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A Lifetime of Gardens

I sometimes find myself wondering why I even bother with making a garden. It would be hard enough with an acre of bottom land next to a creek, but it is hell making an Appalachian “side hill” garden. That’s all we’ve had since we came into our Prime Hill property the year before I was born. So that’s over 50 years fighting rocky soil, Georgia red clay, and the steep terrain in general.  Always an avid reader and a historian of the rural South, I’ve spent my whole life reading stories of the poor subsistence farmers of the Appalachians scratching out enough food to feed a family from a mountain side. Tall tales of cattle with two legs shorter from walking across steep slopes all the time. It isn’t all untrue. A man has to be creative to grow a garden on the side of a mountain year after year. We have almost four acres of land. The only “flat” land is the front yard and a half-acre on the ridge top. So we made terraces. I use a BCS “walking tractor” with a rotary plow to contour and create natural berms to hold moisture and stop run off. Whatever it takes.

As I get older I try my best to prioritize my time. Late each winter I ask myself if I want to go to the trouble and physical labor to make a garden. As cheap as they are at the store, potatoes are more trouble than they’re worth. It’s the same with several other vegetables. I do know that my garden is organic, Roundup free, and no chemical fertilizers have been used in decades, but damn, it’s a lot of work. It would be a whole lot easier to just go to the store. But I really do it to help remember my people.

Paw Paw Jess (my grandfather on Daddy’s side of the family) used to work his fields pretty hard. The old Hopkins home place had some good bottom land. Paw Paw was a good farmer when he wasn’t knee-walking drunk. Daddy always told stories that when he was a boy, Paw Paw led the mule to the field, placed a quart jar of his moonshine at one end of the field and a quart of buttermilk under a tree at the other end. By the end of the day, Paw Paw was dog drunk and he’d done worked the mule half to death. Ironically, his biggest crop was always corn, which he turned into more liquor, which he also drank.

For some reason I don’t know as much about Mama’s side of the family. My Great-Grandfather Emmett Roberts built the first housing development in Jefferson, Georgia over a hundred years ago, but I don’t know anything else about him other than he was a respected member of the community. My maternal grandfather, Ernest Roberts, went to work “up north” right after World War Two. Henry and Alene Phillips of Rabun County had moved to the Pontiac, Michigan area sometime around the end of the war. They had several related businesses in the area, including some type of boarding house. They recruited drivers for RoadWay trucking. My “Grandpa Ern”, as I always called him, procured a job through the efforts of the Phillips family and began driving a big rig.  

Sometime in the late 1960’s, Grandpa Ern and his second wife, Grandma Lucy, moved back to Georgia, buying a few rural acres on the county line of Stephens and Habersham County. Behind their house was a big flat area of a few acres. The first thing Ern did was clear it and buy an old Ford 8N tractor. Him and Lucy always made one hell of a garden. They probably grew and put up most of their food every year. Ern was always fastidious with everything he did. He taught me how to shine shoes the right way. He kept his Florsheim shoes and side-zip boots polished and buffed to a mirror finish. He was always perfectly dressed (unless he was in the garden). When mowing grass or working the garden Ern broke out the very stylish one-piece, zip up coveralls. I have some of those myself, but Amy says she’ll file papers if she ever catches me wearing them. Maybe I’ll wear them on our next date night…

Ern always favored Pendelton shirts in wintertime. He was fanatical about maintaining his trucks. His garden was no different. I never, ever, saw a weed in it. Everything was always hilled, hoed, and looked like a photo from a seed catalog. Mama always said I got my anal-retentive and obsessive traits from him. Memories of his gardens are always a benchmark for me.

Well, Daddy was a drinker during my childhood, but not on a level that could match Paw Paw. Our side-hill garden tilling and plowing wouldn’t have ended well with a bunch of white liquor anyway. Somebody would’ve rolled the tiller or homemade tractor off the side of the mountain and ended up at Ridgecrest Hospital. Daddy made the most of what we had. There were four or five manmade terraces up behind the house where we planted our regular vegetables. Squash, okra, radishes, beans, cucumbers, and that type of stuff. Up on the ridge was where the potatoes and corn got planted.

