Horse Learns to Stop at Bootlegger's -- Finger Bowl Faux Pas -- The Mailed Jeep

The following account is in the tradition of stories about unsuspecting people who end up owning horses that have learned to stop at drinking establishments or brothels.

Sheilah Roberts Lukins, Bottoms Up: A History of Alcohol in Newfoundland and Labrador (St. John’s, NL: Breakwater Books, 2020), 121, 238n15.

It is said that by the late 1940s and early 1950s, nearly every house on or near Princess Street [in St. John’s] bootlegged liquor.

The local police soon found a clever way to catch some of the local bootleggers. They simply watched the horses. These clever delivery animals knew their routes well and knew exactly where to stop with their wagons. One of the soft-drink companies had a delivery wagon with a driver who was less than hard-working. In the middle of his deliveries, he would regularly scoot down to Princess Street to visit a bootlegger. Here he would stop the horse and pick up his drink. The fellow soon lost his job for various reasons, and the company hired a new driver. They never bothered to train new drivers because the horses knew the routes so well. So when this new driver steered the horse and wagon in the direction of New Gower Street one day, the horse went about its business “training in” the new driver by turning onto Princess Street, where it stopped at a house. The driver looked around confused, but soon realized what had been going on. It was said that the horses showed the police the location of every bootlegger in town. This helped the police apprehend many of them. [n.: Patrons of Fiddler’s Pub in discussion with the author, July 2017.]

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Stories about naïve diners’ experiences with finger bowls typically involve the water therein being sipped or drunk. In Woody Allen’s memoir, however, the situation is reversed: he mistakes a bowl of clam broth for a finger bowl, and washes his fingers in it. (On the finger bowl faux pas, see Véronique Campion-Vincent & Jean-Bruno Renard, 100% Rumeurs (2014), 344-56.)

Woody Allen, Apropos of Nothing (New York: Arcade Publishing, 2020), 34.

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“Dear Dad.” M*A*S*H, season 1, episode 12, 17 Dec. 1972. Corporal Radar O’Reilly mails a jeep home piece by piece, telling Colonel Blake the packages are toys for orphans. Dr. Pierce (voice over): “Radar is not the first guy to do this, of course. It’s an old army bit. I wouldn’t be surprised if one of George Washington’s soldiers hadn’t mailed home a horse one piece at a time.” (There’s an unintentional double negative there, I think.)

C. H. Moore, “On the Level,” Crime and Punishment #12, March 1949. “A soldier in Germany stole an army Jeep and had mailed half of it to his home in the U.S. before he was caught!”

 

 

Supernatural Legends Exploited by Moonshiners

“The Cave Without an Exit,” Unusual Tales #38, March 1963. Frightened locals warn two cave explorers to stay away from a haunted cave. The pair fight with moonshiners who work in the cave and inadvertently cause drums of booze stored there to explode.

The idea that moonshiners sometimes exploit supernatural legends to scare away potential interlopers is a folk belief about moonshiners’ own strategic use of folk beliefs. In Britain (and elsewhere?) there are similar tales about smugglers using ghost legends to safeguard their activities. See, for example, Theo Brown, The Fate of the Dead (D.S. Brewer, 1979), 39; and Karl Bell, The Magical Imagination: Magic and Modernity in Urban England 1780-1914 (Cambridge University Press, 2012), 68-9.

Daniel S. Green, Far-Out, Shaggy, Funky Monsters (Greenville, OH: Coachwhip Publications, 2018), 817-8. A newspaper asked Floridians their opinion of the Skunk Ape. A man from Lynne responded: “I think somebody making moonshine liquor spreads these rumors to keep people scared out of their areas.” “Believe It, or Not,” Ocala Star-Banner (FL), 17 November 1977, p. 10A.

Green, Funky Monsters, 974. Knobby was a hairy hominid named after Carpenter’s Knob, Cleveland County, North Carolina, where it was supposedly first spotted in 1978. “It’s somebody running moonshine,” one resident theorized at the Cook’s hardware store. “They’re trying to scare people away.” “Knobby’s Popularity Diminishes,” Rocky Mount Telegram (NC), 13 March 1979, p. 2.

Green, Funky Monsters, 977. “Probably second only to Knobby being a bear, one of the most bandied about explanations was a simple scare tactic adopted to keep folks away from an illicit still. If any kernel of truth could be attributed to this rationale, the results flew in the face of its intent, as the crowds came to search for Knobby. As the Knobby furor died off, an event occurred which rekindled the idea Knobby was meant to ward people away from furtive moonshine production.” “In Casar community, where Knobby was seen most often, an old house caught fire and burned to the ground. The remains of the house contained one of the largest liquor stills ever found in the Carolinas, and it was learned that the fire was caused by an oil burner used in the distilling process. Naturally the diehards yelled that the Knobby or Bigfoot stories were concocted to keep people away from the site of the illegal still.” Robert L. Williams, “‘Knobby’ North Carolina’s Bigfoot,” UFO Report, September 1979, 27.

Chad Arment, The Historical Bigfoot, 2nd ed. (Greenville, OH: Coachwhip Publications, 2019), 609. One explanation for a Ralston, MS, gorilla hunt was that “moonshiners had fabricated the story to discourage officers from poking around.” “Gorilla hunt: Recess called to let the dust settle,” Hattiesburg American (MS), 12 Sep. 1952.

Arment, Historical Bigfoot, 684-5. “Nearly every officer [in Franklin County, NY] who found it possible to get away was last week searching for a reported wild man.” It was later reported that “it was nothing more than a clever ruse, effected by bootlegger[s] to take advantage of the absence of officers in coming across the border with $5000 worth of liquor.” Lake Placid News (NY), 2 Sep. 1921.

Arment, Historical Bigfoot, 764. A sheriff in Richland County, OH, stated a “huge ape” seen roaming at large “was a man engaged in bootlegging” while wearing his wife’s fur coat. The bootlegger didn’t intend to be mistaken for an ape. “‘Ape’ is revealed as county’s bootlegger,” Charleston Gazette (WV), 17 July 1931.

Turnabout being fair play, monster stories were supposedly also used by farmers to protect their berry or melon patches from thieves –  including moonshiners “in search of material for their home brew” (Arment, Historical Bigfoot, 473-4, 732, 745, 828-9; see esp. 873-5, 877-8).

Joe Nickell, “Tracking the Swamp Monsters,” Skeptical Inquirer, vol. 25, no. 4, July/August 2001. “My Cajun guide…offered some interesting ideas about [Louisiana’s] Honey Island Swamp Monster and similar entities. He thought that frightening stories might have been concocted on occasion to keep outsiders away – perhaps to protect prime hunting areas or even help safeguard moonshine stills.”

William Montell, Tales of Kentucky Ghosts (University Press of Kentucky, 2010), 67. “Back during Prohibition, six moonshiners decided that [a property where an entire family had been killed years before] would be a safe place to hide a still because no one ever came around. They put the still in the barn behind the house, and one night as they celebrated a big moonshine whiskey sale, they began making fun of the “ghosts” that had been hiding them. As they joked, a fire mysteriously started in both ends of the barn and trapped them inside. One of the men, badly burnt, escaped the fire and lived long enough to tell what had happened.”

Montell, Kentucky Ghosts, 183-4. A bootlegger pretends to be a headless man to scare folks away from an abandoned mine where whiskey is made and stored.

Drew Murdoch, “Ghost Gallery,” Jumbo Comics #56, Oct. 1943