The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby by Tom Wolfe

Author:Tom Wolfe [Wolfe, Tom]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Popular Culture, Literary Collections, Social Science, Essays
ISBN: 9780553380583
Google: TQFFToLxYpoC
Goodreads: 89758
Publisher: Bantam
Published: 1964-12-31T23:00:00+00:00

CARS AND BRAVERY! THE MOUNTAIN-STILL OPERATORS HAD been running white liquor with hopped-up automobiles all during the thirties. But it was during the war that the business was so hot out of Wilkes County, down to Charlotte, High Point, Greensboro, Winston-Salem, Salisbury, places like that; a night’s run, by one car, would bring anywhere from $500 to $1000. People had money all of a sudden. One car could carry twenty-two to twenty-five cases of white liquor. There were twelve half-gallon fruit jars full per case, so each load would have 132 gallons or more. It would sell to the distributor in the city for about ten dollars a gallon, when the market was good, of which the driver would get two dollars, as much as $300 for the night’s work.

The usual arrangement in the white-liquor industry was for the elders to design the distillery, supervise the formulas and the whole distilling process and take care of the business end of the operation. The young men did the heavy work, carrying the copper and other heavy goods out into the woods, building the still, hauling in fuel—and driving. Junior and his older brothers, L. P. and Fred, worked that way with their father, Robert Glenn Johnson, Sr.

Johnson, Senior, was one of the biggest individual copper-still operators in the area. The fourth time he was arrested, the agents found a small fortune in working corn mash bubbling in the vats.

“My Daddy was always a hard worker,” Junior is telling me. “He always wanted something a little bit better. A lot of people resented that and held that against him, but what he got, he always got h‘it by hard work. There ain’t no harder work in the world than making whiskey. I don’t know of any other business that compels you to get up at all times of night and go outdoors in the snow and everything else and work. H’it’s the hardest way in the world to make a living, and I don’t think anybody’d do it unless they had to.”

Working mash wouldn’t wait for a man. It started coming to a head when it got ready to and a man had to be there to take it off, out there in the woods, in the brush, in the brambles, in the muck, in the snow. Wouldn’t it have been something if you could have just set it all up inside a good old shed with a corrugated metal roof and order those parts like you want them and not have to smuggle all that copper and all that sugar and all that everything out here in the woods and be a coppersmith and a plumber and a copper and a carpenter and a pack horse and every other goddamned thing God ever saw in this world, all at once.

And live decent hours—Junior and his brothers, about two o’clock in the morning they’d head out to the stash, the place where the liquor was hidden after it was made. Sometimes it

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