January 17, 2000

My brother Buddy had a 1940 Ford that was a dream car to everybody then as well as now. Buddy was home from WW II and working at Sam Laney’s in Denton.

He would allow me to drive the car if I would take good care of it, keep it clean, oiled, don’t speed and be sure to keep the inside smelling nice.

Grandma loved being driven around, so she and I made many little jogs down to Farmers Branch for Grandma’s favorite medicine as I found it rewarding to keep her in her favorite brand.

You see, Grandma taught a lot of the people of Onega how to manufacture this illegal product and she was a good judge of the quality. I remember she had a brown jug with a shelled corn cob crammed down into the mouth of the jug.

This would keep it from evaporating while it kept its usual place as a door stop.

The jug would keep the wind from blowing the door shut.

Since Grandma was a part of Onega before it became Aubrey, she made good friends with the Onega Natives and also worked closely with the medicine man of the Sandtown Indian Village. She was also a midwife for the area and new settlers became a part of her life as new additions arrived.

Aunt Sis was a canning demonstrator for the Ball Jar Company during the depression era and traveled all over Texas. She kept old newspapers that tell of how the Federal Marshals would discover stills and dump as much as 150 gallons into the ground. Many stills could be easily tracked down as the smoke was a give away to their location.

Lookout scouts were alert around stills (if they didn’t use too much of their own product ) and gave warning so the finished product could be quickly moved or concealed. However, If Federal agents bribed their way into camp, they had no sympathy and delighted in getting the amount of their reward money published in the papers, especially on large caches.

This is recorded history of the time from newspapers, but Grandma had a relative here in Aubrey who used her recipe whose still was never raided. No wonder, as the county sheriff was one of his best customers. One of the tales told about him was that he sampled his wares quite a lot. He once, fell in a dry abandoned well shaft and wasn’t found for three days when he sobered up enough to yell for help.

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