The first crop I ever planted was in kindergarten. Our class took a field trip up to town to tour the farmer’s co-op. Monique Lunsford was a classmate of mine until we graduated from high school. Her parents, Rollin and Roanne ran the store. I loved the old feed and seed stores. Still do, but they’re few and far between these days. I still remember the way the co-op smelled, even after all these years. The Lunsfords let each of us kids pick out a pack of seeds to take home and plant. I chose a pack of watermelon seeds. I don’t remember the variety. I was excited to get them into the ground. We had a junky old front-tine tiller that Daddy used to till me my own “plot” at the edge of the garden. I threw the seeds in the ground and covered them with a rake. I was five, so the seeds were forgotten and they were never watered. I was too busy playing. Lo and behold, they came up. All of them. I bet we got at least 30 watermelons from that packet of seeds. They almost overran the entire garden. We ate them till we never wanted to see another one. We gave them away and still they kept coming. I’m surprised Daddy didn’t somehow use them to make liquor.

By the time I reached second or third grade we had moved our corn operation over to Nannie’s garden spot. My maternal grandmother, Arleisa Norton, known to everyone in the family as “Nannie”, lived a couple of miles away from us and had a prime creekside piece of flat bottom ground. Nannie, Daddy, and Mama planted it each year. She often kept me during those summers so I spent many mornings in the corn patch with her hoeing corn while I listened to her tell stories. Sometimes my friend Billy was roped into helping us. As an only child, Mama had to import playmates for me each summer.  Nannie and Billy are both gone now, and I’d give about anything to spend one more day in that corn patch with them.

Time marches on and I’m still playing in a garden. This year’s crops have been horrible with all the rain. The tomatoes were a complete bust. So were the Brussel sprouts, although I might get an autumn harvest of them. Cucumbers, squash, and zucchini have been ok, and the carrots are consistent. The daily storms have made a mess of it. I actually had to weed-eat the rows instead of hoeing and weeding by hand. I’m just re-planted the last of the squash and cucumber for the season, and I’ll get some autumn greens. Covers over the raised beds will give me carrots through most of the winter, so all isn’t lost.

And of course, I’m already planning on what can be done better next season. Hopefully it won’t involve an umbrella.

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Farming for Rocks

It’s that time of year again. Time for me to start working on the garden. And the first crop every year is always a rock crop. For almost 50 years I’ve picked rocks out of the garden. Fifty years. I’m getting old. Better than the alternative, I suppose. I believe our garden spot may be the rockiest place in Rabun County. I’ve been filling buckets full of gravel and rocks out of that mountaintop since I was four years old. And Daddy did the same thing for several years before that.

I’ve always envied the New Englanders and the beautiful stone walls surrounding their farms. Of course there’s a reason for those stone walls. Generations and generations ago the farmers pulled these rocks from their fields as they broke the new ground. And likely kept pulling rocks for several generations after the ground was first plowed. Those old codgers were resourceful and tenacious; I’ll give them that. The reason I’m jealous? At least they got beautiful stone walls from their efforts. All I get is bucket upon bucket of basically gravel.

My Sweet Wife doesn’t believe me, but I’m trying to be a “glass half full” kind of guy. I really am. The garden is located on top of a ridge with a steep access road, so all of my yearly rock crop gets put in the roadbed to fight the never-ending battle against erosion. So there’s that. And each year there seem to be fewer rocks to pick up. Glass half full… On the downside, I’ve found hundreds of arrowheads in the garden through the decades. Those seem to be getting few and far between. Can’t win them all. At least I don’t have to deal with the freezing winter weather and the spring mud of New England. Here’s to many more years of filling buckets with Georgia rocks. Glass half full. I’m trying, Sweet Wife, I really am.

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Weekend Loaferin’ and Shopping in the 70’s and 80’s.

A little more than a year ago I decided to just ride around after attending a memorial service for my college friend Todd Rock after his unexpected death. A ride down memory lane so to speak. It was pouring rain, so it wasn’t a good day to loafer, as we called it when I was a kid. I had driven down to Demorest for the service and decided afterward to check out Baldwin and Cornelia before making my way over to Toccoa to hit Harbor Freight.

 I spent my undergraduate college years at Piedmont College, long before it became a big time, full-blown “university.” I’m happy that it has grown, but I barely recognized anything while rambling through campus. I headed on down to Baldwin. It was always almost a ghost town. It can’t even be called that now. It’s gone. Of course, a Dollar General sprouted up at the corner of Hwy 441, likely the death knell for whatever businesses remained. Luckily, the Stew and Que is still around. It looks like the owners are doing a thorough remodel. I love that place and have eaten many  meals there in the last 50 years. Heck, for a couple of years a back booth served as an unofficial satellite office for me during my representation of several employees of the nearby Fieldale plant who were going through hard times.

