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New York Times
14-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Brad Holland's Disruptive Vision
Brad Holland, an artist whose conceptual work and iconoclastic ways delighted — and often maddened — generations of art directors, died on March 27. He was an early bloomer. While his fellow ninth graders were winning blue ribbons in art class for drawings of cocker spaniels and hot rods, he once told an interviewer, he was collecting rejection letters from The Saturday Evening Post and Walt Disney. Mr. Holland got his big break when he was 23. Arthur Paul, Playboy magazine's celebrated art director, decided to flout company policy by giving him an assignment, even though he refused to take direction. Like most magazines, Playboy told its illustrators what to provide — almost always a literal interpretation of the work. But Mr. Paul was game enough to let him have his head, setting a precedent that Mr. Holland would follow for the rest of his life. This particular assignment was to illustrate an essay by P.G. Wodehouse, the British author and humorist who created Jeeves, the consummate butler to the hapless Bertie Wooster. For Mr. Wodehouse's essay, on his own 'servant problem,' Mr. Holland delivered a series of elaborate pen-and-ink drawings of toffs manipulating tiny servant puppets, drawings that recalled the satirical work of the 19th-century British caricaturist Thomas Nast. 'I find it rather difficult to pin down my feelings about those illustrations to my Domestic Servant piece,' Mr. Wodehouse wrote to Mr. Paul after his piece ran. 'My initial reaction was a startled, 'Oh, my Gawd!' but gradually the sensation that I had been slapped between the eyes with a wet fish waned, and now I like them very much.' It was perhaps a typical response to Mr. Holland's virtuosic, if often baffling, work. His strange and magical imagery (and his stubborn methods) reinvented illustration. Before long, his work seemed to be everywhere — on magazine, book and album covers, in advertisements, on posters for theater productions and political causes — and Mr. Holland was considered one of the most sought-after, and impactful, commercial artists of the late 20th century. When The New York Times introduced its opinion page in 1970, Mr. Holland was one of its signature artists, helping to chronicle the Watergate scandal and the oil crisis, among other national and global events. 'I never liked illustrations,' Mr. Holland said. 'They were ghosts of ideas, transparent, vaporous. I wanted my drawings to engage. When I tackled the Watergate hearings or the formation of OPEC, I internalized the public issues. Then I rooted through the junkyard of preconsciousness. The pictures that came out were ink blots. See in them what you want.' Mr. Holland worked mostly in acrylic, on Masonite panels or illustration boards, but he was stylistically and technically agnostic. 'My models were always writers, guys who could write essays, poetry, plays, whatever they chose, and try different approaches,' he told the art director Steven Heller in 2005. 'There's no reason why an artist can't take a similar approach. Use charcoal one day and bright colors the next. Do a series of white-on-white paintings and then do a handful of messy drawings as if you were five years old. I mean, you can't get everything into a single picture. Every picture is just an elephant. Everyday you feel a new part of who you are.' One of Mr. Holland's last projects was illustrating 'It Happened in Salem' (2024), a children's book about the Salem witch trials — and a timely cautionary tale about the power of rumor — by Jonah Winter. The book's art director, Rita Marshall, had long admired Mr. Holland's work, but she was put off by his famously prickly persona. When she phoned him, she recalled in an interview, 'he reprimanded me for waiting 40 years to give him a book. I told him I was afraid of his bad-boy reputation and thought he would be difficult to work with. He replied, 'But Rita, I'm an Eagle Scout and am very nice to work with.'' As it happens, she said, he was.
