Tommy Dodson 2014

Partial Transcript: My name is Tommy Dodson, and I was born down in Pickens County, South Carolina, back in 1944. Spent the first thirty years of my life in Pickens County. We got a new sheriff in that we had for forty-four years. He tried to make it tough on all the old moonshiners. He put a piece in the paper in—well, I moved to North Carolina in ’73. The reason I moved was so my kids would be close to the bus to go to school. We was two miles from the road. Make this look like it was some city somewhere, where I was at. But when I moved to North Carolina, they put a piece in the Pickens, South Carolina, paper that—and put a picture of some still parts and stuff in there and a big write-up and said, “We never did catch him, but we made it so tough on him he moved to North Carolina to get away from us.” But I really didn’t move on account of him or them either one, but that’s what they said.

Partial Transcript: Well, they lived—my dad was born about a quarter mile from where I live now, and they’ve all been—that’s where they’ve been ever since. They come over on the Mayflower. They said that there was three brothers come over here. One settled in Tennessee, one in North Carolina, and one in Georgia. And so we’re a part of the one that settled in North Carolina.

Partial Transcript: Well, they’ve done a lot of farming and stuff, but me personally, what I’ve done is log my whole life, cut timber.

Partial Transcript: Well, there was four brothers. My dad had one brother older and two younger than he was. They took up moonshinin’ when they were just toddlers, really, but it didn’t come from the Dodson—their daddy. It come from an uncle, their mother’s brother, and that’s where it all filtered down from. I heard my dad talk a lot about him. They picked him up and sent him off for moonshinin’ back in—you know, my dad talked like he was born in 1900, something like 1910 or something. Took him over to Georgia and put him on the chain gang over there. He wasn’t there no time and they had a fifty-pound ball—and they say he was a very strong man. They put a chain on him, and a fifty-pound ball—they talk about Georgia like it’s way off, but it’s just an edge of South Carolina there, I guess forty miles from where he lived. But he just picked that ball and chain up, threw it on his shoulder, and run off and left them and carried it all the way back to their house. And his dad—he said he remembered his dad cutting the chain off of him at the chop block with a hammer and an ax and stuff. Then he camped out with him. He was hiding from the law. That’s where it all stemmed from.

Interviewer
And was he a farmer as well, or did he just strictly do moonshine and get the corn from—?

Tommy Dodson
Oh, they farmed. They tried to grow their own corn, you know, but they didn’t sell it for ten cents a bushel if they could get two dollars or three, so that’s the reason.

Partial Transcript: It was wonderful. We had a wonderful life. My dad, he truck farmed, and we had a lot of honeybees. He tried to keep 120 hives of bees at all times. He said out of 120 he’d have a hundred good ones. And then do a little moonshinin’ on the side. We lived good, had a lot of hogs, ate a lot of pork. Didn’t have nothing to worry about. My dad, he didn’t cotton too much to the law, you know. They dreaded him worse than he dreaded them, in other words.

Interviewer
What is one of your fondest memories as a child growing up?

Tommy Dodson
0:05:48.4 Well, I guess some of the best memories are of my dad’s baby brother. He had his younger brother that was never married, and he stayed with us all the time. We just mostly lived in the woods. We’d go out to make a little bit of liquor and kill us three or four squirrels and cook them in an eight-pound lard bucket on the furnace and make cornmeal gravy, and we’d really chow down and enjoy ourselves. I enjoyed it. Tough life, but it was good.

Partial Transcript: My mom, well, my mom was a great person. She had a sister that come down here with her husband from Tennessee. They come to a logging outfit over in South Carolina, where I was born. In fact, I was born in her sister’s house. My mom come down here to visit her sister and met my dad and got married. That’s how she got down here. But she was right-hand buddy to my dad. She helped him in everything he had to do. When I got big enough to turn a sausage mill, I ground the malt, and she’d help me. But anything to do around the hogs and any feeding or hoeing corn or anything, she was right in here with us then knock off, go home, and fix lunch. We called it dinner, but what they call dinner now, we called it supper. So that was kind of the way that went, but it was wonderful.

