Losing the Southern Stereotype But Not the Moonshine

In the early 1940s, when my parents decided to build a restaurant in a small community near the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, they plugged into the pop culture of the time. The establishment needed a theme, something to make their business stand out.

At the time, the biggest show on Broadway was the musical “Lil Abner,” and the top comic strip was “Snuffy Smith.” They decided to jump onto that bandwagon, so they adopted a hillbilly theme for the restaurant. The dining room walls were painted with colorful hillbilly scenes, and the front of the building was adorned with two-dimensional wooden hillbilly figures. (They also served as my playmates from time to time.) Somehow – and I never found out how – they also had a REAL full-size moonshine still outside. It was, however, filled with concrete to prevent it from ever being used to make mash again.

The menu looked like old ceramic jugs a person would drink moonshine from, with food listed in over-the-top hillbilly jargon: Fride Chikun, Mashed Taters, etc. My mother, who was a gifted writer, wrote booklets for tourists to buy. They were filled with funny sayings and fictional stories about the hillbillies in the area.

In other words, everything about the business was built around the popular hillbilly stereotype. It was deliberately campy, because my parents believed that people would see the outside, catch the joke, and come inside to eat in a good meal.

But as time went on, my mother began to encounter people who deeply believed the stereotypes. A professor from a college nearby would come in, eat, but then use a red marker to correct the spelling in the menu. Finally, after this happened more than once, my mother had to sit down with the professor and explain the joke. At some point, she even published an article in the local newspaper talking about how she looked forward to the fall and winter seasons. She liked those times best because the tourists were all gone, and she didn’t have to play the hillbilly role for a while. It was a double-edged sword: the hillbilly theme was helping the business to prosper, but at the same time, it was endorsing the stereotype.

My mother saw the humor in the hillbilly life. She died young, but I think she would have enjoyed shows like “Hee Haw: or “The Beverly Hillbillies.”  Unfortunately, those kinds of shows made me squirm. I hated how the stereotype painted people who lived below the Mason-Dixon line as bumbling, uneducated mountain folk who never wore shoes.

My first encounter with people who had bought into the stereotype happened when I was on leave from the Army. My roommate and I had flown to New York City for the long Labor Day weekend. That Saturday afternoon we went to Shea Stadium for the ball game. It was my first trip to New York City, and my first MLB game, so I was excited. My excitement disappeared after we found our seats behind the dugout when everyone seated around me made fun of my accent. They wanted to know if I had ever seen a television, if I used an outhouse, or if I had married my cousin.

To escape them, I went to the concession stand for a hot dog and coke. Just like everyone else around me in the stadium, the man behind the counter asked me where I was from. When I told him Tennessee, he actually came out from behind the counter to look at my feet! He was amazed that I was wearing shoes! (Never mind that I was in uniform and wearing combat boots!) I told him that he’d been watching “The Beverly Hillbillies” way too long!

Not long after that, I had an encounter with someone else who had been watching that same show too many times. I was working my last day before the Christmas break when one of my sergeants sauntered over.

“You’re from Tennessee, right?” he whispered in a conspiratorial voice.

 “Sure am, sergeant…”

“I’ve always wanted to drink moonshine. I bet you could get your hands on some for me. I mean, you gotta have someone in your family that makes moonshine, right?”

There was no use trying to explain that my family was two generations away from mountain folk who had made moonshine to support their families because farming in East Tennessee was not easy. In fact, about the only thing that grows here is rock! This was also some decades before you could walk into your local liquor store to buy branded moonshine. It was still very illegal to sell home-brewed. But he was a friend, so I told him I would do my best. I flew home the next day.

I asked my father to check into the possibility…. he talked to someone… who talked to someone…. who talked to someone who made moonshine. The day before I was scheduled to fly back, a local man showed up and handed over two quart jars of 200% proof mountain moonshine. I very carefully wrapped them in cotton bunting and two shirts, then put them into my carry-on bag.

In those days, military personnel were required to fly in uniform if flying stand-by, so I flew out of Knoxville in uniform, carefully watching my cargo. There were no problems there… but I forgot about changing planes in Atlanta.  At the check-in desk there, they placed my carry-on bag on the conveyor belt to run it through the X-Ray machine. It went in…and the belt stopped.

I suddenly imagined myself in front of a court-martial board for transporting illegal substances aboard a commercial aircraft in uniform.

The man across from me glanced at the X-Ray image, then looked at me.

“I have to ask you to open your bag, please.”

I wasn’t going to add lying to the list of charges I was about to face, so I told him the truth. “I have two quart jars of 200 proof  Tennessee moonshine in my bag.”

 I was moving to open my bag when he reached out to stop me. “Are you sh…ing me?!”

“No sir.”

He leaned across the conveyor belt and whispered. “I’ll let you keep one….if you give me the other….I have always wanted to try some of that stuff!”

At least he didn’t look to see if I was wearing shoes!