Uno

While driving through Hart County, you might spot this cryptic road sign for Uno, Kentucky,

Supposedly its name is intended to mean "You Know" which, further supposedly, refers to the area's once-booming illicit moonshine industry. According to Wikipedia, another name for the town is Clearpoint, which supposedly really means "clear pint", as in moonshine. (I am deeply skeptical, however, of all fanciful local-lore retconned explanations of the name origins of small towns, which rarely turn out to be true.)

One thing we do know for sure is that the famous Smith's Country Hams got its start in Uno. Though that original store no longer exists, their Cave City location is still going strong.

Moonshine

Moonshine, that other legendary Kentucky drink besides Bourbon, is a real Kentucky delicacy and not something that Al Capp just made up for “Li’l Abner.” I’m continually amazed at how many city-folk I encounter who thought moonshine was just a weird urban legend, or simply a colorful euphemism for whiskey.

Here’s how it’s made:

Assemble your ingredients: corn meal, sugar, water, yeast and malt. Freshly stone-ground corn meal is better than crap you find at the supermarket, and course raw cane sugars like turbinado are better than processed-to-death white sugar. For common folk-remedy “spring tonic” variants, you can add various herbs and roots such as ginseng and the psychoactive sassafras root. Some have even used wormwood or mugwort, making moonshine spring tonic truly the “Appalachian Absinthe.”

Combine the ingredients in a large container until thoroughly mixed. This is what is known as your “mash.”

Place the mash into a “Still” (home distillery) and turn on the heat to 175 degrees. The idea is to heat the mash to the vaporization point, and collect the steam vapors rising from it in the still’s copper tubing. This condensation then collects in a separate container, and this, my friend, is moonshine; the mystic elixir that Snuffy Smith called “corn squeezin’s,” the medicinal balm that Pogo Possum called “Aunt Granny’s Bitter Brittle Root,” the holy grail that Grandpa Jones called “Mountain Dew.” The soda pop of the same name, by the way, used to depict cartoon hillbillies on its bottles before the days of political correctness.

(The recipe I provided here is just for your information, mind you. Strictly for sake of argument. Just making conversation. Don’t actually do it. And if you do, research it online first and make sure you know how to build and operate a still. But don’t do that either.)


Poorly produced moonshine can not only be horrible to drink, it can also be toxic. A common practice back in the day was to pillage auto parts for assembling a still, such as the radiators and coils. Needless to say, this was unsafe and led to moonshine that contained traces of lead poisoning. This hazard obviously doesn’t apply to the majority of moonshine being produced, of course, but that didn’t stop the Government “Revenooer men” from exaggerating the risks in their anti-shine literature of the 40s and 50s. Even today, I found a current scare-site on the web that warns “About 80 percent of all adult lead poisoning deaths are related to moonshine consumption”. Personally, I find this claim to be ludicrous, since there’s obviously far more people exposed to lead paint and lead pipes still in public use out there in the world than there are moonshine drinkers.

The confusion with whiskey comes from the fact that Kentucky Bourbon is at least 51 percent corn-based rather than rye-based, and literary references to "corn liquor" might mean either Bourbon or Moonshine. Whiskey and bourbon have a different fermentation process, must be aged in special oak casks, and usually contain a blend of grains.

The most famous portrayal of moonshine in film was probably the 1958 film Thunder Road, in which the great Robert Mitchum played a bootlegger from Harlan County, Kentucky who drove a supercharged Ford with a secret compartment tank for transporting moonshine into Tennessee. The iconoclastic film, presenting Kentuckians flouting laws and eluding cops in high-speed car chases, was the grandfather of all Smokey and the Bandit -type films that followed. For better or for worse.

(top photo: confiscated moonshine stills in Breathitt County.)

The U.S. Army vs. Kentucky bootleggers

On February 21, 1922, the U.S. Army was called in for this publicity stunt, to make a big showy deal out of destroying these confiscated moonshine stills in Newport, KY. The hope was that the media publicity of a tank crushing metal drums would help deter people from making their own alcoholic beverages. It didn't work.

I'm not exactly sure that this is the sort of thing that our military was intended for, but there it is.

Larry Flynt

Kentuckian Larry Flynt, publisher of Hustler magazine, lays claim to being the world’s most famous pornographer, a title that not everyone would aspire to but one that he seems happy with. (His closest rival, Hugh Hefner’s Playboy magazine, is technically not pornography in the strict legal sense. Not to mention it’s boring.)

Flynt was born and raised in Salyersville, KY, population 1,604. (Saaaaaa-lute!) He attended public school there but dropped out at some point, due to problems at home between his bickering parents. Flynt began his enterprising ways at a very early age, bootlegging moonshine in the Magoffin County wilderness.

At the age of 15, Flynt did a stint in the Army and then the Navy. In 1970 he opened a strip club in Cincinnati called the “Hustler Club” and soon followed it up with its own magazine that was an instant hit with its envelope-pushing editorial style. Today the franchise includes a casino and a successful chain of clean, attractive Hustler shops intended to offer a classier alternative to the usual sleazy porn stores.

Flynt’s lasting contribution to society may not be so much for his erotica, however, but for his involvement in legal precedents. The entire legal definition of what constitutes “pornography” was shaped largely because of his pushing the limits of what could be gotten away with during the 70s and 80s. (These definitions, however, have since largely been made irrelevant by the internet.)

In 1976, Flynt fought anti-porn campaigner Charles H. Keating Jr. all the way to the United States Supreme Court on charges of obscenity and organized crime, and beat them. Keating went on to later fame as a convicted felon in the notorious 1989 savings and loan fraud scandal.

In 1983, Flynt refused to reveal his sources for a John DeLorean tape recording that was very embarrassing to the FBI, and showed up in court wearing an American flag as a diaper. For this act of “flag desecration,” he was imprisoned six months.

Also in 1983, Flynt lost a Supreme Court battle over insulting remarks made about rival publisher Kathy Keeton. The case, however, is frequently cited as an example in law school courses today, because of its implications regarding personal jurisdiction over a defendant. Flynt harangued the court with a slew of insults and obscenities and was arrested for contempt of court (the charges were ultimately dismissed).


In 1988, Flynt successfully fought off a libel suit from the Reverend Jerry Falwell, over a satirical advertisement that suggested Falwell had sex with his mother in an outhouse. The Supreme Court sided with Flynt, eight to zero. The Falwell case decision cemented and affirmed the media’s right to satirically poke fun at celebrities in even the most brutal and cruel way.

Two other anti-porn activists, Peggy Ault and Dorchen Leidholdt, tried libel suits of their own after being named in Flynt’s “Asshole of the Month” column in Hustler. Both were dismissed with findings in favor of Hustler.

For most of his career, Flynt has faced legal challenges from the city of Cincinnati, a place which has often had a reputation for being a difficult place to exercise free speech (some constitutional activists have referred to it as "Censornati"). The city reportedly redrew zoning lines to deliberately make Flynt’s Cincinnati bookstore illegal, and sent an underage person in to purchase items there in a sting operation. He faced 26 years in prison but got off with a plea bargain.

Flynt is paralyzed from the waist down after an assassination attempt by White Supremacist Joseph Paul Franklin in Georgia (who claims to have been motivated to kill Flynt because of interracial sex being portrayed in his magazine). He makes an unlikely but effective warrior for First Amendment rights, and will probably be best remembered in this respect, especially after his portrayal by Woody Harrelson in the film The People vs. Larry Flynt.