Partial Transcript: Oh yeah, we canned everything. We canned everything—green beans, applesauce, apple butter. Oh, like I said, we raised a lot of hogs. We canned a lot of sausage. She canned a lot of meat too. But we got to—we really loved canned sausage. Fry it till it’s almost done and put it in a jar, pour it half full of grease, put the lid on, turn it upside down and it’d stay there forever. We didn’t have no electricity, didn’t have no freezer or nothing. We had to can it. But sausage and stuff won’t keep in the freezer no how more than a few weeks because it’s got all the salt and stuff in it; it won’t freeze hard enough.

Interviewer
Did you have a smokehouse?

Tommy Dodson
Oh yeah, we had a smokehouse. Yeah, we finally cut a load of logs and had them sawed and built us a smokehouse out of lumber. We first had it on the little old back porch at our house. It wasn’t all that good. We’d get a few polecats whenever we’d kill a hog. We’d have a house full of polecats, but we got used to that too, or they got used to us. I don’t know which. But it was fun.

Partial Transcript: No, she mostly just made quilts and stuff. She done her quiltin’ and stuff. She didn’t make too many clothes. She made a lot of quilts. And she used hundred-pound sugar sacks to make the linings out of good heavy material. We got sugar, back in that time, in hundred-pound bags for about a couple of bucks, and that’s what we used. Of course, they was white, but she would dye them red and color them up and make good, heavy quilts. Where we lived we needed some heavy quilts. It was in the mountains, and it was cold. The house wasn’t too tight, so if we didn’t have enough cover you’d have to raise it up and turn over under it, but we made it good.

Partial Transcript: Well, I milked the cow and fed the hogs, fed the chickens, just a little bit of everything there was to do around the place after I got big enough. Make sure I had stove wood in and firewood and all of that stuff. But I helped with all of it. Just like I was talking about my uncle a while ago, he was always there to help us too, and me and him done most of that.

Partial Transcript: Well, my dad said him and his brothers, they learned enough from their uncle that I was telling you about to get it started, and they made them a little-bitty rig and put it out behind their daddy’s barn. They stole enough cornmeal out of the house to get them a little thing going out there. He found it and give them a good whippin’ and tore it up. He said that made them want to expand a little more, so they got out and picked them up some little bigger stuff and got a little bit further from the house. They got them a little bit made that time, and it just kept growin’ and a growin’. Then back during the war—we raised hogs. They were pretty good-sized. My dad and his oldest half-brother, they worked together because my dad helped raise the second kids and the older brother was only fourteen. My dad was twenty-seven. There was a 4H camp near where they lived. Meat was rationed during the war. A lot of dignitaries from Columbia, South Carolina, would come up to this camp to spend time. My dad and his brother had whiskey, and they had plenty of pork, which was rationed, and they couldn’t get none. These politicians, well, they had a little money, and they’d come up there, and they’d sell them five gallons of liquor and a ham—cured meat. They done quite well over there during the war dealing with the politicians and stuff.

What I should have said, my dad got a job of caretaking that camp, which he was not interested in that. It paid thirty dollars a month. But they done a little bit better than thirty dollars a month with the whiskey and the pork.

Interviewer
0:13:06.3 How much did five gallons of shine go for in those days, do you know?

Tommy Dodson
Fifty dollars. Fifty dollars. It come down after the war. It dropped down pretty heavy. But everything was kind of booming during the war, and that’s what they got for it—fifty dollars for a stone jug full—five-gallon stone jug.

Partial Transcript: Well, after I got big enough to follow him around, we lived two miles from the road, and revenuers got pretty heavy. But down on the highway, two miles from our house, a Greyhound bus and a Trailways run two a day down and back. And he got him an old, heavy military suitcase, a heavy joker. Some of the lawyers and doctors down in a little town called Pickens, South Carolina, they liked it. I was big enough to go with him some, and I’d follow him down there. We’d go down there, and he’d carry that old suitcase and have six gallons of liquor in it. Back in that time, you’d get out and flag the bus. So we’d get out on the road, sit the liquor down, and when the bus come on just flag the bus, stick it in the cargo bay under the bottom, go into town, and just get off like a businessperson with your suitcase and do whatever you wanted to with it, get on the bus, and go back home that evening. Worked out pretty good. Worked out good.