 Seeing the Stew and Que brought back some memories. When I was a little boy, we usually didn’t have much money. That said, we always ate well when Daddy had steady work.  During the mid-to-late 1970s, he helped build a subdivision for the Murrell family somewhere around Baldwin. I guess that was when he discovered the Stew and Que. For a year or so we made the trip to downtown Baldwin on many weekend nights to eat supper. It was a big trip for me and was the longest trip we made to eat.

Once the hot lap of Baldwin was complete I traveled back into Cornelia from the south side. Other than the iconic Steak House being long gone, everything looked about the same, although the south end was significantly run down. As always, I looked around trying to figure out the former location of the White Spot. Mama always referred to it in her stories about running around Cornelia and Clarkesville during the 1950s. I’ve never figured out its location, or exactly what the business was for that matter. I think it was located on the site where an abandoned grocery store now sits. Driving into town I remembered other great businesses that are gone and will pass from memory with my generation. I’ve always been obsessed with old movie theaters. I remember being over the moon when the theater in Cornelia was renovated back in the early 1990s. It was short-lived. Unknown to me at the time, I was there for the final showing just a short time later.

Across the street was the former location of Johnny Gunn’s Barber Shop. I had several haircuts there while I attended Piedmont. Mr. Gunn was quite the character, as was Mr. Ken Martin in Demorest. Now that I think about it, most of the old barber shops had great characters.

Next up came Mount Airy. I’ve seen several photographs of the town back in its heyday. The grand hotels and restaurants were gorgeous. By the time I began attending Piedmont in 1990 the beautiful old hotels were gone for a couple of generations, replaced by package stores, beer joints, and pawn shops. I’m a Hopkins from Rabun County. I’ve seen my share of rough beer joints, often going into them looking for uncles to see if they were able to work with us the following day. The beer joints in Mount Airy were known to be rough on a whole different level, with even my uncles warning me to keep my ass out of them. For better or worse, it looks like even the Mount Airy places are shut down.

Next was a ride down what is now known as Dick’s Hill Parkway. I’ve climbed that “hill” too many times to count on bicycle rides back in the day. My grandparents lived close by on Rock Road. What was once a neat old, abandoned store owned by the Irvin family sat crumbling into the earth at the intersection of the two roads. At the bottom of the mountain, I headed into Toccoa. We did much of our out-of-town shopping there when I was a kid. Mama’s daddy and stepmother lived close to Toccoa and we often went down to see them on Sunday afternoons. We’d go into town and have gourmet seafood at Long John Silver’s. It was fine dining for us. I’d order the Peg Legs with “extra crinkles,” as I called them. I thought those crunchy bits tasted better than the actual chicken. Still do…

After getting our bellies full, we’d go shopping. Back in the 1970’s and 1980’s Toccoa was a hopping place. Some towns still had “blue laws” and most stores were closed on Sundays, but not Toccoa. There were numerous places to go back then. JC Penney, Kmart, and Sky City; Toccoa had them all. After making the rounds, usually just looking, as Mama and Daddy were too tight to spend money, we’d visit with my grandparents a little longer and head back to Clayton. It’s sad to see how Toccoa has died off during my lifetime. So many places have gone away. I especially miss Sam Sosebee’s restaurant downtown in the plaza. He made the best hotdogs ever. A relative of his opened the joint back up for a bit fifteen or twenty years ago, but it only lasted a short time. And then there was Ed’s Barbeque on the road back towards Hollywood. We sometimes rode down there to eat on Friday nights. I can’t remember anything about the food. I do remember he had a couple of kid-sized picnic tables up front. I always sat at one of them while Mama and Daddy sat further back. Good times.

Most of the old, native-owned stores and restaurants are long gone now, replaced by trendy upscale places owned by “move-ins”. I have to admit, some of these places are pretty neat, but they always seen to come and go. The owners just aren’t invested in our community long-term and move on to the next best place within a few years. While a few dwindling places remain as they’ve always been, about all that’s left are the memories, and even those have begun to fade.

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Snows of Winters Past

Last month we received the first snowfall of the year. It was the first snow since Amy and I moved into the “Apple House.” We both act like big kids most of the time, so you can only imagine how excited we get about the possibility of snow. After twenty years, I’m finally over my disdain for snow from living in Ohio for four years. Amy’s playfulness makes it fun again.

