. We must have grabbed Mr. France where it hurts, though, from all the things he’s said in the papers.” If drivers looked at how France tried to strong-arm the union leaders, Roberts continued, they would realize that their best interests lay in supporting the union. He argued further that affiliation with the Teamsters would give the FPA the leverage and backing needed to gain concessions from NASCAR that all the drivers agreed they needed.

France, however, marshaled his forces and overwhelmed the already weakened opposition. His longtime relationships with track owners — particularly those former bootleggers with whom he had built the sport — paid off as most jumped to his, and NASCAR’s, defense, both literally and figuratively. Clay Earles recalled a particularly tense period: “I went to every race … the Frances were afraid to go to the races. Back in that day the Teamsters Union had a real bad name. They had some rough people. And so I went to every race fully dressed [packing a gun] though they never did confront me.” Perhaps most important, Earles spoke on behalf of his fellow promoters to the drivers: “We cannot afford to run under a union. We can’t afford to have a race scheduled and have you people strike on us. That’s going to put us out of business. And if it puts me out of business, it puts you out of business.”

France traveled to Washington with Darlington track owner Bob Colvin and allegedly received assurances from an assistant attorney general that NASCAR was on solid legal footing. “Drivers are individual contractors according to the entry blanks they sign,” Colvin told reporters. “There is no form of union for individual contractors. We will have the FBI at Darlington for the Labor Day Southern 500. The law states that pickets, etc., for independent contractors are illegal and anyone participating in such or trying to stop the race will be liable for prosecution.” Colvin noted no irony in his and France’s desire to prevent union organizing at a Labor Day race.

The death knell for the movement sounded when Fireball Roberts succumbed to pressure, resigned as FPA president and severed ties with the union. The day after publicly defying France, he took a slow drive from Charlotte to Asheville, site of the next race. On the way, he made his decision: “My motives in the FPA were quite clear. I simply wanted to better the positions of race drivers, car owners, myself and racing in general. I can see now that by affiliating the FPA with the Teamsters that we could possibly accomplish more harm than good for racing. I feel if I do anything to hurt the least man in racing, I will be doing a disservice to my fellow drivers who have been my friends for 15 years. And I’ll have no part of it.” France welcomed his most popular star back into the fold: “I think in future years Fireball will regard this move as the best thing he ever did for sports in America.”

With Roberts’ defection, Turner and Flock stood alone against France. Turner’s gamble had failed, and as his biographer observed, he and Flock were “like the last two players in a round of poker that has become too rich for everybody else’s blood.” The NASCAR president banned both from NASCAR racing “for life.” They tried to hold out and filed a number of lawsuits against the organization, seeking injunctions to prevent their being blackballed. The courts dismissed all their petitions, and the ban stood. Bill France had won. Any factory owner could look with pride at the manner in which he defeated the union effort.

The race held at Asheville-Weaverville Speedway in the midst of the controversy demonstrated many of the problems drivers faced. Word of a possible confrontation between France and Turner attracted an unusually large crowd of more than 10,000. Though neither showed, the race generated a major confrontation of its own. About 60 laps into the 500-lap race, holes began to appear in Turn 4 of the recently paved track. “The holes soon became gaping monsters,” observed Asheville Citizen-Times reporter Bob Terrell. When Bunk Moore hit one on lap 208, bounced off the outside wall, careened into a temporary pit area, smashed through the pit wall, hit a pickup truck and injured a spectator in the process, officials threw the red flag, temporarily stopping the event. While track workers tried to sweep up debris and make repairs, Pat Purcell, executive manager of NASCAR, called all the drivers together. He informed them that because of track conditions the drivers would run only 50 more laps and left them with the reassuring thought: “I hope you can make it.” Officials failed to tell the spectators that they had shortened the race.

When the flagman threw the checkered flag at lap 258, pandemonium broke out. Four thousand enraged fans blocked the track exits to prevent the drivers from leaving. “I paid five bucks to see a 500-lap race. Somebody owes me some laps or some money,” one member of the mob demanded. “Fist fights broke out in the crowd,” Terrell observed. “Someone was thrown in the lake at the western end of the infield, and two persons who attempted to quiet the crowd were heaved bodily from the track over the pit wall.” Part of the mob hoisted a pickup truck and placed it across the exit road, trapping drivers and crews inside the track for 3 ½ hours. Sheriff’s deputies called to the scene failed to disperse the crowd. Finally, 6-foot-6, 285-pound Pop Eargle, a crew member for car owner Bud Moore, approached the ringleaders to get them to let the drivers go. When one of the leaders jabbed him in the stomach with a 2-by-4, “Eargle grabbed the big piece of wood and whacked the mobster in the head.” Shortly after this incident, the crowd allowed the drivers to leave. Local hospitals treated four individuals for injuries incurred in fights, and deputies arrested three members of the mob. As they finally headed for their homes, the drivers had to wonder whether they had not made a big mistake in failing to back the FPA.