Partial Transcript: Well, I started going with him when I was about six years old. I followed him around, but when I got old enough and big enough that I could carry ten pounds of sugar into the still and a gallon of liquor out, I went at it. I worked it. Then I just grew on up. My dad gave me a two-gallon jug, carried that for a while, then stepped up to a three gallon. We still got them all. Not all of them. We had hundreds of them. But we’ve got one of each thing. Then I stepped up to a three gallon, a four gallon, a five gallon, and by the time I was sixteen years old, I had two five gallons. And then just kept on growing on up and just got going and stayed going. It’s something—I log too. I’ve cut timber for fifty-something years, and the two—you get the two in your blood, and you ain’t going to get it out. I mean, if they put you in Alcatraz, you’d figure out some way to make a drink, and you’re going to cut a few trees if there’s one standing. That’s the way it is. You’ve got to be born in it, you’ve got to grow up in it, and you’ll stay in it. That’s the way I found it.

Interviewer
When you were making moonshine, were you also delivering it yourself, or were people coming to you?

Tommy Dodson
Well, I never did deliver too much of it. Maybe get it somewhere and let somebody pick it up, a sizable amount or something. My dad was kind of scared of that. He said as long as you were in the woods with it, you had just as good a chance as the other guy. But when you get in the highway and going downtown with it, you were just like a rabbit in a gun; you were just there. And that kind of stuck in my mind. That’s about right.

Partial Transcript: A good one—I think it’s good. It leads up to me getting involved in it, but it’s some cousins of mine that got the whole thing started. They lived out on the side of the road, and a preacher lived right out the road about 100 yards. It was wintertime, and it was muddy, and their yard was muddy. There was a road that went up a little old creek there. They called it Sugar Likker Road—Sugar Likker Lake Road. It was named that on account there was so much liquor made up that little old road. I come up the road one day, and boy there was mud coming out of their driveway and just right around and right up that road. It looked like somebody had been hauling logs out of there. I stopped in there about half drunk, and I said, “Boys, that ain’t going to work.” I said, “I know what you’re doing. The preacher will have you caught.” “Yeah, yeah, yeah.”

Well, they went up there and run their stuff and had a cousin of mine watching for them. Well, the law knew what was going on. They stopped over the hill and went around the house and went up there. Caught another cousin of mine and his friend. So this cousin that was supposed to have been watching for the law, he’s going to go down to a beer joint and get him a beer. So he goes over the top of the hill. There’s a law car sitting there. And he turned around, took off back up that road blowing his horn. It was a ’55 Chevrolet. I remember it like it was yesterday—yellow and white. He went around the curve up there in the road, blowing his horn, and they had his brother and his friend, their hands tied around a dogwood bush, sitting on the side of the road. They’d done handcuffed them to a dogwood tree, and they stopped him. And he said, “What are you blowing your horn for?” And there was a federal guy told me this later. I’ll get around to that in a minute. And said that he said, “Well, it’s crooked road up through here. Didn’t want some fool running over me. I wanted them to know I was coming.” And he said, “No, you were blowing for these boys to get out of that still.” And he said, “I’m going to take that car.” And the federal man told me that my cousin had his hand on that pistol and flipped the snap up on it before you could pop your finger. And he said, “You might take it, but you’ll drive it into hell before sundown.” He said, “That’s where you’re going this evening.” And that federal man told me, “I know Patterson had a gun, and he done had my deputy’s gun.” And he said, “I laid on mine. I knew he didn’t need another one.” But he said, “I’ve never been so glad to see somebody leave a scene in my life as I seen him going down the road.”

0:20:54.8 But what led up to that, I had a little ol’ still above where I lived, and I went to check on it. Well, I run it out. I run the stuff out. And went across and go down another branch, and I got over there in the branch, and there was two sardine cans and maybe a pork and bean can and one of these little ol’ small cracker boxes. So I knew there was something going on. So it spooked me. I stayed away from it for a while. I finally went back and cleaned it up. And this is what started the story on the other. I sat at the house one day and the law pulled up in the yard. They got out and come over to the house, knocked on the door, and I went to the door. I spoke, and they spoke. I said, “You fellers doing any good?” That federal guy said, “Yeah, we’re doing good right up here behind your house.” I said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

But anyhow, I’d went up there the day before, and one of the deputies was up there. Now, I was young, you know, and didn’t much care, but this deputy, he said, “I saw you up there yesterday.” I said, “If you seen some silly you-know-what in that still yesterday, why didn’t you arrest him instead of coming around here and trying to pack something on somebody that don’t know what you’re talking about?” And that’s when the federal guy, he said, “I’ll just turn it over to these county boys. If you want to fess up and just own up to everything, there won’t be much to it. But if I have to go to Greenville to get a warrant, I’m going to take this place apart.” I said, “No. No, friend, you ain’t going to take nothing apart here.” I said, “This is my momma’s place.” I said, “I ain’t got nothing here. She just lets me live here.”