I thought about the snows of my childhood while we watched the snow come down that Friday afternoon. When I was a really little rascal, I didn’t believe snow was real. Mama and Daddy read me stories that mentioned it, and I had seen it in television shows, but it didn’t snow at our house. The first snow we had came just before my fourth birthday. Most of the snow fell during the night. I knew it was coming, but when I woke up and actually saw the white magic I almost lost my mind. Daddy picked me up in my Spider Man footed pajamas and threw me off the front porch into the yard. Good times…

As I’ve written before, Daddy and I had lots of fun in the snow when I was a kid. Being an only child with no other kids in our neighborhood, Daddy was my partner in crime when it snowed. He loved every minute of it. After Mama made us a big breakfast, we geared up to go play. Freshly oiled boots, long johns, and toboggans on my head. We sledded down the hill in the yard until we were wet, frozen, or both. After the first couple of snows, Mama decided we couldn’t come back into the house until the end of the day. She wasn’t going to clean up after us all day. No problem for us. We have a beautiful antique Home Atlantic parlor stove in the basement. Daddy would take the decorative dome off so it functioned as a cooktop. He would haul two coffeepots to the basement. One of them he used for coffee all day, the other held plain hot water so I could have Swiss Miss hot chocolate all day. Some of my best memories are of the time Daddy and I spent posted up in our 1970’s lawn chairs with our drinks just talking in front of the Home Atlantic. He told some of the best stories during those periods.

As the years passed, we began pulling sleds around the yard behind the four-wheeler, went sledding down the giant hillside at Uncle Rip’s house, often on an old car hood, and even sneaked onto the county golf course with Big John and Little John Dixon. By the age of twelve or thirteen, I was raising hell around in the snow riding the four-wheeler with Kerry Garland and Cecil Fountain. We’d ride all over Clayton and Warwoman, sometimes hitting the 20 Penny drive-thru maybe while pulling a sled. As the years went on, Daddy and I just rode the back roads taking pictures.

The allure of the recent snow was too much to pass up. I took the dog out right at dusk the day after the snowfall and the snow-covered hillside was irresistible. I found my childhood plastic sled buried under some junk in the basement. After digging it out of the pile, I went upstairs and fortified myself with a couple of adult beverages.  It took a few minutes, but I dared Amy into going into the dusk with me. It was just before dark; the old-timers called it the “gloaming.” We took turns hauling the sled up the hill and riding down. Much of our stuff is still in storage while the remodel continues, so we made do with our outerwear. My Sweet Girl flew down the hill wearing a fleece onesie and a pair of Muck boots. It was perfect.  Neither of us injured ourselves and we got our sledding fix for a while.

I’m not going to weigh in on global warming. All I know is every year I start the garden a little sooner and harvest veggies a little later into the fall. And the snows are few and far between. I miss them, along with many things of years gone by. I ran into Cecil Fountain right before the snow and tried to talk him into some mischief once the snow fell. No luck, but maybe next time. We’re still young…

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Wisdom Lost

Today would have been Daddy’s 81st birthday. He’s been gone for four and a half years already. I think about him a hundred times a day. It’s still hard to believe that he’s gone. Not a day goes by that I don’t get sad thinking about all the things we never got to do together, all the places we never got to go… The fly fishing trips we wanted to take. The backpacking and other camping trips we dreamed of taking together.

            I think of all the stories about his life that he still had to tell. During the final couple of weeks he lived he was still telling me new stories that I had never heard of his younger years, his exploits making liquor and mischief while running around in his hot rod 1956 Fords.

            Every day I need to ask him something. Whether it’s general life advice or how to do something, there’s always something.  Like most rural Appalachian folks of his generation, he knew how to do pretty much everything. An expert at cobbling things together to keep machinery and tools together without replacing them, I have no doubt that he saved thousands of dollars in repairs. When Amy and I cleaned up his house to sell after his death, she was amazed at his ingenuity. He had hand carved doorknobs, latches, and even hinges at his house.  

            I’ve been a woodworker for 40 years, and still need his knowledge daily. I wish I had another 20 years with him to learn more woodworking skills from his vast store of knowledge. I make Appalachian ladderback chairs, but Daddy never got around to teaching me how to weave the hickory or oak bottoms. I have to farm that out to someone. Daddy could weave a beautiful herringbone pattern in an hour. I’m sure I will learn the technique, but I wish he had taught it to me.

