Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, October 11, 1993 TAG: 9310090046
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BY BOB ZELLER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: GREENSBORO, N.C. LENGTH: Long
One day last year, former Wilkes County moonshiner Willie Clay Call arrived at Junior Johnson's race shops in Ingle Hollow with an unexpected guest.
"Do you remember me?" the man asked.
"By God, I won't ever forget you," Johnson said, instantly recognizing retired revenuer Joe Carter, the federal Alcohol Tax Unit agent who had chased him down and arrested him for moonshining in 1956.
They hadn't seen each other in more than 30 years, but the impact they had on each other's lives in the rugged 1950s, when Wilkes County called itself the moonshine capital of the world, had created a bond that three decades could not erase.
They were like two old war veterans from opposing armies, linked forever in a shared experience so vivid and real, the passage of time could only bring them closer together.
"I was surprised he treated me with the courtesy he did," Carter says. "In fact, he showed me through the shop and he gave me one of those commemorative pocket knives from Ford Motor Company."
Carter, in turn, sent Johnson one of the desktop miniature copper stills he had bought from a retired Eastern North Carolina moonshiner who makes them.
Both men knew that making moonshine, as well as catching moonshiners, was the hardest work they had ever done. But it had been the time of their lives.
For Johnson, however, moonshining has carried a lifelong debt.
This year, it came back to haunt him in a seven-month battle with his ex-wife, Flossie Clark Johnson, over the Ingle Hollow property they had amassed in their years together.
Lifelong residents of Wilkes County, they had met as kids. As young teen-agers, they would sit in the balcony of the Wilkesboro movie house "and he would sit behind me, flip my hair or whisper in my ear," she wrote last year in her popular cookbook, "Flossie's Favorites."
Although Johnson was briefly married to another woman in 1949, he soon came back to Flossie. She is a friendly, generous, big-hearted woman, prone to shed tears at most anything sad or happy.
But as a moonshiner, and even as an ex-moonshiner, Johnson avoided being linked to anything that could be seized by the government to satisfy fines or liens for unpaid whiskey taxes. That led him to put all of their property in Flossie's name. And although they considered themselves married from the mid-1950s, they did not legally tie the knot until 1975.
As Johnson reaped years of success as a NASCAR driver, then car owner, their fortune grew.
By Oct. 27, 1992, when Junior was granted the divorce he requested, their 26-acre Ingle Hollow spread that included their home and the shop that houses his No. 11 Ford Thunderbird cars driven by Bill Elliott, was worth $1 million.
And all of it was in Flossie's name.
The strategy has proven doubly ironic, for it not only caused him grief in 1993, it never stopped the government from getting its due.
In 1969, some 10 years after he stopped moonshining, Johnson paid an unspecified amount in IRS tax liens.
And in 1974, when the Department of Justice launched a campaign to collect unpaid criminal fines, Johnson became a target.
Eighteen years earlier, when he was sent to prison in 1956, Johnson had served an extra 30 days after swearing that he had no money to pay the fine. But the government claimed in 1974 that serving the extra 30 days did not absolve him from paying the fine.
Johnson was subpoenaed to a hearing in Greensboro on July 3, 1974, one day before the Firecracker 400 in Daytona.
"They engaged in dirty tactics," he says today. "I know what they thought was I'd just send the $5,000 rather than leave Daytona to come to court," Johnson says. "But I felt like I didn't owe that $5,000 because I did the 30-day deal for it. And I went to great lengths to try to do what was right with it."
He told the court he didn't have the money.
By then, he was one of Wilkes County's most successful chicken farmers and businessmen, with a racing operation that had won almost $1 million in race purses since 1966, not to mention sponsorship dollars.
Johnson showed how nothing was in his name, but the court did not accept his testimony.
"I think they was at the point they were going to garnish my wages at the race track or something, so they was going to get their money one way or the other. So I just paid 'em, and I still don't think I owe 'em," he says."
In 1985, however, he received a pardon from President Ronald Reagan.
"I felt like I had justly earned the pardon," Johnson says. "I did think that over my lifetime I had justly paid for what I had done. I didn't think I needed to keep payin' for it the rest of my life.
"It was more than just window dressing. You're not a citizen of the United States [without it]. I couldn't vote, couldn't have a gun. I was probably a pretty bad violator of the gun law because I hunted a lot."
In the large trophy room of the home Johnson has abandoned in Ingle Hollow, a certificate dated Dec. 26, 1985, hangs on the wall.
"Be it known that this day, the president has granted unto Robert Glen Johnson Jr., also known as Junior Johnson, a full and unconditional pardon . . ."
But the room that heralded his many successes seems empty now that Johnson no longer uses it.
He left Flossie on Aug. 16, 1991, after she confronted him with the rumor that he was having an affair with 28-year-old Lisa Day, who had been raised just up the road from Ingle Hollow.
The fateful call, Flossie says, that brought "the most devastating thing ever in my life," came from someone who identified herself only as "the other woman." But she said she had been abandoned, too, and she was calling to tell Flossie "who he's leaving you for."
"I thought that part of Junior was over with," she says today. "I guess I was naive about that part. When you're in sports and racing, I know how it is. But he never brought any of those girls home with him, and I never worried about it. I wasn't calling the race track or the motels all the time trying to chase him down or find out what he was doing."
