THE BEAR AND THUNDER ROAD

I have regaled you with some of my childhood memories growing up in the foothills of the Great Smokey Mountains. As you know I was born a young child with a full set of teeth and a full coat of hair. While Davy Crockett killed him a bear when he was only 4 years old, my encounter with a bear was at the tender age of 3. I was hunting squirrels for supper with my Dad's 22 rifle. He would give me three or 4 shells and tell me to bring back 3 or 4 squirrels. If I brought back less, he wanted to know what happened with the extra bullet. Anyway to the bear. I came around a giant oak tree about a mile from my Dad's whiskey still and tripped over a black bear napping behind the tree. As you can imagine, we were both surprised and startled.  We became entangled with each other and since we were on a slope, we started rolling downhill asshole to elbow, each holding to the other. As we neared the bottom of the hill, nearby observers (other hunters) spread the story that I was wrestling with the bear. We collided with a Sassafras tree which stopped the downhill tumble. The bear got up and stood on its hind legs and so did I. He reached out his paw and I shook it and we went our separate ways. Some might tell this story differently but I was there and I know that it was, for the most part, an innocent encounter. No blood was shed. At any rate, you will just have to believe what you will. 

My first cousin Willy B tells a story where he run into a bear while in the woods. When asked why he didn't shoot the bear he said: "I did not have a gun and it was not loaded." Willy B was known to stretch the truth from time to time.

Now, nine years later in 1958 my sisters, Thelma and Estelle asked me to drive them to Lake Toxaway since neither of them had a driver's license. My Dad was in his liquor still working so I  short wired his 1941 Chevrolet coupe and away we went. Now Lake Toxaway is best known for its spectacular waterfall called Toxaway Falls. 

In 1958 Robert Mitchem was starring in a movie called Thunder Road and they were filming a scene where Robert Mitchem with a full load of moonshine "left the road at 90" while being chased by Revenooers. The movie showed his car going off the road and down the Toxaway Waterfalls. When we got there, Robert Mitchem was having lunch with some of the camera crew and of course my sisters went right up to him and asked for his autograph. I was busy checking out the blonde girl at the lunch cart. She smiled at me and darned if it didn't look like she had all her teeth. She motioned me over and gave me a sandwich and a bottle of coca-cola. We talked and she asked me for my telephone number. I sheepishly told her that I didn't have a telephone or a number. She smiled and said: "I guess I will just have to send you messages by smoke signal." I never saw her again but every once in awhile over the next few years, I looked toward Toxaway Falls just in case she was sending me a signal.

For those of you who have not seen the movie Thunder Road, I would recommend it. It does stretch the truth a mite but it still depicts the way of life in Western North Carolina in the '50s.  Course none of the cars we used to haul moonshine for my Dad would go 90 miles an hour and we just hauled the hooch in the trunk of the car in one-gallon coke jugs mostly at night time.

Note: 

Thunder Road is a black and white 1958 drama–crime film directed by Arthur Ripley and starring Robert Mitchum, who also produced the film and co-wrote the screenplay. With Don Raye, Mitchum co-wrote the theme song, "The Ballad of Thunder Road." The film features Gene Barry and Jacques Aubuchon. The film's plot concerns running moonshine in the mountains of Kentucky, Tennessee, and North Carolina in the late 1950s. Thunder Road became a cult film and continued to play at drive-in movie theaters in some southeastern states.