Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, October 9, 1993 TAG: 9310090088
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 8 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BOB ZELLER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: GREENSBORO, N.C. LENGTH: Long
His father, Robert Glen Johnson Sr., was often gone for years at a time, serving his latest prison term for moonshining.
Except for that, Junior had a comfortable upbringing.
Because in spite of its drawbacks, moonshining was a lucrative trade.
"We had the first combine in Wilkes County, and we had the first lights, and I think we was the first family that ever had an inside bathroom in our area," Junior says. "Our family wasn't rich, but we was probably considered to be rich at that time by other people."
Whiskey, of course, has been a staple in American life since European settlers arrived.
The mountains of North Carolina were already well-settled when distillers in western Pennsylvania rose up in 1794 to protest a tax on whiskey passed by the new and cash-poor American government. President George Washington sent troops to squelch the Whiskey Rebellion, forcing hundreds of Pennsylvania distillers to flee. Many went south, into the Appalachian wilderness and out of the reach of the tax man.
Whiskey making became a part of Southern mountain life. Eventually, so did the revenuers.
When Robert Glen Johnson Jr. was born on June 28, 1931, it was illegal to own, sell or drink alcoholic beverages in the United States. He was 2 when Prohibition was repealed in December 1933 after 12 years.
Prohibition had not stopped Junior's father from making whiskey, and neither would the new federal tax law that followed its repeal. Nothing short of old age, in fact, ever stopped Glen Johnson from making whiskey.
"I believe he would have did it for nothin'," says Junior. "It was a way of life. He just loved it."
For the Johnson family, it was far more than building a little still and cooking some mash to earn a few extra dollars.
For most of his life, when he wasn't in prison, Glen Johnson was the kingpin moonshiner of Wilkes County.
And when agents of the Internal Revenue Service's new Alcohol Tax Unit raided Glen Johnson's house on April 27, 1935, what they found cemented Johnson's reputation.
The second floor of the two-story wood frame house in Ingle Hollow was jampacked with cases of moonshine. Cardboard boxes, each holding six 1-gallon jars of moonshine, were stacked by the hundreds in the upstairs bedrooms.
"I was 4, and my older brother Fred was about 5 1/2," recalls Junior. "The whole upstairs of my daddy's house was chock full of whiskey. And the agents had nailed some planks to the steps and they would bring each case to the top of the steps and slide 'em down those steps.
"And me and my brother started jumpin' on them cases and riding them down the steps to the bottom. And we would run back up stairs and jump on another one and ride it down. I remember that very distinctly. And after awhile, they got tired of us bein' in their way. But we was pretty raw kids, so we probably told 'em what we thought of 'em."
The ATU agents removed 7,100 gallons of illegal whiskey from the Johnson house.
Legend has it that Junior's mother cooked the agents a big country dinner as they emptied her house of whiskey. Junior swears it's true, and his ex-wife, Flossie, doesn't doubt it.
"When people came, they were just asked to eat," she says. The purpose of the visit, apparently, just didn't matter.
Although no one was keeping score, the 1935 bust at Glen Johnson's house is considered, by some moonshine authorities, the largest inland seizure of illegal whiskey in the history of the United States.
And after neatly stacking the 1,113 cases outside the Johnson home, the agents proceeded to empty them, dump the whiskey and break the jars - all 6,678 of them, in the Johnson front yard.
After the agents left, resourceful friends and relatives scrambled to salvage the liquor that had puddled in the Johnson yard and gardens.
"Some of the neighbors salvaged several hundred gallons," says Johnson. It took two or three weeks to clean up the glass, he remembers.
Glen Johnson had fled before the raid. He became a fugitive, on the lam for about eight months before finally turning himself in. He was sentenced to four years in federal prison.
"He'd a been rich if he'd got by with that," says former Wilkes County bootlegger Thurmond Brown, a lifelong friend of Junior's. "The price of liquor was low at that time, you see, and he was buyin' it and storin' it, waitin' for the price to go up. He borrowed money to buy it. Run out of his own money and borrowed it."
As a teen-ager, school was not high on Junior's list of priorities. He quit after the eighth grade, having advanced four grades further than his father.
Johnson's preoccupation, other than cars, was baseball. His team was the New York Yankees. And his dream was to become a major-league pitcher.
He spent hours throwing a ball against the family barn and developed a wicked repertoire of pitches.
"I'd pitch a ball just like I raced," he said in a 1991 interview. "I'd put 'em on their pants."
But one day around the end of World War II he was on a tractor, "acting a fool, just playin' and cuttin' up, spinnin' around with it."
He cut the wheel too sharp and the tractor tipped. He jumped as it went over, but it rolled onto his arm.
"I couldn't really throw a ball after that," he says. "It destroyed whatever it took to throw a ball."
Keywords:
PROFILE AND AUTO RACING
by CNB