[Catspaw]

Rudolph is as as "pro-life" as Heinrich Heydrich ever was.These "good people" of Murphy ,NC who gave tacit approval to him, are worthy of every caricature and insult that comes their way.

I'm not going to blame an entire town for giving tacit approval to Rudolph. It may well be a small minority of the townsfolk. However, if anyone helped him and harbored him, God help them, because they're going to have the book thrown at them.

[Alberta's Child]

For anyone who hasn't read "The Last American Hero," Tom Wolfe's essay from the early 1960s about NASCAR legend Junior Johnson, I would strongly recommend it. Johnson hails from these same hills of western North Carolina, and Wolfe did an outstanding job of tracing NASCAR's roots back to the rural areas of the south where running moonshine was a long-standing tradition.

It wasn't too long after the American Revolution before the people who lived in the mountainous western areas of every state on the eastern seaboard began to see the city-dwellers on the coast who dominated the legislatures as no different than the British government that had just been overthrown. There has been an inherent distrust of outsiders in almost every one of these little towns that has carried on to this day.