New York Times
20-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
The Hand-Embellished Countryside Homes That Helped Define Scandinavian Style
IN 1888, THE Swedish painter Carl Larsson and his wife, Karin, were given a remote log cottage in the village of Sundborn, 140 miles north of Stockholm, by her father. Over three decades, the couple transformed the house, which they named Lilla Hyttnäs, into an elaborate meta-art project, a hand-embellished 14-room home for their eight children. Carl depicted them in more than a hundred Arts and Crafts-inflected watercolors, gamboling amid wildflowers and curled up in Gustavian chairs in rooms painted and stenciled in shades of ocher, crimson and teal. His paintings, which he published reproductions of in books translated into eight languages — 'Ett Hem' ('A Home,' 1899) and 'Das Haus in der Sonne' ('The House in the Sun,' 1909) — helped form Sweden's national identity and imprinted on the world an indelible image of rural Nordic wholesomeness. Norman Rockwell, to whom Carl is sometimes compared, would later similarly idealize small-town life, but the difference in the two artists' approach is elemental: To make the hyperrealistic oil paintings reproduced on the cover of The Saturday Evening Post, Rockwell, who was born and raised in Manhattan, first photographed models in his studio. Larsson painted from life — his own — though he presented an elaborately constructed version. Carl died of a stroke in 1919 at age 65 (Karin died nine years later) and, since the 1940s, Lilla Hyttnäs has been maintained by a group of more than 300 descendants, who use parts of the property and open other areas to visitors. During their lifetimes, Carl and Karin also designed two private dwellings nearby to accommodate the overflow of children and guests. Today the residences stand with Lilla Hyttnäs as a homage to the Larssons' vivid aesthetic, which helped pave the way for the patterns of the Finnish textile company Marimekko and the whimsical fabrics of the Austrian-born architect Josef Frank. 'You can see the Larsson houses' influence everywhere,' says the Los Angeles-based writer and interior designer David Netto, citing the eccentric painted hearths and walls at Charleston, the Bloomsbury Group's spiritual headquarters in the English countryside, and the stage-set artificiality of the Italian scenic designer and architect Renzo Mongiardino's exuberant 20th-century interiors. 'Their sensibility springs from the celebration of folk art, obviously — but in service of a psychological mission to design from a place of innocence.' AS COZILY ANACHRONISTIC as the couple's interiors may now seem, they were designed with revolutionary intent. The Larssons wanted to challenge what they saw as the tedium of the German Lutheran-influenced academic style of upper-class Scandinavia: imposing dark brown wood antique furnishings and excessive neo-Renaissance ornamentation, the sort of surroundings often critiqued in the works of the Swedish playwright and novelist August Strindberg, who was among Carl's closest friends. They also rejected the traditional hierarchy of living spaces. Influenced by the politically radical British textile designer William Morris and the Victorian art critic John Ruskin, who preached the democratization of design and the elevation of the handmade over the mass-produced, they decided there would be no central parlor for entertaining, no grand entrance or servants' wings at Lilla Hyttnäs (or at the other homes they would go on to transform); instead, narrow corridors hung gallery style with framed drawings lead to lofty expanses and clusters of jewel-box rooms. In violation of the bourgeois norms of the time, the couple painted antique furniture with their characteristic disregard for provenance. They relished supersaturated shades — often using several in a single room — on the walls and ceilings, which they also decorated with murals, looping bowers and vines and stanzas of poetry. The children's faces are depicted repeatedly — painted wispily on doors throughout the house or in a quatrefoil on a chimney — floating like Raphael's putti. The sweetness of such flourishes, however, is cut with Modernism, much of which came from Karin. Also trained as a painter (the couple met at the Scandinavian art colony in Grez-sur-Loing, south of Paris), in her time she was written off as a domestic helpmate. This is perhaps unsurprising, as she spent much of her adult life pregnant and is depicted in many of the paintings wearing ankle-length maternity pinafores that she designed and sewed. But her taste in furnishings, and the fabrics she hand-loomed, embroidered and crocheted, which are everywhere in the houses, provided a disciplined counterpoint to her husband's baroque inclinations. In collaboration with local carpenters, she filled the homes with furniture that blended Nordic folk expression with Japonisme, the