            And then there are the tools. We have countless specialty tools in the shop for making musical instruments. I’ve made instruments since I was a little boy, but I have no idea what some of the templates and jigs are used for. Daddy had jigs, templates, and patterns for everything. He had all of the stuff to sharpen and set teeth on crosscut hand saws. I wish he was here to show me the proper way to do it.

            I’m sure he’ll be smiling down on me (or laughing at me) in the next few weeks. Amy and I moved back into my childhood home last year. The remodeling project is ongoing, but it’s getting there. Daddy would be a great help as I muddle through it. We are making a huge garden this year. He would be right there with us, riding the Cub tractor and telling us what we were doing wrong. I guess he is still here in many ways. And I’ll be starting a new batch of chairs at the end of the summer, splitting out the wood for them by hand with Paw Paw’s hundred-year-old froe and an ancient wooden maul. I can envision Daddy sitting on his stool drinking coffee and telling me stories of doing it when he was young. He taught me how to make the chairs and how to use a froe. He showed me the ways to read the grain of the log in order to get the easiest splits and the best pieces. He managed to use almost every inch of the wood. The processing of the logs was too labor intensive to waste anything.

            When I do all of these things Daddy is still here with me. While there is so much more that I could have learned from him, the skills he taught me and the life lessons are priceless.

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Farewell to Andy’s

How do you say goodbye to a landmark, an institution, an icon? The news broke on Facebook a few weeks ago that Andy and Deborah Hunter are closing Andy’s Market at the end of this month and are retiring. No two people deserve to retire more than them. Their work ethic likely won’t be seen again. The only other store owner whom I had the pleasure to know with a work ethic like that was the late Charlie Mac Dickerson. As Andy was quoted, “After coming through these doors six days a week for 54 years, it’s time.” Wow… 54 years…

 I still remember going there as a kid back when Andy worked there for Rick Mason, several years before he bought the place…  I have literally been going to the store since I was born. Mama grew up next door to the store site, and I grew up a half mile away. Daddy and his best friend Charles refused to shop anywhere else and were in there three or four times a week. The store is the last tie to my childhood left in Rabun County. Everything else is long gone. Reeves is still around, and arguably better than ever with the younger generation running the business, but it’s not the same anymore. It’s become a conglomerate of stores, with the “hardware” store on Main Street not even really selling hardware anymore. It has lost the small town feel of my youth.

But Andy’s has always stayed the same. It even smells the same. I could be blindfolded and transported there, and I’d know where I was. Every single time I walk through the doors a flood of memories washes over me. Not a few, or even a few dozen, but probably hundreds of them. I’d stop there with Mama for weekly groceries when I was a little boy and usually begged for ice cream or candy while there. Bomb Pops, brown cows, the little bags of maple log candies. Maybe that helps explain my Type 2 diabetes diagnosis… One time our German Shorthaired Pointer sneaked around and ate a whole bag of unattended Brach’s chocolate covered peanuts from there and liked to have died.  Other times, I’d jump in the truck with Daddy to go grab something that Mama had forgotten, and she was already in the middle of cooking supper.  Sometimes when Daddy forgot to stop on his way home from work Mama would make me walk back down there and pick up the forgotten items. I told her she should make Daddy walk back down and the next time he wouldn’t forget.

I remember way back in the day when people still used lard to cook with. Not canola oil, not extra virgin olive oil. Lard. Mason’s, and Andy’s in the early days, had orange and white one-gallon buckets of lard stacked against the back wall near the meat counter. I used to beg Mama to buy one so I could have the empty bucket for a drum. She never did, and I was stuck with my drum set of Quaker Oats containers.

And then there was the candy at Christmas. I wished I’d have known that last year would be my final chance to get old fashioned hard candy and stick candy at the holidays. When I was really little, Paw Paw would have Aunt Virginia go to Mason’s and get me a box of stick candy for a Christmas present from him. I looked forward to it every year. Paw Paw has been gone for almost thirty tears and Aunt Virginia passed away a few weeks ago. Once I grew up, Daddy carried on the tradition of giving me a box of stick candy from Andy’s at Christmastime. Once Daddy passed away four years ago, I started buying myself one each year a couple of weeks before Christmas. Another memory and tradition gone…

And now a dilemma is before me. I guess I’ll have to become a vegetarian. Everyone knows that Andy’s has the best beef around. My family has bought their meat at Mason’s and Andy’s since the day the doors opened. Heck, they probably bought it at Talmadge and Margie York’s old store at the same location before Rick Mason purchased it. I hate change. I’ve said since the day I moved back to Clayton from law school that the day Andy’s closed would be the day I move away. I can’t get Amy to move. I suppose I’ll just eat vegetables and just mope around being maudlin for a neighborhood landmark fading away.

