Moonshine Days
A Story of Bootlegging in the Hills of Southern West Virginia
(This article was originally published September 24, 2022, in the Southern Spice section of the Times-Georgian)
Well, between Scotch and nothin’, I suppose I’d take Scotch. It’s the nearest thing to good moonshine I can find. ~ William Faulkner
Moonshine, the Southern elixir of life, has many names — some disparaging, some inspiring: corn mash, white lightning, hooch, bathtub gin. In the Appalachian countryside of the 1940s and 1950s, hard-working “hill-people” struggled to eke out a living as harsh climate, formidable terrain, and greedy governments and corporations conspired against them. Career choices were few: vegetable farmer, timber mill worker, coal miner.
The coal miner gave up daylight hours and healthy lungs to earn his salary, not in paper currency, but in “coal scrip,” redeemable only at the coal company’s shop. The song “Sixteen Tons” bemoans the fate of the miner who “sold [his] soul to the company store.” While the local man sacrificed himself for the betterment of his family, the coal companies responded with deplorable conditions and exorbitant product prices, causing the miner’s tumbling descent into debt that he would never escape until his death.
“Hooch, ” however, bought blankets, milk, and shoes for wives and children. It put food on the table when, quite frankly, coal mining and farming couldn’t. Moonshining was the inevitable outgrowth of an economic system designed to oppress even the most hard-working citizens.
“Running shine, ” it turns out, formed the foundation of NASCAR racing with the whiskey runners who sought to avoid tax revenuers during Prohibition and beyond. And the moonshine business provided the underpinning of my family’s financial livelihood in rural West Virginia.
It still confounds me that bootlegging figured so prominently in my family’s history. My deeply devout primitive Baptist grandfather and great-grandfather ran a still and sold shine on their land for years, even after they got caught, punished, and served their time.
Moonshine Making and Family Consequences
The year was 1943. My grandfather had worked in the timber mill and the mines. Neither agreed with him, so he had turned to the third option afforded young men in southern Appalachia at the time: farming. It didn’t pay all of the bills, so he “supplemented” the family income by making shine.
Grandpa was arrested for making and selling moonshine. At the time, he was married (to his first wife, not my grandmother) and had four kids. He was 32 years old. According to the arresting agent, he had two choices: 1. Go directly to jail; or 2. Join the army.
He was not alone. My grandfather was in cahoots with my great-grandfather. Both of them were arrested by Officer England, a lawman who would hound them both throughout their moonshine careers, and, ultimately, make peace with the mountain ways and even attend my great-grandfather’s visitation and funeral.
Both my grandfather and great-grandfather chose to enlist. They opted to take their chances in World War II instead of facing jail time.
My great-grandfather, a tall, lanky, hard-working farmer, spun the wheel of chance and accepted his fate as a truck driver in Italy in World War II. Not great, but certainly not a terrible assignment. He served his time and returned to the States with no injuries and no time spent in direct combat.
My grandfather did not fare so well.
Grandpa enlisted as a combat infantryman and saw action in Northern France, the Ardennes, and the Rhineland. He found himself at Normandy merely days after the D-Day landings.
It was a harsh penalty to pay for running a still and selling a bit of “shine.”
In the Battle of the Bulge in December of 1944, my grandfather fought on foot, always just a few steps ahead of the enemy, and ended up in a foxhole in the brutal Central Europe winter. He froze. They all did. The end of the war was oh-so-near, but he couldn’t see it. How could he know? For him, the present was all-consuming, dangerous, and freezing, yet he did his job without complaint.
However, he vowed he would never be that cold again. Years later he would tell my grandmother, “I froze in the war and swore I’d never be cold again. Help me throw some more logs on the fire.”
He also made a bargain with the Lord. If he could only make it home to God’s country, West Virginia, he would never leave again. With few exceptions, he held to that tenet for the rest of his life.
Grandpa was injured in a tank accident for which he would ultimately be awarded a Purple Heart. He spent months convalescing in a hospital in Belgium, only returning stateside after the war.
He made his way home, only to find his then-wife ushering out a “gentleman caller” she had become friendly with while he was away. To be frank, she was pushing her lover out the back door as my grandfather was coming in through the front door. (She gave birth to a baby a few short months later.)
Needless to say, he divorced her forthwith and went on to marry my grandmother in 1947.
Back to the Hooch
My mom can’t remember when my grandfather got back into the moonshine business, but from what she can recall, that “shine” money bought coats, shoes, school supplies, and food for the table.
People came from all around, she said. White folks and folks of color alike — a rare occurrence in West Virginia in those days. Didn’t matter. My grandfather served them all from a hidden still.
My mom had no idea where the still was and, when pressed, said she couldn’t find it to this day.
My grandmother kept a bit of “shine” in the house for “medicinal purposes” only. My mother tasted it once — that was enough. She nearly retched from the intensity and burn of it.
How did they learn to make it? Who taught them the secrets of crafting shine and creating the still? How did people know they were doing it? These are the questions that plague me still, so many years later. As is often the case with family history, anyone who could answer these questions is now long gone.
The older I get, the more often I find myself in the unenviable and impossible position of longing for departed loved ones to sit beside me so I could ask them these burning questions. I’ll have to settle for taking on the role of recorder and storyteller myself, writing what I know, and adding “Moonshine Days” as another chapter in my family’s history.