0:23:09.0 So that’s when he said, “Are you kin to P.A. Patterson?” I said, “Yeah, he’s my cousin.” He said, “That’s the dangerousest (sic) I ever seen.” I said, “No, he’s as harmless as a heel hound. You just don’t want to fool with him.” And then that’s when he told me all this story about that. And he did go get a search warrant, but there wasn’t nothing they could do. The thing was two miles from my house. But he just wanted to bluff me into something, but it didn’t work. So I thought that was a pretty good story.

Interviewer
Did you ever get caught?

Tommy Dodson
No, I’ve really never been straight out caught. I’ve been set up and knocked down, you know. But I got a strip in the paper—if I’d have thought I’d a brought it—where Pickens law wrote up in the paper about—they put it in there in ’87, I believe it was. Anyhow, they had a big write-up and said, “We never did catch him, but we made it so hard on him he had to move to North Carolina to get away from us.” But that ain’t the reason I moved. I told you a while ago the reason I moved—so the kids could go to school. It wasn’t on account of them birds. (laughs) But they’re all dead and gone, and I’m still here. And that’s the gospel truth.

Partial Transcript: Well, it put food on a lot of people’s table. And like them guys I was talking about a while ago, there was a feller over there in South Carolina wrote a book, Where Have All Our Moonshiners Gone? He’s got a good book. Don’t get me wrong. He wrote a good book. But what he wrote about is the revenuer’s side of it. That’s all he knew because he was on the newspaper, and they’d bring in all this stuff, and the pictures and stuff, and that’s the side of it he got. And hopefully my wife and I will get to write a book one of these days on how much trouble it caused mountain people and how many kids it sent to school without a biscuit of a mornin’ because they went out and tore up their stuff and took it and sold it and drunk what of it they could and sold the rest of it. That’s the way they done it. But it was a curiosity the way it happened. But it was a way of life. I mean, it was a way of life. No ifs, ands, and buts about it. It was a way of life. I never did see no harm in it myself. I really didn’t. My dad said we raised—I keep on bringing up hogs. Well, we raised a lot of hogs. People would come to the house when they killed hogs at Thanksgiving time to get their pigs for next year. What pigs we had in the spring, we’d fatten them out and sell them in the fall. And what pigs we had in the fall, we’d sell them to people around in the community to raise our hogs for next year. But he said there wasn’t no more harm in selling anybody a gallon of liquor for ten dollars than there was selling a pig for ten dollars if you wasn’t going to turn it into the government. It was nothing but tax evasion anyway. One was the same as the other. And that’s the way I looked at it too.

0:26:46.2 There’s a lot of these good folks go out and they’ll sell an old car or something—three or four hundred dollars. You think they’re going to turn it in? No. So they done just as bad as I did for selling a case of liquor. Same thing.

Partial Transcript: You don’t need to know about that. Everybody in the community made liquor, and everybody but us was jealous of everybody else. That’s one thing about our family, we wasn’t jealous. I didn’t care if you had fifty barrels over here in this holler and I had three over here. It wouldn’t make no difference to me, because I always figured if there wasn’t no place for me, the Lord wouldn’t put me here no way. And I just carry on. But everybody in the little ol’ community where I was at, they made liquor and sold it—where I was born and raised up at. And most of them are kinfolk. No kin to us, but we was about the only ones in the community that wasn’t kin. And boy, if one traded cars—got a car that looked a little bit better than the other one, here’d come the law, and they’d tear down everybody in the country. (laughs) Just jealous and reporting each other, and it was brothers and sisters and sister-in-laws and brothers and all that stuff would report each other. But we never did have no grief like that. We stayed to ourselves, but everybody did fool with it.

