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To: Bob Ireland

Bob, I knew about Nascar getting it’s start from moonshine runners but didn’t organized crime get involved during Prohibition when so many made poison whiskey?

My dad and my husband (I found out) used to buy shine for local doctors back in the 70’s and 80’s. It was the late 70’s when I lived back in the mountains near the still.


955 posted on 11/15/2023 11:43:57 AM PST by Melinda in TN
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To: Melinda in TN
***didn’t organized crime get involved during Prohibition when so many made poison whiskey?***

Not in my memory - perhaps faded(?) The mountain trade was too remote, I think, not enough money. Penetrating those ridges and valleys was dangerous for outsiders. As I said, electricity was new to much of Appalachia. Up on Cagle Mountain, north of Chattanooga, where I semi-retired in the '80s, they first received television signals from Denver! ...back in the 50's. It was such an isolated world - then! ...not now!

Those roads that Lucas Doolan was driving in Thunder Road, some of them, looked more like super highways in my memory. In one scene he sprayed oil from his rear bumper to send a crime thug chasing him to his death - "over the falls"; nice for movies but I don't see it. If someone driving chickens to the market the next morning had tumbled into a mountain ravine because of that the next day there would have been a revenge battle in the works. Mountain roads were a twisting and turning challenge and I remember, in the '80s, fog and clouds so thick at night that one had to open the driver's door and follow the line in the middle of the road - and those were modern roads!

980 posted on 11/15/2023 1:28:57 PM PST by Bob Ireland (The Democrap Party is the enemy of freedom.They use all the seductions and deceits of the Bolshevics)
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