News Release

Note: For photos and drama places, titles and dates, visit http://www.unc.edu/news/archives/jun07/oddlist060607.html

Junior drama takes stock of NASCAR, Wilkes history

Horses and wagons, canoes and sailing ships – these are the means of travel usually seen in outdoor historical dramas.

But move over moccasins. This year, the colonial and the pioneer will share the limelight with the V-8 engine as the Wilkes Playmakers of Wilkesboro present a much more recent slice of history.

The company’s new “Moonshine and Thunder: The Junior Johnson Story,” set in the 1930s and ’40s, will tell the tale of a stock-car racing giant whose beginnings as a bootlegger paralleled those of the National Association of Stock Car Auto Racing.

The addition of “Moonshine” brings the total number of outdoor dramas in North Carolina this year to 21 said Scott Parker, director of the Institute of Outdoor Drama at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. For the play titles, locations, dates and details, visit http://www.unc.edu/news/archives/jun07/oddlist060607.html.

The institute, a public service of UNC, aids and advises companies nationwide about management, promotion, technical and artistic elements and more. Parker estimates annual attendance at 2.5 million, with an economic impact on U.S. travel and tourism of about $500 million.

Parker will retire July 31 after heading the institute for 17 years. Previously, he produced “The Lost Colony” and taught theater at Duke and East Carolina universities. The number of outdoor drama theater companies affiliated with the institute doubled during his tenure, to 100 in 37 states.

Next April, Parker will become dean of the College of Fellows of the American Theatre, an honorary society based at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C.

“Scott has always been helpful not only to us, but to everybody in outdoor drama,” said James Wilson, general manager of “The Sword of Peace” and “Pathway to Freedom” in Snow Camp. “His experience is wide and valued deeply.”

“Moonshine” will premiere much later than the traditional June-August outdoor drama season, playing Thursdays through Sundays Oct. 18-28.

By then, the Wilkes Playmakers usually have moved inside, said Karen Reynolds, company executive director. But that would make it impossible to get a car on stage.

Yes, she plans to have thespian gentlemen start big engines, and to show NASCAR film clips on a big screen. Johnson himself, and possibly other racing notables, will be invited for opening weekend – which coincides with the annual Carolina in the Fall bluegrass festival in neighboring North Wilkesboro.

“People can go hear bluegrass all day and come watch the moonshiners at night,” Reynolds said. The play will be in the Forest Edge Amphitheatre in Fort Hamby Park, on the shores of W. Kerr Scott Lake. “The setting is absolutely beautiful, and there are camping facilities,” she said.

The company will stage both “Moonshine” and their seventh season of “Tom Dooley: A Wilkes County Legend” in the park, both in partnership with the Army Corps of Engineers and Friends of the Lake. Reynolds, a Wilkes County native, wrote “Dooley” and is penning “Moonshine” as well.

“A lot of the history of our county will be involved,” Reynolds said. “This is really a celebration of who we are.”

Set in Wilkes, once known as the moonshine capital of the world, the story takes place in the 1930s and into the 1940s, during the Great Depression. Jobs were scarce everywhere, and the independent-minded Scotch-Irish of the North Carolina mountains saw no reason to change who they were, Reynolds said – and never mind the government monopoly on liquor sales.

They were a private people, used to being left alone. “There was very little recourse for these folks who couldn’t feed their families.” So they minded stills and employed fast cars and fancy driving to deliver illegal whiskey  – often with government revenuers in hot pursuit.

They were not alone in the culture of rebels during those times, including robbers John Dillinger and Bonnie and Clyde. “Henry Ford actually received a letter from Clyde Barrow thanking him for the V-8 engine,” Reynolds said.

In Wilkes, things changed when Holly Farms (now Tyson Foods) opened a chicken processing plant there in the 1940s, offering lots of jobs, she said. By then, the moonshiners “were tired of going to jail. A lot of them became poultry producers.”

Born Robert Glenn Johnson in 1930 in Wilkes County, Junior Johnson learned to drive when he was 8 or 9. By the age of 14, he was delivering bootleg whiskey in his father’s pickup.

“Everybody we’d grown up with was doing the same thing we was, and we didn’t really think basically it was against the law,” he told The Sporting News. Johnson’s evasive driving abilities became legendary. He invented the 180-degree bootleg turn, dropping the car into second gear and jarring the wheel to the left.

He and other bootleggers were the first competitors at the former North Wilkesboro Speedway, open from 1947 to 1996. A June 2005 master’s degree thesis by Andrew J. Baker of Ohio University, tracing the history of the track, is posted at http://www.savethespeedway.net/history1.html.

In 1956, federal officers seized the largest supply of illegal whiskey in U.S. history in a raid at the Johnson farm. Johnson was sentenced to two years in a federal reformatory and served 11 months, learning, he said, about discipline, obedience and stopping to evaluate the ideas of others.

Afterward, he devoted himself to NASCAR, winning 50 races as a driver before becoming a racing team leader in 1966. By the time of his overall retirement in 1995, Johnson had helped initiate the Winston Cup championship series and been inducted into the N.C. Sports, N.C. Auto Racing, Stock Car and International Motor Sports halls of fame. Today, he lives on a farm near Hamptonville.
           
Wilkes Playmakers contact: Karen Reynolds, (336) 838-7529, playmaker@pcshome.net
Institute of Outdoor Drama contact: Scott Parker, (919) 962-1328, parkers@email.unc.edu
News Services contact: LJ Toler, (919) 962-8589