Moonshiners And Revenuers Reunion--WSJ

Moonshiners And Revenuers Reunion--WSJ

By the time ATF agent Bob Powell served in Wilkes County in the 1970s, Junior Johnson had long since left moonshine running for NASCAR.

"Back in Junior's heyday, if I'd been after him I know I'd a caught him," Powell said Tuesday night after a group of former bootleggers drove their vintage cars down a long dirt road in Wilkes County as well as took to a stage to swap tales with retired revenuers.

Johnson laughed when asked about Powell's comment. "I do not know why he couldn't get after me, because I was on the road all the time."

Terri Parsons, the widow of former Winston Cup champion Benny Parsons, organized the light-hearted session as a way to recall the roots of NASCAR.

"They took an illegal occupation and turned it into the number one sport in the country," she said.

Several hundred individuals gathered in a field near the weathered wooden house where Benny Parsons was raised. They sat on hay bales to listen to the stories as smoke curled from a moonshine still set up across the creek.

Sitting in rocking chairs on one side of the stage were bootleggers Junior Johnson, Willie Clay Call, Millard Ashley, Don Call, Dean Combs, James Willard Shew and Clarence Benton. On the other side were retired revenue agents Bob Powell, Bob Gram, Charles Mercer, Will Blocker and Tommy Chapman.

They had shared a meal earlier, eating barbecue. But dinner wasn't filled with the kind of backslapping reminiscences that people saw during the stage show. The moonshiners and revenuers mostly segregated themselves, Powell said later, with no laughter or storytelling. He described it as more a relationship of tolerance than camaraderie.

But the real-life revenuers and bootleggers did enjoy a mutual respect back in the day.

Mercer remembered his last day on the job in 1974, when he staked out Willie Clay Call, a man he called "uncatchable."

Mercer walked for two or three hours behind Call's place, waiting in vain for him, before having a fellow agent pick him up. Then Call came out to visit them. "I understand you're leaving," Mercer remembers Call telling him, then saying, "I really appreciate the way you've done your job."

For those who think that moonshine's a thing of the past, authorities made one of the area's biggest seizures just last week, finding 929 gallons kept in storage, but no still. There's big money in selling moonshine, with people up North purchaseing it as a delicacy or novelty, authorities say. People in Wilkes offer it to trusted visitors.

The lost tax revenue is not so much the issue now, as are health concerns.

In February, authorities seized and blew up the moonshine still that Dean Combs was running in an outbuilding in the shadow of the old North Wilkesboro Speedway. Authorities didn't buy his explanation that the 200 gallons of corn liquor they found was for cold medicine.

Combs said that moonshining was really hard work, lifting sugar and doing the jugging, but the product kept his seasonal allergies at bay.

"Last year I didn't have a bit of problem," he said. "Now I don't know what I'm going to do."

It's hard to imagine deputies and methamphetamine dealers sitting down together decades from now to joke about it all.

But moonshine is different, accepted for centuries as a way for respectable farmers to make extra cash. Alcohol, although a drug, was socially acceptable then and now, in a way that recreational drugs aren't.

Some moonshiners didn't drink alcohol. Some revenue agents did.

Bruce Stewart, an assistant professor of history at Appalachian State University in Boone, writes that the distillers were well-respected members of the community during the Civil War "when the U.S. Congress attempted to balance the national budget by creating the Internal Revenue Service to collect taxes on liquor, tobacco and other 'luxuries.'"

Stewart's book King of the Moonshiners: Lewis R. Redmond in Fact and Fiction tells how writers looking for colorful stories created a myth of a moonshiner hero despite the fact that Redmond shot and killed a U.S. deputy marshal in 1876.

Retired agent Gram said the Wilkes County version of moonshine and revenuers wasn't violent when he was here. "It was like a game," he said. "No guns involved. It was a chase."

As far as who had the best cars, Johnson said it was no contest. "Bootleggers had the best cars," he said. "They had the money to buy the souped-up parts, and there really wasn't no comparison."