Roarin’ out of Harlan, revvin’ up his mill, He shot the gap at Cumberland, and screamed by Maynardville. With T-men on his taillights, roadblocks up ahead, The mountain boy took roads that even Angels feared to tread. Blazin’ right through Knoxville, out on Kingston Pike, Then right outside of Bearden where they made the fatal strike He left the road at 90, that’s all there is to say, The devil got the moonshine and the mountain boy that day.
Connoisseurs of Thunder Road know that the movie was filmed in Asheville and the action takes place nowhere near Knoxville. Nonetheless, the words of the song and the image from the movie of the hot rod flipping over into an electrical substation are cemented in our collective memory, and they certainly tap into larger truths about this region’s ties to moonshine, fast cars, and running from revenuers.
Back in the November 2002 Cityview, I gathered all the hints available as to where Robert Mitchum had gotten that particular story. From the 2001 Mitchum biography Baby I Don’t Care, by Lee Server, we learned that Mitchum had used a connection to get into the ATF files in Washington and come away with nine pages of offi cial documents. It’s easy to see how Mitchum could have taken the language from official reports to craft the lyrics of his song. (The tune was that of a Norwegian pavanne that his mother used to sing to him as a child.) But no one has ever found evidence of the crash that Mitchum sings about.
We explored the theories of Oak Ridge physicist/writer Alex Gabbard. In his book Return to Thunder Road, Gabbard had celebrated the route described in the song from Harlan Ky., through Maynardville on Highway 33, Broadway and then onto Kingston Pike. Gabbard had many clues about the mountain boy, and how he might have been connected to places near Harlan. Both Gabbard and writer Kate Clabough had interviewed Farragut farmer John Fitzgerald, who swore, with many persuasive details, that as a teenager he saw federal agents at a roadblock and a crash on Kingston Pike. Clabough – a relentless historical researcher trained in a library/newspaper morgue in Nebraska before she moved to Louisville in 1997 –checked newspaper microfilms, police reports and funeral home records. She interviewed many who called with leads after the Cityview story (we listed a phone number), including Knoxvillians with memories of similar crashes of moonshiners or stories they’d heard about some of our area’s great dirt-track drivers, or their grandfathers, or friends of their grandfathers.
One elderly woman called and told me about a crash off North Central, where the car turned over and poured whiskey all over the street. One caller said the movie was based on moonshine-runner Gus Mathis. Clabough interviewed his widow, Grace, by phone from her Cocke County home. She said, yes, indeed, Gus ran his car over Swann’s Bridge headlong into a police car, ended up in a full body cast and got 13 years in prison in Atlanta. But he was not the subject of the movie. Clabough wrote letters to people all over Harlan, Ky. “Not one lead,” says Clabough, “not a glimmer of recognition.”
From the very beginning, longtime ATF agent Grant McGarity, one of the last from the Knoxville office who had been on moonshine raids in the early 70s, told Clabough “immediately, with no hesitation” that he had always heard the real subject of Mitchum’s movie was from Cocke County. This was logical, since Cocke County had for so many years been the nation’s capital of moonshining. As it always is in pursuit of a legend McGarity said the records from that era had been transferred to Atlanta, so he couldn’t tell her any more.
Several years ago, that’s where it stood. In the Metro Pulse of April 1, 2004 – the 50-year anniversary of the action of the song (“On the First of April, 1954 … “) Knoxville historian/bard Jack Neely elegantly summed up our city’s fascination with this story.
Clabough, meanwhile, vowed that she would someday find the mountain boy, even as she was writing dozens of stories and keeping up with her blended family of five children. (Her husband, David is a dairy farm manager turned graphic designer and the one who first piqued Kate’s interest in Thunder Road.) Clabough sent an e-mail letter to the editor of The Newport Plain Talk. It was a short note, saying she was looking for the identity of the person in the movie Thunder Road. Within days, Clabough received an unsigned letter, written in a neat script, probably that of an elderly female, on two sides of lined notebook paper. It was postmarked Knoxville. It said that the facts “as told by my mother,” that “the person in Thunder Road was from Mountain Rest in Upper Cosby, now in the National Park. Pinkney Gunter was a maker of moonshine. His son, Rufus, was the ‘runner’ and delivery man. “After Rufus’ death,” the letter continues, “the family was approached by Mitchum’s people about signing a release to make a movie based on their son’s exploits. At first, his father refused, but, eventually, his mother did sign the release.”
