From Athens- Friday Thoughts

Buc, chances are they were in business with your relatives.

stevedawg wrote: Buc, chances are they were in business with your relatives.

stevedawg, I have lead a very "eventful" life. Have seen both sides of many issues. After reading all of the posts in this thread, appears many regulars have done the same.

When we farmed in Midland, Georgia, there were two very big creeks on our property. Promise you that there were several "steels" along the creeks that had the axe cuts through the metal.

Probably some have never heard about this, but in the 1950's there was a group in Atlanta that bought some bad shine from North Georgia, different "stuff" put into the steels and ended up causing several cases of blindness and deaths as best I remember. Folks living in the country knew "their shine man" and never had problems with bad whiskey. Anything for a buck. Was a big story in the 1950's.

In the 1950s moonshining was quite prevalent in the south. In the decade of 1954 to 1964 more than 72,000 stills were destroyed by federal agents in North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama and Mississippi.



Some on this board probably know that Junior Johnson of NASCAR fame was heavily involved with "white whiskey".

Another famous moonshiner operated in Wilkes County North Carolina in the 1950s and 1960s. Willie Clay Call bragged that “my daddy was a moonshiner, and my grandpa was in it too”. His good friend Junior Johnson, whose own father ran a still, learned to drive fast by running shine. “Out on the highway, you’re a-runnin’ for your life.” He goes on to brag, “They never caught me a-hauling.” The revenuers did catch him once while working his father’s still and he did eleven months in the pen.