Roads Gone Wild

Ballad of Thunder Road Written by Don Raye and Robert Mitchum, Recorded by Robert Mitchum

Thunder Road (1958) Coming home from the battlefields of Korea, moonshiner Robert Mitchum finds a different kind of war brewing at home when mobsters try to take over his family's still in this rousing backwoods action classic.

New Straitsville, Ohio’s annual Moonshine Festival celebrates a bygone era, when local heroes made America drunk. “The dry dicks are coming! The dry dicks are coming!” During the Depression, this siren call, usually delivered by children, was cause for serious alarm in the Appalachian town of New Straitsville, Ohio, then known to millions as the Moonshine Capital of the World. ’Shiners—roughly all the town’s residents—would scurry like mice into abandoned mine shafts and hollows to protect their stills from approaching federal agents.

Welcome to ’Shine Town, U.S.A., the only place in America that was actually happy when prohibition was introduced. The abandoned mines were one of many elements that combined to set up this dying town as the world’s moonshine mecca: Leftover boxcars could transport the sugar, corn, rye, barrels, and bottles needed to make hooch. The sulfur water from the mine shafts gave Straitsville Special a unique taste outsiders couldn’t replicate. And the town was full of piss-broke, grizzled ex-miners who were more than happy to earn their living breaking the law.

Although Prohibition-era bootlegging normally conjures images of Al Capone, Eliot Ness, and Tommy guns, only one death in New Straitsville could be pegged to moonshining…and that was caused by an exploding still.

No one got caught; everyone made money—the operations were just too tucked away and widespread to be contained. The local courts were valued customers, not feared enemies. The town boasted 175 stills, the biggest of which cranked out 300 gallons at a time, and unlike a lot of moonshine, Straitsville Special didn’t blind you or kill you when you drank it. Customers appreciated that touch. Then Prohibition was repealed in 1934. Overnight, prices nosedived from $40 a gallon to $4, and one by one, the stills stopped distilling. Well, almost.

It’s Memorial Day weekend 2004 at the 34th Moonshine Festival, New Straitsville’s annual homage to getting America plastered on the sly. The depressed town’s main drag is lined with abandoned storefronts, yet moonshine is, in a way, as vital to the town’s economy now as it was 80 years ago. “The festival is the only thing keeping this town alive,” says Ken Burgess, who has run the event for nearly 30 years.

Make Moonshine Banned from your local pub? Here’s how bootleggers make their own (don’t try this at home). Be Corny Soak corn in warm water until the kernels develop two-inch sprouts (sound familiar?). The corn is “malting,” or turning to sugar. Dry and grind the corn, then boil it to create mash. Monster Mash Add yeast to the ground meal to speed up fermentation. The mash is cooked— this is the base for whiskey—then left in a bucket for a few weeks, or till it stops bubbling. Lay Pipe Snake six feet of copper tubing through a hole drilled into the top of Ma’s Crockpot and pour the mash into the pot. Punch a hole near the bottom of a plastic milk jug and fill it with ice. Distill The One Run the tube through the jug’s cap and out the hole. When the Crockpot’s near boiling, vapors pass through the tube and, after reaching the ice, condense into a clear alcoholic drip. Burn, Baby! Dump the first few ounces—they’re deadly. Flick a Bic and light a spoonful; if it burns reddish, the liquid’s lethal. If it turns blue, congrats: You’re pregnant! Now for a celebratory drink…

In 1970 the village’s declining brick industry triggered astronomical unemployment, but the town’s centennial celebration found visitors once more filling local coffers. Anyone can pick up a fifth of Old Granddad at a corner store, but the transaction is decidedly without mystique—Burgess and his neighbors soon found people would happily part with cash to get a taste of nostalgia, and the Moonshine Festival became an annual hoedown.

This year an estimated 20,000 tourists are swarming in to fork over cash for souvenir moonshine jugs, $15 THIS SHIRT WAS CONFISCATED AT THE MOONSHINE FESTIVAL T-shirts, and the fire department’s ATV raffle. Though this may look at first glance like any typical hick-town summer fair—rickety carny rides, batter-fried everything—the town’s inherent outlaw spirit is still very much on display.

Bill Neal, a 51-year-old local tire shop owner, stands behind the town’s lone remaining legal still—he’s the last of a dying breed. “The old-timers are dead or too old to run the still,” he laments. Directly behind him is a mural depicting X-eyed bootleggers at a still with a dog rolling on the ground in convulsive laughter. “I didn’t paint that,” Neal says. “You could never run ’shine between those two barrels.”

A federal permit allows New Straitsville (population 774) to distill liquor legally during the festival, but leave it to the Man to rain on the parade: The government insists all moonshine be dumped as soon as it drips. The hardest part of Neal’s job is shooing away folks who want a sip—undercover Feds have been known to infiltrate the festival to monitor disposal, but it doesn’t appear as though any are present this year. “They’ll be disappointed if they do show,” he says. “I ain’t done nothing wrong.”

The festival air is thick with an odor best described as rotting candy doused in rubbing alcohol. “If you’ve smelled marijuana, you know its scent,” says retired liquor control agent Jerry Benson. “Same with moonshine—once you smell it, you know it the rest of your life.”

In the festival’s epicenter, the five teenage finalists in this year’s Miss Moonshine pageant sit on a stage clad in jailbait evening wear and looking about as legal as moonshine itself. Ultimately, Ashley Misner, a brunette wearing a red dress, is rewarded with tiara, sash, and a position of true honor: riding in the Moonshine Parade on the hood of a Pontiac. A pimply spectator in a NASCAR T-shirt muses, “Man, I can’t wait to try to do her.”

Steps from the main drag, about 10 teens huddle together and pass around a bottle of clear liquid. Several move into the shadows of a nearby church; others mosey into the festival for a corn dog or a ride on the Tilt-A-Whirl. “You’d better have that jug filled up when I get back!” one teen shouts, walking with a new swagger.

With his unruly red beard, patched overalls, and tumble-down house back in the woods, Flynn is a walking, talking hillbilly stereotype. “Moonshine runs in my blood,” he boasts, metaphorically as well as literally. Using his handcrafted copper (and not remotely legal) still, Flynn ferments his mash of malted corn, sorghum, yeast, and water for six to 10 days, then distills the belly-burning spirits.

To demonstrate, he unscrews a mason jar, dips a stick inside, and sets it on fire to test for impurities. (In 1930 so many people were partially paralyzed from a bad batch of ’shine called Jake, the condition was called Jake Leg Syndrome.) “People are like crackheads with this stuff,” he says, capping and shaking a jar of white lightning.

Flynn’s evil potion clocks in at a varnish-peeling 110 proof—that’s 30 more than pantywaist Jim Beam. Far from the festival’s center, Flynn offers a snort. The liquor tastes surprisingly sweet and smooth, a clear bourbon that, when swallowed, gives one the sensation of being disemboweled with a flaming bayonet. “Personally, I like it better than store-bought whiskey,” he drawls.

Flynn braves gravel roads and 90-degree switchbacks to supply his thirsty friends with $15 mason jars. But his distribution method is child’s play compared to the drastic measures his forebears had to take. To evade police, Flynn recounts, tipping his creased Kodiak hat and actually strumming a banjo, one bootlegger stuffed cow carcasses with his homemade. “And I do believe he never got caught,” he says. Neither has Flynn. “I’m here to carry on a tradition,” he says. “This way of life’s dying.” He sets down the jar gently beside his shotgun. “I’d do this for a living, if only it were legal.”

Joshua M. Bernstein. Moonshine Mania!. . September 2004.

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