All my old heroes are passing. A Moonshiner turned NASCAR racer? Now THAT is the Resistance!
Joe Doakes
Wow. Shows what I know – I thought Johnson died in the seventies – and that he’d have been a lot older than that. He was a legend when I was a little kid and followed auto racing.
Wow.
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Something happened to NASCAR. Something inevitable.
I remember walking around the concessions at the Daytonna speedway and marveling at all the sponsor’s logos on people’s jackets. I can understand rooting for Kyle Bush – but M & M’s?
Really?
Give me a dirt track on a Saturday night with an after party anytime.
“Hey, you want a little water in that beer to thicken it up?”
For anyone who hasn’t seen it, I highly recommend the movie Ford Vs Ferrari. It is a great story, done well. I would also recommend the Netflix documentary on Carrol Shelby. The highlight of the Shelby story is the culture of Van Nuys, where mechanical geniuses came together for the love of doing what they do best.
Then like NASCAR, Shelby got all corporate.
There is something about success that just ruins everything. I would tell anyone who has the good luck to be part of a start-up, to leave after the first four hour meeting. That is the point after which, everything is bad.
Moonshine will undoubtedly outlast NASCAR down here. As Greg said, it’s gotten corporate, with all crap that brings in the current year.
Here’s a little factoid. There’s a lot of legal distilleries making what they call “moonshine” and selling it to people who think if its in a mason jar and its clear, its shine…but its not.
The legal stuff has to be kept at or below 100 proof. No moonshiner worthy of the name would ever sell anything less than 120 proof. The best white liquor is 150 proof.
Swiftee;
I concur. I was in the Air Force with “a good old boy” from Tennessee. He went home on leave and brought back some ‘shine from his dad’s still. His dad was a moonshiner and a car racer, but he wouldn’t tell me whether or not his dad used the “race cars” to run shine to avoid the “revenuers”. He claimed that it was somewhere between 130 and 140 proof, but all I know is that before he caught me, I poured some into a styrofoam cup and it started to melt. I guess that you need to put some kind of mix in those cups, first.
Just for kicks, I looked up the solubility of polystyrene, and yes, ethanol is a solvent of some capability for that. Kinda suggests that that particular plastic might not be the best way to hold your drink!
Rest in peace, Junior, and may we never repeat the disasters of Prohibition and total control of alcohol by the government. I’m not a moonshine drinker–white lightning or illicit–but I applaud the new micro-distilleries out there.
NASCAR has become to stock-car racing what the Nashville Sound was to country music. Undeniably successful, but ultimately overdoing it. Watch for the rise of “Outlaw NASCAR”.
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