Asian-inspired decorative movement that emerged in Europe after Japan was forced to open to the West. Throughout the residences, the couple echoed other design movements, from Bauhaus art and Meiji-era ukiyo-e prints to the Modernist geometry of Dutch de Stijl art, made famous by Piet Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg. The dining room at Lilla Hyttnäs epitomizes the couple's aesthetic, with its intense tomato red and forest green hues. Paneling was traditional in wealthy homes of that era, but they opted for a cheap reed-and-bead variety then mostly relegated to kitchens. For the built-in settee at the head of the table, Karin sewed a seat cushion from a coverlet embroidered by women of the nearby village of Dala-Floda, and a back pillow with sunflowers reaching their tentacle-like petals from four corners into the center of a sapphire blue field. Her 'Four Elements' tapestry hangs above the settee: intense abstract waves of plum, royal blue and tangerine that collide with a Modernist geometric pyramid. The table's white linen runner, embroidered in red thread, depicts an almost hieroglyphic Larsson family tree. The complex interplay of the couple's tastes, veering from fancifully extravagant to studiously spare, is also evident across the road at Spadarvet, the small early 19th-century farm that they bought in 1897 to provide meat and vegetables for their clan and accommodations for their frequent visitors. Klas Frieberg, a 66-year-old retired engineer and a grandson of Carl's youngest daughter, Kersti, bought out his other family members' ownership of the farm in 1990, raised his family there and remains its steward. In the unassuming entryway, the heavy 18th-century pine door bears ornate 17th-century iron hinges and a birch carving by Axel Frieberg, Kersti's husband, made in 1931. 'These elements came together over a 200-year span in history,' Frieberg says. The walls are painted in variations on a deep grayish green that often appears in the Larssons' interiors and is referred to by Swedes as Carl Larsson green. They are adorned with antique hames (parts of a draft horse's collar) placed by Carl himself, along with a few studies in oil on canvas of horses that he later included in his monumental 1908 painting 'The Entry of King Gustav Vasa Into Stockholm, 1523,' which has dominated the upper staircase of Stockholm's National Museum for more than a century. Separating the hallway from a small sitting room hangs one of Karin's geometric textiles: black and white with a fringed edge. A plastered, rectangular chimney that runs through the middle of the second floor like a pillar remains exactly as the couple painted it in 1897, with a swirling pattern of buttercream and azure and a trompe l'oeil plaque declaring, 'Here are no ghosts' in Swedish. BY 1906, THE Larssons had acquired yet another home to make into art: a modest eight-room 18th-century house about eight miles from Sundborn in Falun, the largest town in the area, where the children went to school. They began spending their winters there, decamping to Lilla Hyttnäs in the summers. Today the street-side gate door of the Falun house retains a striking six-foot-high totemic wooden relief from Carl's time that — according to its current residents, Björn Henriksson, 80, a former television producer, and his wife, Kajsa — may have been designed by Karin. Although none of the original furniture or wall embellishments have survived, Björn and Kajsa have ensured that the large painting studio Carl added out back, where he made many of his later works, would preserve the couple's sensibility. In the room, now used for family gatherings and small concerts, there is a huge, nubby textile on the wall that Karin might have admired for its Indigenous handwork and scale (Björn brought it home from Pakistan, where he was filming a documentary) and spindle-legged Queen Anne chairs painted green around a large round table draped with fern-colored fringed cloth. Across the property's small garden remains an important space used by the artist that has been kept intact by the Falun community to honor Carl's legacy: a two-room red accessory cottage. There, while the children were in class, he spent his days creating etchings on a hulking press. That clunky piece of hardware, once a modern marvel, stands quiet now, like the tiny adjoining bedroom, painted ocher, where he sometimes napped on a cot beneath early 19th-century Japanese prints hung along the ceiling line. On a frigid January evening in 1919, while Karin was with him in the cottage, Carl clutched her arm and said, as she would later recall, 'Karin, I'm dying.' She guided him across the wide-plank pine floor and laid him down on the simple cotton coverlet, a soft beige-and-plum textile that she'd designed with Navajo blankets in mind. It's there still on the narrow bed, caught in a beam of sunlight shining through the high windows.