The closing of the store is made even sadder as there will be no passing of the torch as when Andy bought the grocery from Rick. It was only fitting that Andy took over from Rick since he grew up practically next door and worked there since he was a boy. This coming week the rugs will be beaten out on the handrail for the last time, Andy and Deborah will likely have a last walkthrough, turn off the lights, and lock the doors for the final time. That day the traditions will end and only the memories will remain.

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A Lantern With Stories to Tell

I know that I’ve had at least one person who always looked forward to my stories. Every time I posted a new essay, he made a point to thank me when I ran into him at Andy’s or Walmart. Then he’d look at me and tell me that I needed to start telling the good ones. He meant the stories about the liquor men. He knew I had collected hundreds of them through the years. Sadly, he didn’t live to see this one. It’s time to start telling them while there are still some folks out there who can appreciate them. Godspeed, Richard Bleckley. This one is for you.

The liquor business in Rabun County had become tough by the early 1960s. Daddy had tried a stint at the carpet mill, but ninety cents an hour wasn’t a great living, so he continued to make liquor. Every still Daddy and his brothers set up was cut down by the revenuers before they could run enough moonshine to turn a profit. Daddy was so broke that he had to “leave the country” as he phrased it. When he told this story to me when I was a little boy, I asked him if he went to England or Canada. His reply: “Hell no, Boy. I went to Blue Ridge.” He was going to work for my Uncle Frank Sisson logging and sawmilling in Fannin County.

At the time Daddy made his decision to head to Fannin he had no cash money. He sold his last liquor car for some travel money and left hitchhiking from Uncle Delo’s and Aunt Dorothy’s house on Persimmon.

Uncle Frank started working Daddy like a dog as soon as he arrived. At least Daddy was making an honest living. That didn’t last long. Frank loved to make money. He and Daddy decided that the area where he was logging was a perfect still site. There was good water. The logging operation would hide the trails into the woods where materials were transported to the liquor still while the noise from the skidders and saws would mask any sounds from the liquor operation. The only downside was that Daddy couldn’t hear the revenuers coming if they learned of the operation and raided him.

Frank took Daddy into Blue Ridge and outfitted him for a long stay in the woods. Mr. Claude Call, an old buddy of Frank’s, bankrolled part of the operation. Sugar and steel were expensive and Mr. Call was as tight as Frank. They decided to not hire any still hands. Daddy would do everything by himself. A Lovell man who was kin to Jim Lovell from Rabun County had a store in Blue Ridge. Daddy bought a fancy sleeping bag, a skillet, coffee pot, and a red Coleman lantern for his stay at the still. That stay turned into eighteen months staying at the still around the clock. Either Frank or Mr. Call would bring Daddy supplies and groceries. Daddy cooked his food on the furnace for the still and always said that he spent eighteen months sleeping behind a chestnut log.

The still wasn’t a traditional copper pot set up. It was a fairly sophisticated steamer capable of turning out a lot of moonshine. Frank and Mr. Call made all the money. Daddy was paid a percentage. After eighteen months of getting by without detection, the site was raided by Federal agents. Frank had paid off the local sheriff and was warned that the revenuers were on the way to the still. Daddy barely escaped, leaving the lantern and other gear behind.

The Blue Ridge operation was done. Daddy had Frank drive him into town where he bought a brand-new Chrysler to drive back to Rabun County. As soon as he returned, Daddy spent a few days paying off all the debts he had left behind when he “went west.” He would continue to make liquor for several years, but the era was ending.

Years later Daddy went to Blue Ridge to visit Uncle Frank and Aunt Mary Ann. Frank told him he had something for him. They walked out to an old shed behind the house and Frank handed Daddy the old red lantern. When the revenuers destroyed the operation, they had thrown the lantern into a barrel of mash where it stayed until Frank went to salvage the valves from the steamer. It was none the worse for wear other than a dent and broken globe.

