THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, August 27, 1995 TAG: 9508240727
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J3 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BILL RUEHLMANN
LENGTH: Medium: 87 lines
Devil drivers on the mountain roads!
Junior Johnson started transporting liquor when he was 14 years old. ``If you was ridin' with Junior,'' an associate testified, ``you'd have to change britches.'' Johnson hauled 'shine from Georgia to Mississippi, mastering racing skills that would translate on the track into 50 Grand National victories.
Curtis ``Pops'' Turner, who made his first rum ride at 10, ran whiskey cars in caravans; he used to steal sugar from the Little Creek Naval Station at Norfolk during World War II, trade it for moonshine and sell that to sailors. When authorities sought to stop him at the gate with a 500-pound load of the sweet stuff, he crushed through the barricade and made it all the way to Roanoke before they caught him. Turner would later tally 17 NASCAR wins and, at 43, break the 180 mph barrier at Daytona.
Nor were the revenuers slouches, either.
Take large, tough Kentuckian William Bernard ``Big Six'' Henderson, who raided more than 5,000 stills over an energetic career and personally placed in the slammer upwards of 5,600 moonshiners. ``Big Six,'' protested one aggrieved miscreant, ``damn if you don't follow me around like a hound dawg! I just wisht I could be some place you wasn't!''
``You will be,'' responded the lawman with confidence, ``and soon.''
These are only a few of the cavalcade of rough-cut back-country stars who shine among the luminous pages of Moonshiners, Bootleggers & Rumrunners (Motorbooks, 192 pp., $24.95) by Norfolk author and irrepressible foible collector Derek Nelson.
``It's kind of a story about human nature,'' he notes.
Nelson, 45, who has written an array of offbeat books with wit and wonder on subjects from golf to military history, subscribes at midlife to the Elvis Costello world view:
Human nature.
I used to be disgusted,
But now I'm just amused.
``People have such tremendous propensities for weakness and courage, stupidity and strength,'' Nelson says.
It's all here in Moonshiners, an informative and entertaining account of U.S. citizens doing battle with the law about booze. Seasoned researcher Nelson, editor-in-chief at the Naval Safety Center, Norfolk, started at the Old Dominion University Library and ended at the Library of Congress, with extensive correspondence, travel and in-person interviews between. His purpose: to illuminate ``a great American saga that began before the American revolution, reached a crescendo during the Prohibition era and continues today.''
Mission accomplished. Blue John, white mule, dead man's dram; the book demonstrates how the stuff was made, transported and alternately consumed and spilled across the eras. Of typical interest is Prohibition's Isadore ``Izzy'' Einstein, the 5-foot, 225-pound ``Lon Chaney of the bootlegger-busters,'' who first established himself as a member of a private club for actors on New York's 48th Street as Ethelbert Santerre, then raided the joint.
``Einstein,'' writes Nelson, ``carried a stopwatch and calculated how long it took to get a drink in the various cities he visited during his official perambulations: Chicago, 21 minutes; Baltimore, 15 minutes; Pittsburgh, 11 minutes. The record was in New Orleans, where he once got a drink from a cab driver in 35 seconds.''
The captions to the lavish and fascinating photographs are alone worth the price of admission:
Tourists fool around on the battered remains of Annie L. Spindler. The craft was built in 1910 in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, and was owned by Henry Amiro of Yarmouth. On December 1922, near Cape Cod, it foundered with a cargo of liquor, which was promptly plundered by the local populace.
It is fair to see Nelson's sometimes funny, sometimes violent panorama as a kind of metaphor for American hypocrisy. We, as a nation, adopted the 18th Amendment of the Constitution, which forbade the sale of alcoholic beverages. And we, as a nation, ignored it.
Entrenching further, as an offshoot, not only general disrespect for official legality but organized crime as well.
``Just think,'' suggests Nelson, a bemused chronicler of our multifarious folly, ``about the amazing things that could have been accomplished with the amount of time and energy people have put into alcohol. MEMO: Bill Ruehlmann is a mass communication professor at Virginia Wesleyan
College. ILLUSTRATION: Photo
Norfolk author Derek Nelson
by CNB