Days later, Clabough received a second letter, also postmarked Knoxville but in a different hand and signed. (The 84-year-old writer wishes her name withheld here.) “It included a list of names and addresses I could call to verify,” says Clabough. The writer said Gunter went off a bridge into the lake, and she went “to watch when they were dragging the body.” Then Clabough got a call from Cocke County Judge Ben Hooper. “Thunder Road was based on a man named Rufus Gunter,” Hooper told Clabough. “He didn’t die like Mitchum’s character, but he certainly lived like him.
I remember my Uncle George Poe taking me to see him race in Knoxville. He talked him into giving me a ride. He drove a ’37 or ’38 Ford. I remember the car had no passenger seat so I sat down low on the floor. The car bounced all over. I was scared to death. I wouldn’t say it was a good experience.” Hooper said that in January 1953, Gunter was being chased on Asheville Highway, heading toward Knoxville, when he ran off the J. Will Taylor Bridge crossing the Holston River.
Ronnie Moore, son of racing legend Ralph Burdette “Duck” Moore, told Clabough that his father knew Rufus Gunter well. They raced against each other in the 40s and early 50s, until Gunter’s death took him off the circuit and they both ran moonshine. Clabough will find specific corroboration in time. But for now the tale retains its legendary quality, like King Arthur. Whatever we find out only cements its hold on our imaginations.
In the context of Cocke County moonshining, it’s not surprising that it took almost 50 years for outsiders to get three sources for the name and tale of Rufus Gunter. Though it’s “colorful regional flavor” to historical researchers, it was dangerous organized crime to those who lived it. Some might say that even today there are secrets in Cocke County that prudent souls might not want to ask too many questions about.
In her research, Clabough also interviewed an elderly Jean Schilling at her home near Newport. Her father, Ike Costner, had been the biggest moonshine distributor in East Tennessee during the Depression. Ironically, he had learned to make whiskey at a government-run distillery in Cocke County before Prohibition. Mrs. Schilling gave Clabough several volumes of poems by her aunt, Ella Costner, the Poet Laureate of the Smokies, as well as Ella’s book, Song of Life in the Smokies, a frank and chilling portrait of desperate poverty, Godliness and violence, good souls and bad, in first half of the 20th Century in Cocke County. Ella Costner knew the Gunters. Her book includes the names and genealogy of the families in the Cosby area, including “Pink” Gunter, his wife Susie – called “Ollie,” maiden name Ramsey – and their son Rufus. Born about 1920, Rufus was 33 when he died. Not exactly a “mountain boy,” but still the beloved son of Pink and Ollie Gunter.
Ella Costner describes an awkward encounter with Pink, in which he shook her hand, then scratched her palm with his fingernails as he drew it away. This was a standard invitation to sex, and it was delivered right in front of Ella’s parents. While Ella’s father was a preacher and a good man, her brother, “Newport Bad Boy” Ike Costner, as the newspapers called him, was an inveterate criminal and mobster. Ike and Al Capone were among the first trainload of convicts sent to newly opened Alcatraz in the 1930s. Clabough has a boxful of research for what will be an eye-opening biography.
In her search for Rufus Gunter, Clabough has grown to understand the process by which memories, family stories, legends, and movies tend to merge, take on a life of their own, and grow stronger with the years. This is the way our memory and our oral history works.
The late John Fitzgerald remembered being on Kingston Pike in the early 50s, seeing federal agents drink a Grapette, hearing the roar of an engine. Says Clabough, “In the clippings, I never found a moonshiner’s wreck from those years, but I did find a story about federal agents testing a new fangled technology—radar. John may have seen them testing radar that day, and everything he described may have been exactly as he saw it.” The images from the movie and song could easily have filled in the blanks of what he didn’t see. The words of Mitchum’s song are so vivid – and tied to the roads we drive every day – that we all have seen that Ford Coupe leave the Kingston Pike at ninety and flip into that electric switching station in our minds a hundred times.
Ultimately, it’s the truth at the heart of Mitchum’s movie that makes it a cult classic for East Tennesseans, who might have heard the stories of grandparents survive in the hard times by turning their corn into moonshine.
And there is the pain at the heart of the story -- “Son, his daddy told him, make this run your last, the tank is filled with hundred proof, you’re all tuned up and gassed. Now don’t take any chances, if you can’t get through, I’d rather have you back again than all that Mountain Dew.”
The devil got the moonshine and Rufus Gunter that day, but Knoxville got a legend that will live as part of our culture forever.
This Kate Clabough Chick has really got it going on, doesn't she???? Take Care, Mike
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Comments: 8
Mike - as always...great story!
And Mike- you do spin a fine tale- you kept me enthralled to the end!
I wish like hell I had written it1