The old red lantern went on every camping trip of my youth. It was with us from my first trip as a toddler up Wildcat Creek where we fled from a skunk, on deer hunting trips with my Uncle Rip, Jack Prince, Mike Cannon and my cousins, and on my trip a few weeks ago in Daddy’s refurbished camping rig. The lantern went on all of them. The stories it could tell…

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Motorcycle Heroes: My Life in Motorcycles Part 2

During my childhood, many of the people who became icons to me were athletes. A few were, of course, ballplayers in various sports. Most of them, however, were motorcycle racers. I loved playing sports but had almost no ability to excel in any team sport involving a ball. I did have a fanatical love of motorcycles.

My introduction to motocross was a product of a Fourth of July celebration in Rabun County. The location of the Covered Bridge Shopping Center in Clayton was a vacant parcel of land during the 1970’s. As part of the (I think) Bicentennial celebration, a temporary motocross track was bulldozed and a day of racing commenced. Mama and Daddy loaded us up with a picnic and went to check it out. It was the coolest thing I’d ever seen. I remember Mike Penland’s amazing ride, and I think Perry Thompson raced as well. I was hooked. I bought my first mini-bike a few weeks later with my own money and started reading Dirt Bike magazine whenever I could beg Mama to buy a copy for me.

In the days before the Internet, and with only three television channels, reading magazines was my only link to the stars of motocross. I spent half of my childhood ripping around the woods at home on my dirt bike, pretending I was racing with Marty Smith, Mike Bell, Bob “Hurricane” Hannah, and Andre Malherbe. They were who I wanted to be when I grew up.

By the early 1980s, the coolest event in the sport for me was known as the Superbowl of Motocross. In later years the format simply became called Supercross. Held in NFL sized football stadiums across the country, the venues made for excellent viewing. There wasn’t a bad seat in the house. By 1984 the event had made its way to Atlanta’s Fulton County Stadium. It was scheduled for the first week of March. It was also the week of my birthday. To this day I can’t believe that I begged and conned Daddy into taking me to Atlanta for the race. We’d been to several Braves games with my grandparents, but Daddy never, ever went down there. Unless he was hauling a load of liquor, but that’s a story for another time. He didn’t want to drive us himself, so he bribed a young guy who worked with him to drive us. Steve Coleman also rode dirt bikes, and being a fun-loving guy himself, agreed to haul us to the big city.

For the week leading up to the race I couldn’t contain my excitement. I was up a daylight on Saturday morning. The races were at night and Steve was to pick us up in late afternoon. By twelve noon I was ready to go. By three o’clock I was pacing the floor. The rotary-dial Bakelite phone on the living room table began ringing. Mama grabbed it. She rolled her eyes as she hung up the phone. It was Steve. He was at Toyota of Easley buying a truck and running late. Really late. He was still signing papers. Back in those days it took two hours at best to get back to Clayton.

Steve finally slid into our driveway around dusk and we piled into his new and tiny regular cab Toyota pickup for the drive south. About 20 miles from the stadium, we hit gridlock. Steve tried out the off-road capabilities of his new truck and drove several miles on the shoulder of the interstate. We parked in the lot with minutes to spare, and the race was amazing.

Even after I achieved the dream of all teenagers by getting a license and a car, I kept up with the sport well into my thirties. I’ve managed to stay into motorcycling since age four, and still ride every chance I get. I moved away from motocross, into enduro bikes, and later began riding dual sport and adventure bikes. I’m constantly amazed by how quickly time slips by. The race seems like yesterday.

I saw awhile back that motorcycling legend Marty Smith was killed in a dune buggy crash at the age of 63 last April. Just days ago Mike Bell died while riding his mountain bike. He was also 63. Their generation of racers is rapidly fading away and some great memories of my childhood along with them

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Remembering Christmas Past

There weren’t many holiday traditions in my family during my childhood. No big holiday dinners or parties. My parents did always see to it that Santa was good to me as a child, and looking back, I can only imagine the financial sacrifices they made to get me the presents I wanted. It was a big event in my childhood when the Sears Wishbook came in the mail. I’d go through it from cover to cover, dog-earing pages with things I wanted. Mama and Daddy almost never spent a dime on themselves throughout the year, no doubt hoarding every penny so I could be spoiled at Christmas. I know they were self-conscious about our lack of money, but they made sure that Christmas morning a huge deal for me. Often Nanny and my cousin Lysa came over to watch me tear open all of my gifts while Mama looked on in her baby blue house coat. Daddy was always running the Super 8 movie camera saving the mornings for posterity. I was well into middle age before I began to appreciate what they did without to provide for me.

