On a Saturday night in June 2025, the Dawsonville Pool Room posted a notice for the neighbors: "No, that is not a tornado warning. Chase Elliott wins at @EchoParkSpdwy and we are letting all of Dawsonville know!" Chase had just passed Brad Keselowski on the last lap of a Cup race near Atlanta, his first points win in more than a year, and the news was now coming off the roof of a burger joint.
The tornado comparison wasn't new. "It's as loud as our emergency tornado warning," Gordon Pirkle's grandson told NASCAR.com in 2014. "It's no little siren." It has no civic duties at all. It exists to tell a small Georgia town that an Elliott has won a race, "no matter the time of day or night," as one race report put it, and it got the job in 1983, when it was a piece of junk sitting on a floor.
An extension cord and a deputy
Pirkle opened the Pool Room on the Dawsonville square in 1966. According to the Georgia Racing Hall of Fame, he wanted a shrine to the area's early racers, so the walls filled up with newspaper clippings. He'd known George Elliott all his life. George's sons Ernie, Dan and Bill ran a family race team out of a shop eight miles away, and they were regulars at the Pool Room when they weren't at the shop. Columnist Ronda Rich, who has known Pirkle for decades, writes that Richard Petty chuckled the first time he saw their car and their crew.
The chuckling had some support for a while. For seven seasons the Elliotts showed up at the bigger races and went home without a checkered flag. When the Cup series reached Riverside, California, for the 1983 finale, the Hall of Fame says Bill's winless streak stood at 115 races, with eight second places along the way. He spent the last laps worried about running dry. "The car was getting close on gas," he said afterward. "It had to be almost out."
Back home, Pirkle had a shop next to the Pool Room for the machines in his coin-operated amusement business. "The boys fixed up a back room there so they could watch the races," he told NASCAR.com. (Rich has them listening on the radio. Pick your favorite.) A late caution made it plain that their man was about to win. "Some of them boys talked about going around the courthouse the wrong way, blowing horns," Pirkle said. "They wanted to do something."
What he had was a siren. According to NASCAR.com it had come off a state patrol car, and he'd donated it to a volunteer fire department, which Rich identifies as the one at Liberty. When the department upgraded, it sent the siren back, and it landed in the junk room. So on November 20, 1983, Pirkle connected its wires to a drop cord, carried it outside and let it roar.
"Of course, the deputy sheriff pulled up wanting to know what was going on," Pirkle remembered, "and we told him Bill Elliott won the race."
Rich says it sounded for hours.
A permanent spot on the roof
By 1984, when Bill won three times, the siren was riding on the cab of a pickup truck. Then came 1985, which the Motorsports Hall of Fame calls one of the greatest seasons in auto racing history: 11 wins and 11 poles. Bill dominated the Daytona 500. At Talladega an oil fitting broke, and he made up two full laps with no caution flag to help him. At Darlington he beat Cale Yarborough by six-tenths of a second in the Southern 500, which earned him the Winston Million, a $1 million bonus from the series sponsor, and the nickname "Million Dollar Bill." His other one from that year, "Awesome Bill from Dawsonville," has lasted longer. By then the siren had a permanent position on the roof.
The town wasn't exactly set up for national attention. Dawsonville had no cable television, and the Pool Room was one of the few places with a satellite dish. Pirkle, who originally didn't open on Sundays at all, put out folding chairs around a 21-inch TV. People who couldn't get there picked up the phone. "We'd have calls from all over the country wanting to hear the sirens," he said. "And naturally as loud as this one is, if they called here, they could hear it."
Reporters came too, and he fed them. "While the Elliotts made history, Gordon made hamburgers," Rich wrote. Bill took the championship in 1988, and his last win came at Rockingham, North Carolina, on November 9, 2003. NASCAR.com says the siren marked all 44 of his Cup wins. Pirkle often recalled, according to the Hall of Fame, that he "hurt a lot of dog's ears." After that it went mostly quiet for about a decade, and the dogs got some rest.
