For a good chunk of his career, it was impossible to catch Junior Johnson when he was in a race car. However, it was quite possible to catch Johnson when he was not in a race car, which is exactly what federal agents did on a clear night in 1956. When Johnson walked into the woods of Wilkes County to light the fire on his father’s moonshine still, he found the law waiting for him.
Some of NASCAR’s first drivers, if you didn’t know, were bootleggers, driving souped-up cars to avoid revenuers, who were trying to arrest them for not paying taxes on their liquor. But those liquor-making habits weren’t quite out of NASCAR’s bloodstream in the early days. Hence, Johnson, who’d won five races during his first season in 1955, ended up spending much of the 1956 season in a federal penitentiary in Chillicothe, Ohio.
After he got out, he went on to win 50 races as a driver and six championships as an owner. In the early 1980s, he filed a request for a pardon. It wasn’t until December 26, 1986, that President Ronald Reagan issued one. Reagan had a thing for granting pardons to sports figures — he later granted one to Yankees owner George Steinbrenner for a campaign finance violation. But this one wasn’t an overtly political move. Reagan was a Republican. Johnson was a lifelong Democrat.
No matter. Johnson later called the pardon the “best Christmas gift I ever got.” The pardon, however, didn’t erase all evidence of the crime. In 2007, he lent his family recipe to a distillery in Madison, which went on to make Midnight Moon Moonshine. To market it, the company used his mugshot.
To commemorate our 90th anniversary, we’ve compiled a time line that highlights the stories, contributors, and themes that have shaped this magazine — and your view of the Old North State — using nine decades of our own words.
From its northernmost point in Corolla to its southern terminus on Cedar Island, this scenic byway — bound between sound and sea — links the islands and communities of the Outer Banks.
Us? An icon? Well, after 90 years and more than 2,000 issues celebrating North Carolina from mountains to coast, we hope you’ll agree that we’ve earned the title.
After nearly a century — or just a couple of years — these seafood restaurants have become coastal icons, the places we know, love, and return to again and again.
