Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, October 8, 1993 TAG: 9310080080
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BOB ZELLER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: GREENSBORO, N.C. LENGTH: Long
The Western Union telegram that arrived in the North Wilkesboro office of attorney William McElwee on the morning of Nov. 19, 1956, appeared as if it had been typed by a barely literate operator.
"HAVE ASSURNCE FOR TEST DRIVING JOB FOR ROBERT JOHSON, JR. WITH MAJOR AUTOMOBILE FACTORY RACING TEAM," the telegram said. "EITHER FORD CHEY OR PONTIAC. COMPENSION SHOULD BE IN EXCESS OF $10,000 PER YEAR POVIDED HE IS PLACED ON PROBATION. HIS HEADQUARES WOULD BE EITHER IN ATLANTA, DETROIT OR CALIFONIA.
"BILL FANCE, PRESIDEN NASCAR."
The message, despite the garble, was clear enough: If U.S. District Court Judge Johnson J. Hayes, sitting in the November term of federal court at Wilkesboro, N.C., would forgo sending Junior to prison for firing up his daddy's still, France and NASCAR would see that he remained gainfully employed - not in moonshining and most certainly not in Wilkes County.
By 1956, Johnson had become one of NASCAR's top stars. But he did not fight as he had in 1953, when he successfully appealed his first conviction.
Caught on June 1, he pleaded guilty on Nov. 26, along with his father, to charges of possessing distillery apparatus, mash and whiskey, in violation of the Internal Revenue laws.
"Well, I was guilty," he says. "There wasn't no question about me being there."
The telegram from France didn't work.
In fact, Hayes was tougher than usual. His typical moonshining sentence was a year and a day. The Johnsons got two years each, plus $5,000 in fines.
In time, it became almost a badge of honor to his fans, and shaped the legend of Junior Johnson. But that day, it was a tremendous blow to a racer just coming into his own.
Johnson still doesn't think it was right.
"Well, there wasn't any reason to send me to prison," he says. "I was tryin' to get away from the moonshinin' business, and I had a good future in racing. I had just signed a contract with Ford Motor Co. [which he lost], and that was unheard of most of the time because the other companies didn't sign contracts with drivers."
Johnson had won his first five Grand National races in 1955, and although winless in 1956, his hard-charging, go-for-broke driving style made him a crowd favorite, leading to the Ford contract.
But he was caught between two worlds - his own and his father's.
The thrill of the chase
His father's world, and his grandfather's, and probably his great-grandfather's before that, was making moonshine.
It was a passion, an obsession, a craft. It also was some of the hardest labor a man could do.
At 26, however, Junior Johnson had opportunities his father never knew. The money, excitement and good times of a stock-car racing career gave him a reasonable, law-abiding alternative to bootlegging.
Moonshining and whiskey running was hard work, yes, but tremendously profitable. Had the federal agents not found the still where they caught Johnson, it would have turned about 20,000 gallons of mash into about 800 gallons of sugarhead moonshine in two days, which in turn would be sold for more than $2,000.
Not bad, considering a good, and legal, weekly wage in Wilkes County - for those who could find work - was about $40 in June 1956.
As much as anything, however, the appeal of moonshining was the thrill of the chase, the thrill of outwitting the law. And it was all the more heightened by the threat of jail.
With the opportunity of a rich NASCAR career before him, Johnson didn't need that life anymore. The question was whether he could give it up.
On June 2, 1956, as fate would have it, the answer was no.
He had arrived home in the wee hours that morning from a race, seeking sleep.
"My oldest brother, L.P., was the one who was supposed to go in early and fire the still up," recalls Junior. But L.P. was sick - hung over, some say - and so Junior's father asked him to do it.
In the damp, chilly forest that morning, staked out near the Johnson still, federal Alcohol Tax Unit Agent Joe Carter was freezing.
Carter and three other agents had bushwacked through rugged hardwood forest, crossed Oakley Ridge, descended into Ingle Hollow and set a human trap around the still.
It had been discovered the day before. And now the four of them crouched in the dark, keeping an all-night vigil in the woods, waiting for someone to come fire the still. They didn't know who, but someone was coming. The mash had to run today. It couldn't wait.
The shivering Carter was hoping it would happen sooner than later.
He had worn only a cotton shirt on this unexpectedly cold June morning. And the only thing he could find to cover himself were a couple of empty sugar sacks he found at the still.
It would be a typical ambush. Carter and two other agents hid themselves on three sides of the still. Their boss, John L. West, would enter from the opposite direction, flushing the moonshiners into the trap. After that, all hell was sure to break loose.
Johnson remembers how it started.
"I was bent over with a shovel, fixin' to throw some coke in the burner and he [West] was hid behind the still on top of one of them boxes," says Junior.
Suddenly, Carter heard West shout in amazement: "Junior Johnson!" And then, "Don't hit me with that shovel, Junior!"
Whap!
Junior threw the coke and the shovel at West's face and took off running into a pasture.
Running by instinct, without light, Johnson knew he was headed toward a fence with a gate.
"I missed that gate by one section of fence," Johnson says. Barbed wire ripped into his clothes and his flesh. Johnson went down, taking three strands of barbed wire off a half-dozen posts. Carter came down on top of him.
The chase was over.
"Why are you out here?" Carter asked, not believing that someone of Johnson's fame and stature would be stuck with the menial and risky job of firing up a still. That was for hired hands.
