Mountain Heritage

I trust you have all seen a moonshine still before.

The Cherokee Stickball exhibition was at this year's Mountain Heritage Day. This blog has been in existence for more than two decades, so I have probably told all of my family stories before. Our part of the mountain heritage on display was this part. 

My grandfather was a welder, my father's father. He had seven brothers and one sister, so his father my great-grandfather couldn't pass the farm on to all of them. Being one of the younger sons, my grandfather had to find something else to do, and he tried trade school. He almost quit because he despaired over being able to make welds that weren't ugly, but one of his instructors talked to him about it and realized what he was upset about. The instructor took a hammer and hit one of the admired pretty welds, which shattered under the blow. He hit my grandfather's, and it held. "You've got your whole life to learn to make 'em pretty," said the instructor, so a welder my grandfather became. During World War II he wasn't able to re-enlist in the Army due to that skill, so he ended up working at the Oak Ridge facility making what turned out to be atomic bombs.

During the Great Depression, though, there wasn't even welding work to be had. As a result, he turned his hand to making moonshine stills for the bootleggers. 

He was also a mechanic, and after the war opened a service station where he did body work and tuned the greatest era of cars ever made -- though he was located on the route of what became I-75 and did much of his work in long-haul big rigs. He would have known almost any of these inside and out. So would my father, who grew up working on them alongside my grandfather -- and occasionally racing them illegally in the mountains. Dad later became an upstanding and law-abiding citizen after his wilder youthful days.

If you follow the link above, my grandfather standing in front of a 1940 Chevrolet.

I do love a classic pony car.

You don't see a lot of GTOs, at least locally. This one comes equipped with tartan, a hint of Western North Carolina's intense level of Scottish-immigrant heritage.

I always like a good hot rod.

Nothing like a Thunderbird.

A classic Chevy and a Ford Fairlane.

I always say that nostalgia for me looks like Smokey and the Bandit, which is exactly where and how it was when I was growing up.