Boston Globe
10-03-2025
- Boston Globe
Helen Schreider, intrepid world traveler, dies at 98
Advertisement It wasn't until 2015 — 59 years after her husband was inducted — that Helen Schreider was belatedly inducted into the Explorers Club herself, once it had dropped its gender barrier. Faanya Rose, the club's first woman president, told her: 'You went exploring knowing there was no accolade for women. It was just the pure passion and the pure curiosity.' Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up Ms. Schreider, a former art student who always traveled with drawing pad and colored pencils to record her wide-ranging explorations, died Feb. 6 in Santa Rosa, Calif. She was 98. A niece, Camille Armstrong, said the cause was a stroke. The Schreiders — along with raft-maker Thor Heyerdahl, deep-sea mariner Jacques Piccard, and others — were part of a semi-golden era of exploration, when bold transits could still be plotted across a globe not entirely subdued by technology. On the often harrowing trip that the Schreiders made from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego, from 1954 to 1956, they navigated angry stretches of the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean to skirt roadless mountains in their amphibious jeep, which they christened La Tortuga (The Turtle) and which had a propeller and a rudder. The journey was recounted in a book, '20,000 Miles South' (1957), with text by Frank Schreider and drawings by Helen Schreider, that was serialized in The Saturday Evening Post. While on a US tour with footage they had shot of their trip, the Schreiders met the president of the National Geographic Society, Melville Bell Grosvenor, who hired them as a writer-photographer team. They completed six long assignments for National Geographic magazine from 1957 to 1969, beginning with a second trip by amphibious jeep along the Ganges River in India. Advertisement They followed up with a 13-month journey through the Indonesian archipelago, which they recounted in their book "The Drums of Tonkin" (1963). Trips by Land Rover followed: first in the Great Rift Valley of Africa and then along a 24,000-mile route from Greece to India in the footsteps of Alexander the Great. Their last expedition, in 1969, was to map the Amazon River from its headwaters in the Peruvian Andes, which they navigated in a small boat they built themselves. Their National Geographic book 'Exploring the Amazon' (1970) made the disputed claim that the Amazon, not the Nile, is the world's longest river. (The Schreiders added the Para River in the Amazon's mouth to its overall length, although others considered the Para part of another system; most cartographers today agree that the Nile is longer.) That same year, 1970, the couple parted ways with the magazine. They divorced a few years later and pursued individual careers. Frank Schreider became a freelance writer and crossed the Atlantic Ocean in his 40-foot sailboat, Sassafras. He was on a lengthy cruise of the Greek islands in 1994 when he died of a heart attack at the age of 79 aboard his sloop. Helen Schreider joined the National Park Service as a museum designer. She created exhibitions within the Statue of Liberty for the US bicentennial in 1976 and at Yellowstone National Park. Advertisement Throughout her life, she painted portraits and landscapes in oil, inspired by her travels, which were shown in several solo exhibitions. She was included in the book "Women Photographers at National Geographic" (2000). 'She was voracious to discover the world and the beauty,' Armstrong said in an interview, adding that she always had her drawing supplies close at hand. 'She could literally with 10 swipes of the pencil get the whole drawing. She could capture the moments right as they were moving through villages.' Helen Jane Armstrong was born May 3, 1926, in Coalinga, Calif., in the Central Valley, to Breckenridge Armstrong, who managed water districts, and Ina Bell (Brubaker) Armstrong, a farmer and artist. She earned a bachelor of fine arts from UCLA, where she met Schreider, an engineering student. They married in 1947 while they were still undergraduates. She is survived by a brother, Donald B. Armstrong, and her partner of 25 years, John Ryan, a retired professor of geography at the University of Winnipeg. A second marriage, to Russ Hendrickson, ended in divorce in 1983. The