Then the state showed up at lunchtime
The quiet years had other trouble in them. Around noon on Wednesday, May 9, 2012, agents from the Georgia Department of Revenue walked into the Pool Room, ordered everyone out and took possession. They collected the money from the registers, the safe and the gaming machines. The locks got changed, and yellow tape went across the windows. "They made people pay for their lunches but they didn't get a chance to eat their food," Pirkle told the local paper. He was out of town at a funeral when it happened.
The notice on the door listed $43,612 in delinquent taxes going back to April 2008, plus about $40,000 in penalties, interest and collection fees. "The last time we heard from them, they said we were down to about $30,000 we owed," Pirkle said. He blamed a former accountant, who in 2010 had been found guilty on felony theft counts for funneling client money meant for income taxes. Pirkle said he'd already been through a version of this around 2008 or 2009, when the state seized his bank account and the place ran on cash for about a month.
A volunteer group formed to save it. "It's not about helping an individual, but about the history of Dawsonville," said Robin Smith, one of the volunteers. The plans included a car and bike show and, our favorite, a beauty pageant in jeans and T-shirts, organized by a woman who had worked at the restaurant as a teenager and wanted girls without pageant dresses to be able to enter.
Pirkle got his keys back on June 21 and showed a reporter the ball of yellow tape. "It's a good feeling," he said. The doors reopened on September 1, nearly four months after the seizure, with new tile behind the bar and the same menu. Federal tax problems were still ahead, and the fundraising kept going. The manager, meanwhile, noticed something a little deflating about that first busy Saturday: "A lot of folks passing through on Saturday didn't even know we'd been closed."
The dishwasher
Bill and his wife Cindy had moved back to Dawsonville because their son wanted to race. When Chase Elliott was 13, his parents decided he should find out what a job was, so he went to work at the Pool Room for the summer. Pirkle let him leave early for the race shop on one condition, the same one he gave everybody who left early: the dishes had to be done first. "Every little break he'd get, he'd run back there to that sink and get the dishes washed up," Pirkle said. "He didn't want to be late getting to that shop, is what it was."
In April 2014, at 18, the former dishwasher had a shot at his first Nationwide Series win, on a Friday night in Texas. Pirkle was waiting back in Dawsonville with his hand on the siren, and he was delighted that Rusty Wallace said so on the air. But the crowd had thinned out. "We were down to about 10 people watching because the race had started so late," he said. Then Chase passed Kevin Harvick with 15 laps to go. "But gosh, they started coming back after that happened."
Chase's review of the family tradition was short. "It's loud," he said. He'd been too young to remember it for his father.
He won again the next Friday, and he clinched the series title that November at Phoenix. The Pool Room sounded the siren for that. A week later he finished 17th at the season finale in Homestead, and it sounded the siren again anyway, because that's when they handed him the trophy. One fan drove down from Sarnia, Ontario. A South Carolina couple spent their 18th wedding anniversary on Pool Room bar stools. "I got to hear the si-rene for Chase," Gewene Anderson said. "This is one of the greatest things to me in the world."
His first Cup win came at Watkins Glen in August 2018, a road course, after eight second places. His father's numbers and his father's kind of track, the Hall of Fame points out. Chase landed at the Dawsonville airport to find the place full of cars. "I don't know that many people," he said. That fall his No. 9 Chevrolet ran with a little siren drawn beside the door number, which pleased Gordon Pirkle Jr. enormously. "We made Chase's car!" he told his father.
COVID closed the Pool Room for more than five months in 2020, the longest shutdown in its history, and it came back on September 17. Gov. Brian Kemp turned up for a renovation celebration that month and looked at the weather. "I think this rain's a sign from the good Lord that this is a day for short speeches," he said. Six weeks or so later Chase won the Cup championship, the first one back to Dawsonville since 1988. Hundreds filled the street, and firetrucks and police cars added their own sirens. The police had come a long way since 1983. Pirkle said after the race, "I think the only way I could be happier is when he gets his eighth championship." The record is seven.