"One of the boys was sick this morning," replied Johnson, bleeding from his cuts.
Back on the track
He was sentenced by Hayes on Nov. 26, 1956.
Johnson remembers with disgust what the judge said: "I'm going to give him two years. At least I'll know I have saved him for two years."
He was sent to the federal prison farm at Chillicothe, Ohio, and with good time, he whittled it down to 11 months and three days.
"I think now that it's over and done with, I think it was a very educational thing for me," he says. "I was very independent - felt like nobody could tell me nothin' or show me nothin.'
"I learned there's other things more than just the way you think everything should be. And if you don't learn it in there, you won't ever learn it nowhere."
"I think what he was probably trying to say was he had a boss," says ex-wife Flossie Clark Johnson. "I guess he respected his mom and dad, but he pretty well did anything he wanted to. They didn't have any control over that wild part."
After his release on Oct. 1, 1957, "I had to start scrapping to find somebody to sponsor me and to drive for," Johnson says. But in 1958, Syracuse, N.Y.-businessman Paul Spaulding called out of the blue with an offer to drive. He was back on the track in April and back in the winner's circle by May.
But in July, a strange but friendly mountain man started hanging around the Johnson house, asking to buy whiskey.
"He would come and sit out in the driveway and sleep in his car," Johnson recalls. "I kept tellin' them he was the law. I said the S.O.B. is the law and y'all are messin' with him, and he's going to put every one of you'ns in jail."
But Johnson's brothers failed to take heed, and the government began building its biggest, most aggressive case ever against the Johnson family.
The name of the scraggly ATU undercover agent who hung around the Johnson house was Charlie Riddle. "He took up with them right quick because he looked more like a mountaineer than they did," says Carter.
Although Riddle and another undercover informant, Jarvis T. Carver, were carefully questioned at first by Junior's mother, Lora Belle, they were persistent, and eventually wore down the family's reluctance to deal with them.
Carver waited seven hours one night and finally, at dawn the next morning, managed to buy six cases of moonshine for $21 a case from Fred Johnson and another man.
Carver and Riddle made several more buys that summer - one load was so fresh it was still warm. And on Aug. 12 and again on Sept. 5, Junior's mother sold the feds a pint of whiskey for a dollar.
Junior was often busy racing throughout the summer of 1958, a fact that became all-important after he was charged in the case.
Sept. 21, 1958, was supposed to be a race day for Johnson, but rain flooded the Martinsville Speedway infield and washed out the show.
So at 5 p.m. that Sunday afternoon, instead of completing the final laps of a long race, Johnson was driving on North Carolina 39 in the eastern part of the state, collecting old moonshining debts.
By then, he had collected several thousand dollars, which he stashed under the dashboard of his 1952 Plymouth equipped with a Cadillac V-8 engine.
On his way to another stop, he fell asleep at the wheel.
As his car reached the intersection of North Carolina 39 and U.S. 64, so did one driven by Lewis Sanders of Louisburg, with his wife, Viola, and two others.
Johnson's car flattened a stop sign and then slammed into the Sanders car, colliding with such violence it cut the vehicle in two, according to a newspaper report.
The only person seriously hurt - Viola Sanders - died a day after the crash.
"It was my fault, and there was no question about that, either," Junior says. "It was not from speeding or anything else. But I regret it. It was a very sad situation."
Johnson woke up in a hospital. He suffered only minor injuries and was already back in Wilkes County when word came that Sanders had died.
On Wednesday, Sept. 24, he posted a $2,500 bond on a manslaughter charge and then, accompanied by Flossie and his mother, went to Rocky Mount to attend Viola Lewis' funeral.
That same afternoon, federal agents poured into Ingle Hollow and descended on the Johnson homestead in a massive raid. n n
Both L.P. and Fred were at the house - Fred sleeping in a bedroom. They were arrested. After returning from Rocky Mount, Junior and his mother surrendered the next day, and by the time the case came to trial in May 1959, it was one of the biggest ever in Wilkes County.
There were six separate indictments, including a cornerstone indictment of conspiracy naming Lora Bell Johnson, her three sons and two others.
Junior waged an aggressive defense during the family's four-day trial. His witnesses included NASCAR officials, who said he was racing on some of the dates the ATU claimed he was involved in moonshining.
"We was racin' everywhere you could think of, and the times [the agents] was tellin' that I was at home, I could prove where I was at that night and how long it took me to drive home," he says.
Junior was acquitted. But the rest of the family was not so fortunate. L.P. changed his plea to guilty during the trial and was given two years. Fred was convicted and given 2 1/2 years.
And for selling two pints of moonshine to the undercover agents, Junior's mother was fined $7,500.
"Everybody knew it was to punish Junior after he had been acquitted," Carter says.
But the acquittal did not end Johnson's legal problems.
In October 1959, Johnson pleaded no contest to the manslaughter charge that stemmed from his automobile accident. He was fined $300, given a suspended prison term and placed on probation for five years.
Through it all, he kept racing, winning six races in 1958 and five more in 1959.
But the double blow of the crash and the conspiracy case finally chased him out of the moonshining business for good.
"I think that was probably the thing that changed it the most," Flossie Johnson says, referring to the conspiracy case. "He knew if he kept on, they was going to keep on, too."
MONDAY: The moonshining era has largely died in Wilkes County, but the effects of Johnson's past linger even now.
by CNB