"Junior always told me he loved me more than anything in the world. He never missed a day that he didn't tell me . . . even the day that he left."
On that day, as he left, she told him, "What a tangled web we weave."
And he replied, "Ain't that so."
For a time it appeared as if the property settlement would be amicable. But Flossie would not agree to his request to put the Ingle Hollow spread, which was in her name alone, into Junior Johnson and Associates, which they have owned 50-50 since the mid-1980s.
After consulting a lawyer, she says she told him: "I'm not going to do that, Junior. You've told me many times that this property was mine and to not to let anyone take it from me. And I don't know why you want me to do that now."
And so the battle began.
"If he was in my shoes, do you think he would be content to sit there and take what I'm takin'?" she said earlier this year, before they settled the case.
When Johnson filed for divorce on Sept. 22, 1992, he and his lawyers asked that 50 percent of the Ingle Hollow property be put in a trust, arguing that half of it was rightfully his.
But Flossie and her lawyers said it was all hers. And on Feb. 23, 1993, state District Court Judge Samuel L. Osborne agreed.
In order to claim half the property, Johnson had to show he had "clean hands," the judge wrote. But he was a moonshiner whose tactics "as a matter of law," gave him "unclean hands." The fact that he eventually paid the debts and was pardoned did not change the judge's mind.
"It goes back to the liquor days," Johnson said, "but I've been pardoned from that. But this judge don't recognize that. And that's just another case where I'm still payin' for getting caught moonshining."
Johnson appealed the judge's ruling, and throughout the summer, he was defiant. "I can live without it," he said. "I can walk away from it anytime I want to. There's a principle about this the same as anything else."
Johnson says no one knew how the appeals court was going to rule. In any event, last month they both decided to end the fight and signed the settlement papers on Sept. 17.
Essentially, Junior keeps the two race teams and their assets, including the Ingle Hollow shops and land; Flossie keeps their home and chicken farm, which are next to the shops.
Junior says they also evenly divided other property and assets.
"I wanted to get on with my life, and I wanted her to get on with her life," he says.
It was clear that as hurt as she was, Flossie did not want to fight. And it was also clear that she stood to lose as much as he did even if she prevailed.
If Johnson's appeal had failed, and he lost the Ingle Hollow property, he undoubtedly would have moved the race team out of there.
And a big part of Flossie's life is her close friendships with the crew members. They often come to the house to visit, and she is always ready for them with some of her legendary home cooking. She wanted that to continue.
1993 has not been an easy year for Johnson on the race track, either. Neither of his cars, with Elliott and Hut Stricklin as drivers, have won yet, making it more and more likely that this could be the first year Johnson will be shut out since 1967.
But there other distractions besides the divorce, including his marriage to Day in December, his open-heart surgery in March, the news of Lisa's pregnancy in April and the birth of their son, Robert Glen Johnson III, in August.
Life is vastly changed in Wilkes County, too, compared to the 1950s.
In the early 1960s, Holly Farms built a chicken-processing plant in Wilkesboro and began sponsoring Johnson's cars. And over the next few years a haven for moonshining was transformed into a home for chicken farming.
"It was a life saver," says ex-moonshiner Thurmond Brown. For the first time in its history, rural Wilkes County had a solid, legal economic base. Those who didn't raise chickens could get a job at the plant.
It was a good thing, too, because moonshining was becoming a lot tougher, with fewer markets and longer prison terms for those who were caught.
But moonshining gets in the blood, and for some, it was impossible to quit.
Junior's father, Glen, a kindly man who was an extremely shrewd moonshiner, but also too trusting, was caught again in 1960. It was his eighth conviction, but he appeared in such poor health, the judge was lenient and placed him on probation.
Johnson's lawyer told the judge he "only wanted to live out his remaining days in peace, with his family."
Thirteen months later, however, Johnson was caught at another still with almost 400 gallons of moonshine. He went back to prison for five years. After his release in 1967, Junior got him a job at Holly Farms, where he worked until his death on Aug. 21, 1968.
Today, both retired agents and ex-moonshiners seem determined to keep the memory of that era alive.
Carter, injured 11 times on the job, took a disability retirement in 1973. In 1989, he published his memoirs, entitled, "Damn The\ Allegators." He lives outside Albemarle in a sprawling stone house on a small hill at the end of a long, snaking driveway.
Willie Clay Call, the ex-bootlegger who took Carter to see Johnson, made a good living at the illegal trade and today lives outside North Wilkesboro in a beautiful, sprawling home on a hill at the end of a long, snaking driveway.
His huge garage houses a fleet of beautifully restored 1940 Fords - the ultimate bootlegger's car.
Flossie Johnson is looking to the future, writing a second cookbook she expects to be published for Christmas or perhaps the 1994 Daytona 500 next February.
And at Junior Johnson's race shops in Ingle Hollow, a small framed picture sits above the reception desk. It is the 1935 photograph of Glen Johnson's big bust, with hundreds upon hundreds of cases of moonshine sitting outside Johnson homestead.
Today, more than 50 years later, it is still considered today the largest inland seizure of illegal moonshine in American history.
Keywords:
AUTO RACING PROFILE
by CNB