The sugar bill
All of this sits on top of an older and darker story. "Moonshine was Dawson's first industry," Pirkle told Rich. "Then came racing." He was born in the War Hill area of the county in 1936, and as a young man he tried both making it and running it. "Shoot, I tell anybody that asked, that makin' moonshine is the hardest work you'll ever do," he said. Running numbers is what actually caught up with him, and he served two years in federal prison. "I done it, I ain't proud of it but it learned me something."
The driver Dawsonville remembers from those days is Lloyd Seay, whose name, Wikipedia tells us, was pronounced "See." He ran whiskey over the mountain roads to Atlanta as a teenager, then raced for his cousin Raymond Parks alongside another cousin, Roy Hall. Rich quotes NASCAR founder Bill France on him: "Dale Earnhardt is the best driver I've seen since Lloyd Seay. Lloyd was the best." The stories get taller from there. Wikipedia passes along one deputy who claimed he'd caught Seay eight times and "had to shoot his tires off every time," and another who pulled him over and got handed two five-dollar bills for a five-dollar fine. "Yeah, but I'm gon' be in a hurry comin' back," Seay supposedly said, "so I'm payin' an advance." We can't confirm that one. We'd like to.
On Labor Day 1941 he won the National Stock Car Championship race at Lakewood Speedway in Atlanta and a purse of $450. He was 21. The next day his cousin Woodrow Anderson shot and killed him in a dispute over sugar for moonshine. Jay Busbee, writing from period newspapers and Neal Thompson's book on the era, puts the tab at $120.
Past that, almost nothing is settled. Rich read the trial transcript hoping for the final word and didn't get one. "Their accounts differed as much as day differs from night," she wrote of the two eyewitnesses. Anderson testified that the Seay brothers jumped him. Jim Seay, who was shot in the neck that day and survived, said the shooting started while they were in the car. Sources don't even agree on Lloyd's last words. When Anderson's testimony came out too perfectly detailed, the prosecutor asked him to recite "Mary Had a Little Lamb," and he couldn't. "I didn't see Mary had a little lamb," Anderson said. "I seen what happened to Lloyd." Busbee reports that a first trial ended without a verdict, and that a second jury found him guilty with a recommendation of mercy. Anderson got life and, by Busbee's account, parole in 1948.
Parks paid for the monument. It's in Dawsonville, and the Hall of Fame describes the clear outline of Seay's 1939 Ford on the stone, with his picture on porcelain fixed to the car's window. Pirkle, in his years as the town's unofficial press office, took reporters out to see it. Downtown, the street signs still carry Seay, Hall, Parks and Gober Sosebee, and the Pool Room's own address is 9 Bill Elliott Street.
Siren, si-rene, si-reen
Nobody has settled the spelling either. The Dawson County News has printed "si-rene." The Pool Room writes "si-reen" and NASCAR.com once rendered it "si-REEN," to get the Pirkles' stress right. Dale Earnhardt Jr. took up the matter on his podcast after the 2025 win. "I never even heard of a si-reen," he said. "Where does that even come from? This is Georgia we're talking about."
The one that marked Bill's wins has since been replaced. By 2014 a newer, louder model was doing the work from a black-and-white pole on the back corner of the roof, and people on the outskirts could hear it from their back porches. Christie Moore, the county chamber president, said in 2020 that when she travels and says she lives in Dawsonville, she gets asked, "Can you hear the Pool Room siren from your house?"
After a win at Dover in 2018 it ran for nearly half an hour. That same season, cars started parking en masse in front of Dawsonville Antiques one Sunday, and the store manager wasn't sure what she was looking at. "At first we were a little bit nervous, but everybody looked happy and they were rejoicing," she said. Mayor Mike Eason, asked about all this, conceded that "it probably could violate the noise ordinance," then added, "I haven't heard anybody complain."
The same NASCAR.com visit found a stricter rule inside. A pool ball that hit the checkerboard floor cost you $1, payable to the tip jar.
