Films Featuring North Carolina (With an original focus on Chapel Hill)

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heelinhell said:
That movie was based on the life of NASCAR great Junior Johnson from Wilkes County who ran moonshine as a young lad. He actually had to serve some prison time after getting arrested for running moonshine.
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If Junior Johnson’s Wikipedia page is accurate, his conviction was for having an illegal still, not running ‘shine. Supposedly, he was never caught transporting moonshine. He’d already won several NASCAR races when he was arrested for the still.
 
Zoo_View said:
If Junior Johnson’s Wikipedia page is accurate, his conviction was for having an illegal still, not running ‘shine. Supposedly, he was never caught transporting moonshine. He’d already won several NASCAR races when he was arrested for the still.
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I stand corrected :)

The good news is that Reagan pardoned him in 1986.
 
The film was released in 1958 while Tom Wolfe didn't write his famous article about Junior Johnson until 1965...probably the other way around, i.e., the film turned Wolfe's attention to that world where he found Johnson and wrote about his life.

Here is the Wolfe Article, titled: "The Last American Hero": The Last American Hero Is Junior Johnson. Yes! | Esquire | MARCH 1965

There was a film about Johnson made in 1973 spun off of the article.
 
heelinhell said:
That movie was based on the life of NASCAR great Junior Johnson from Wilkes County who ran moonshine as a young lad. He actually had to serve some prison time after getting arrested for running moonshine.
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One summer while in college, I worked a job where my direct supervisor (a black man) had previously been a moonshine runner and the evening security guard (a white man) was a retired policeman. Sitting in the breakroom hearing them swap stories about when one of them had fooled the other was just memorizing. I so wished I had written those stories down as soon as I had gotten home. But I didn't. When one of them would tell a story about when the other was fooled, the one that was fooled would just burst out laughing at the memory. For example, my supervisor told a story about getting pulled over by the former policeman and once he stopped, he got out of his car and immediately popped open his trunk to show he wasn't transporting any moonshine. And then added, "You never even looked in the back seat, that was full of crated bottles of moonshine." The former policeman just burst out laughing. None of the stories were about souped-up cars. It was all stealth and misdirection.

And the stories the guys at my Dad's store would tell about delivering sugar before there were reporting requirements were wild. Stuff like backing up a truck, carrying an entire load of 100 lb bags of sugar, to another truck and shifting the entire load from one truck to the other. By the time I was working in my Dad's store, i.e., after I had my driver's license, the limit on daily purchases of sugar before reporting was required was 250 pounds. One of my Dad's customers would come in every day and buy four cases of 10-pound bags of sugar (240 pounds, 6 ten-pound bags per case.) After the reporting guidelines kicked in, my Dad stopped selling 100-pound bags of sugar because moonshiners were the only customers buying the 100-pound bags.

When the price of sugar spiked in the early to mid 1970's, due to market speculation, it just wiped out the entire moonshine industry in Eastern NC. All those years the feds tried to stop it and it was finally unintentionally crushed by some NYC finance bros speculating on the price of sugar.
 
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My Deddy knew who all the moonshiners were in our neck of the woods -- he ran a hardware store. My grandpa made, that's how he got the nickname of Applejack. My Deddy didn't drink...at least not by the time I came along.

BTW, I grew up 3-miles from The Devil's Tramping Ground...it was moonshiners that did most of the scaring off people from that historic site.
 
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