https://www.amazon.com/Rum-Runners-Moonshiners-Old-Florida/dp/1729616313
Florida is my Home. I was born in Hollywood, Florida, just a few miles away from the old hangouts of Capone, and where the mob moved its base of operations following the glory days of Prohibition. My father's family moved there in the 1970s after nearly a century in Brooklyn. If you google my last name you'll discover no winners of high office, no Nobel prizes for medicine, or famous inventors. What you'll find is a bunch of swarthy people with olive skin from Sicily that helped create the Mafia and a sweet bread cake of the same name from Lucca, Italy. Legend says it was created by one of my ancestors. Clearly, he was a modest person with a self-deprecating sense of humor because it’s a giant ring-shaped fruit cake. When I was born my Mother’s father, Walt Young, was a member of the Florida House of Representatives for Pembroke Pines, and mom being an unabashed "Daddy's Girl" dragged me over the next ten years on a series of long car drives from Hollywood to Tallahassee where he would finally retired. This long state would wiz past me and my road dog mother would take me through the back-roads of 27 to save money on tolls. There I would see the real Florida of the 1940s and 1950s, the tourism traps that seemed to die out once Disney arrived. It was on these car rides with Mom and sometimes with my Grandpa that I learned about Florida’s culture, and its character.
But it was settling down in the Florida Panhandle that opened my eyes to a completely different slice of Florida culture. Of course, I was living in Tallahassee, a liberal cultural citadel within the Panhandle. The real Panhandle or Old Florida as its sometime called is an intriguing mix-up of rural living and beach resorts, small-town living alongside precious outlets of nature, beach and forest. The vast and compelling settings of Florida's historic past that are happily not lost in its busy present and increasing modernization.
I married a southern belle with many Florida Cracker virtues, who along with my in-laws quickly informed me that I was not a true Southerner, but a Yankee from Miami. Over the past five years I have studied the history of Florida's forgotten frontier and its rural past. Throughout this journey many colorful figures have come into focus. This south Florida Yankee has become intrigued with the rebellious spirit of the Florida moonshiner and cracker rum-runner. The powerful, charming, forces of nature that made their illegal products in the region’s swamps so that the rural laborer and well-dressed big city flapper alike could happily consume it. The men that made so many moonlight journeys towards their river shakes to make the shine or race it across dense forests in stolen cars from quickly unloaded schooners. The beach hoppers and well healed tourists who came here looking for rum and spirits, and were never disappointed. Each played their small part in one of the most compelling human dramas in the sunshine state’s outlandish history.
One of the greatest parts about gathering some of the interviews and source material for this book was the good-natured enthusiasm from the people I encountered. It was truly marvelous the way each interview began to take on a similar pattern. I would usually start off with a local group, association, or in many cases a historical society. I would make a dry call to the main location and would usually be greeted by a very friendly volunteer, who upon hearing the subject of the book would laugh loudly. The median age on the other end of the phone calls was usually about 72. So clearly, I was speaking to someone who had first-hand knowledge.
I would, ask them if they had any knowledge or personal experiences that could be used in the book, and the other end of the phone would then stop laughing and like clockwork grow silent. If it was a man on the other end, a moment of brief reflection was all they needed, and then they were off to the races. Almost at once they would start up the narrative of their lives. Talking about their childhood, the community they grew up in, and the adults around them who had remote connections to bootlegging or moonshiners.
If it was a woman on the other end, they tended to need another round of probing. Regardless of county, city, gender, or race they were all natives to the panhandle or central regions of the state. Little by little, they enjoyed talking to me about the past and the wild activities of their neighbors. But, of course there was no mention about the possible involvement of their own families. They all had one final gatekeeper to prevent me, a stranger, from getting to the fruit. The men wanted you to know that this was a very religious part of the country.
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