Partial Transcript: Well, it’s very important. It’s something that if somebody don’t keep it alive and keep the memories alive and keep it going on, why it’s just going to fall by the wayside, and future generations won’t know a thing about what has been or what will be or nothing. They’ll think it’s just important to try to keep a memory of it and keep it alive, I think.

Partial Transcript: Well, that’s got a lot to teach if you can get them slowed down and get them off the electronic machine long enough to listen to you, but that’s the trouble—getting somebody to listen. They don’t have time. They’re not interested in older people. I guess it just gets to be a bore to them or something. I just don’t know whether they’ll keep it alive or not. We’ve got a few young people that’s taken a good interest in it. I think we’re better off than we was ten or fifteen years ago, at least, because it was really a dying art. And somebody like Cody here that’s really interested and going forward and not just trying to use the name moonshine to profit a buck off of something that they don’t know nothing about—you know, that’s what’s bad. That’s what really gets under my skin. Like all this moonshinin’ stuff on TV, and like this Ax Men loggers and stuff you see on TV that’s nothing but drama, that’s as far from the truth as truth could get. That’s sad. It is to me. And I think—well, I don’t think; I just hope and pray that we can get a few people that’s really interested in it and keep it alive.

Partial Transcript: Well, they’ve lost the whole meaning of life. Now, that’s my opinion. Everybody’s got their own. But they just lost the whole meaning of life. They’ll never know what I knew as a child and growing up. It’s so far out, there ain’t no way. And I only see it getting worse. I sure hope it don’t, but that’s all I see.

Partial Transcript: Oh yeah, we could eat. I think we could eat whether we had any—I know we could—whether we had a penny of money or not. It might not be something you like, but you’ll learn to like it if you’re stuck with it long enough. You get hungry enough, it will taste good. We know how to dig out a groundhog and cook it and catch a coon and all of that stuff.

Partial Transcript: Well, I hate to say it, but I believe it’s just about too far out of control for them to go back like that. It would take a terrible disaster, and they wouldn’t be—there wouldn’t be a handful of folks left. There might be one or two around in an area like this, but as far as when you get closer to town and closer to the city, why, I just don’t see how they would survive. I really don’t. You know, they’ve never been taught. They don’t have a place now. And it’s just not—I don’t see it feasible that they could make it. I think if it got real bad, I think it’d just be death and destruction just beyond imagination because they done let everything go and just go down to the grocery store and pick it up if you’ve got the money, and they don’t have a clue of what it’d be like to live off of the land. They really don’t.

Interviewer
0:34:04.0 Is that something that can still be taught? Can we teach people that prosperity comes from the ground and not from China or from the grocery store?

Tommy Dodson
Well, you could teach it, but as far as getting out there and really doing it, I just don’t know. I really don’t know. Because we’ve done let that phase of life go by. I mean, it’s gone. And like I say, it would take a total disaster to get what few people that could make it to start over again. But it just—I just don’t see it doing. I don’t see you could. I think we went too far. I really do. I think we let it get out of control maybe thirty, forty years ago when we first turned to all this stuff. And whenever they started doing away with these little ol’ schoolhouses around in each community—when I was growing up, every community had a schoolhouse, and ours, they taught seven grades in one room, one teacher. But they were everywhere. But when they done away with all of that, they done away with all the country doctors. You have to be with some big company before you can do doctorin’ or stuff like that. I think that was the beginning of the end. And we’ve just done away with everything that we knew, and we’re stuck with this new way of life that they’ve got, and I just don’t see it coming back. I really don’t.

Partial Transcript: The main thing I think I learned at an early age from my dad is to be honest with people, and if you can’t help them, it don’t cost a thing to leave them alone and stay out of their business. That’s one thing that’s bad about everything today is people don’t have any business theirselves, so they want to stay busy running somebody else’s, and that’s not good. And I learned at an early age to mind my own business and leave the other guy alone. And if something happens you can’t do exactly what you tell a guy, it don’t take no trouble to tell him why and talk to him. You don’t hide from nobody or do nothing like that. So I think that’s about the best lesson I had.

Partial Transcript: Yeah, we’ve got a son that can handle it. Yeah. He’s been around it about his whole life. He’s not into it like, I’d say, myself, but he can handle it all right. He can handle it.