May 26, 2005

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 sometimes allowed me to drive the car if I would take good care of it, keep it clean, oiled, didn’t speed and was 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. I also found it rewarding to keep her in her favorite brand.

You see, Grandma taught a lot of the people in the Onega area 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 kept it from evaporating while the bottle was kept in it’s usual place as a door stop. The jug kept 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 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, her daughter and Billie McCauley’s mother, was a canning demonstrator for the Ball Jar Company during the depression era and traveled all over Texas.

Grandma kept old newspapers that told of how the Federal Marshals discovered stills and dumped as much as 150 gallons of whiskey onto the ground. Many stills could be easily tracked down by the smoke was let people to their location.

Lookout scouts were alert around stills (if they didn’t use too much of their own product) and gave warnings 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.

These stories of the raids are recorded in the newspapers that we found in Aunt Sis’s stash. Grandma had a relative living in Aubrey, who used her recipe whose still was never raided. No wonder, the county sheriff was one of his best customers. One of the tales told about him, was that the sheriff had a habit of sampling the products from many stills. Once when he was out making his rounds, he fell into a dry abandoned well shaft and wasn’t found for three days when he sobered up enough to begin yelling for help.

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