As an only child without much close family, many of the events I now remember as holiday traditions wouldn’t be important to most people, but I relive them every year. We always used to go visit my Uncle Buck and Aunt Rose on Christmas Eve after they moved back to Rabun County. We always went up to “the store” as we referred to Dickerson Hardware and I would get Daddy a small gift that Charles would help me pick out for him as Daddy pretended to not notice what I was up to. Charles was Daddy’s best friend and the ritual continued until Charles’ untimely passing.

When I was really young we always went to see Daddy’s daddy. Paw Paw, as I always knew him, always had a box of Red Band stick candy for me to take home for the holidays. He didn’t drive, rarely leaving the family farm, so I imagine my Aunt Virginia went to Mason’s for him to pick up the yearly treat.

The Red Band candy ritual continued until Daddy’s death last year. Mason’s became Andy’s, but Andy kept continuity with his stock, with shelves and tables stocked with candy as the holidays approached. This year was different, and without Daddy here to buy my present of Christmas candy, I had to get it for myself.

The memories remain. Yesterday I sat in Mama’s old rocker in front of the fireplace that Daddy built in 1976. I was eating my Christmas candy while wearing a Carhartt coat Daddy bought me for Christmas almost thirty years ago. 

            Merry Christmas, everyone.

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Grindin’ Corn: My Introduction to Moonshining

I recently watched a clip of the TV show Moonshiners online. It made me laugh. Obviously fake, contrived, and completely developed for TV, I thought to myself, if only they could make a “real” moonshining reality show… This thought took me back to my early childhood, when I was involved in the liquor business at around the age of 6 or 7. My family’s involvement with the illicit liquor trade goes back into the 1800’s.

My paternal grandfather, always known to me as “PawPaw”, made liquor his whole life. Unfortunately, he drank about as much as he sold. My great-great uncles and great grandfather were notorious violent criminals who lived in the Warwoman community of Rabun County during the late 1800’s and first years of the twentieth century. While their other exploits will be discussed in a later story, those men also made more than their share of illegal booze. By the time PawPaw came of age, the Hopkins clan had taken their liquor making to a higher level.

Daddy and my uncles began helping PawPaw at the various stills from their earliest years, doing whatever they could to be useful. Still sites were extremely dangerous, especially for kids who were not paying attention. When he was about nine years old, Daddy fell in a box of hot mash and was burned so badly that he missed almost a whole year of school. Despite the dangers of injury and risk of prison, Daddy and a couple of my uncles began making moonshine on a large scale by the mid 1950’s. Many of their stills were near the family farm, which is located in the Bridge Creek community, at the headwaters of Stonewall Creek.

The Stonewall area is still a wild and now largely inaccessible area, but Daddy and I prowled the woods there during his last years looking at the remains of his old stills. I recorded short interviews with him at each old still site and plan to post some essays on this website as time goes on. On one such trip, we found a stash of his Mason jars that had been hidden there since the 1950’s. He had walked up on the still site as the revenuers were destroying, or “cutting” it. They were so noisy and distracted with the destruction of the still that they didn’t hear or see him walking up. He simply sat the case of jars behind a tree and walked away. Fifty years later the unbroken case of jars remained untouched.

Although Daddy pretty much left the moonshining business sometime during the mid-1960’s, for some reason he started dabbling in it again during the mid to late 70’s. We had several years in my rural county when work was slow, so each winter, Daddy ran off a little liquor on an old 28 gallon copper still. We had an old hand-cranked grain mill that had come with their farm when PawPaw bought it back in 1940, and Daddy paid me to grind corn into meal, sprout malt, dry it, and grind it each autumn. To make the malt I would take seed corn, lay each kernel side by side on a wet brown paper towel, fold it over and sit it in front of a south facing window to absorb the sunlight each day. Keeping the towels damp allowed the corn to sprout, and when they got almost an inch long, I removed them from the towels and let them dry out for a while. Then I would come home after school each day, grind the sprouted corn for malt, and grind regular corn for the mash. I had a nice little enterprise going for a couple of years. I had no idea what the corn was being ground for. I can’t remember how much he paid me for each batch I produced, but it kept me in G.I. Joe action figures and Hardy Boys books for some time.

Times are tough right now with all the economic upheaval from the pandemic. The old grinder still sits on the workbench in the basement. As for the still… it might or might not be around somewhere, and a man might have to take drastic measures to survive the next depression…