Schreiders' plans for a delayed honeymoon road trip grew more and more ambitious, until Frank Schreider suggested driving all the way from the Arctic Circle to the tip of South America. Helen Schreider agreed, and the couple departed from Circle, Alaska, in the treeless tundra, on June 21, 1954. Along for the journey was their German shepherd, Dinah. Because the Pan-American Highway had not yet been completed over some mountain ranges in Central America, the Schreiders rebuilt an amphibious Ford jeep that had been manufactured during World War II, which Frank Schreider described as a 'bathtub with wheels,' to take to the sea. Advertisement The ungainly La Tortuga first entered the Pacific Ocean in Costa Rica in 10-foot surf, a terrifying experience for the couple that nearly ended their journey. 'La Tortuga reared like a horse, Helen grabbed for the dash, Dinah was thrown to the back, and I held grimly to the wheel,' Frank Schreider wrote in '20,000 Miles South.' The jeep later passed through locks of the Panama Canal to the Caribbean, where the Schreiders steered south, provisioned with a month's supply of Army C-rations. They island-hopped for 250 miles, coming ashore onto pristine beaches where children covered La Tortuga in flowers. After 30 seagoing days, they landed in Turbo, Colombia, where a customs official asked, "Is it a boat or a car?" 'It's both,' Ms. Schreider replied. At the southernmost tip of the continent, there was a final amphibious crossing in a 10-knot current of the Strait of Magellan to Tierra del Fuego, where they completed their journey Jan. 23, 1956. Back home in the United States, Helen Schreider told a newspaper reporter that she had been 'game for anything.' This article originally appeared in
New York Times
07-03-2025
- New York Times
Helen Schreider, Intrepid World Traveler, Is Dead at 98
At its founding in 1904, the international Explorers Club stated clearly that membership was 'limited absolutely to men,' a fraternity of the hearty who blazed new routes through 'the open and the wild places of the earth.' Inductees include Roald Amundsen, leader of the first team to reach the South Pole; Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzig Norgay of Mount Everest fame; and, in 1956, Frank Schreider, who with his wife drove from the Arctic Circle to the tip of South America in an amphibious jeep. They were the first people to travel the length of the Americas in an amphibious vehicle. Frank and Helen Schreider went on to indulge their wanderlust in India, Africa, the Middle East and the Amazon Basin, making documentary films and writing of their lengthy journeys in books and in articles for National Geographic magazine. It wasn't until 2015 — 59 years after her husband — that Ms. Schreider was belatedly inducted into the Explorers Club herself, once it had dropped its gender barrier. Faanya Rose, the club's first woman president, told her: 'You went exploring knowing there was no accolade for women. It was just the pure passion and the pure curiosity.' Ms. Schreider, a former art student who always traveled with drawing pad and colored pencils to record her wide-ranging explorations, died on Feb. 6 in Santa Rosa, Calif. She was 98. A niece, Camille Armstrong, said the cause was a stroke. The Schreiders were part of a semi-golden era of exploration, when bold transits could still be plotted across a globe not entirely subdued by technology, along with the raft-maker Thor Heyerdahl, the deep-sea mariner Jacques Piccard and others. On the often harrowing trip that the Schreiders made from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego, from 1954 to 1956, they navigated angry stretches of the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean to skirt roadless mountains in their amphibious jeep, which they christened La Tortuga ('the turtle') and which had a propeller and a rudder. The journey was recounted in a book, '20,000 Miles South' (1957), with text by Mr. Schreider and drawings by Ms. Schreider, that was serialized in The Saturday Evening Post. While on a U.S. tour with footage they had shot of their trip, the Schreiders met the president of the National Geographic Society, Melville Bell Grosvenor, who hired them as a writer-photographer team. They completed six long assignments for National Geographic magazine from 1957 to 1969, beginning with a second trip by amphibious jeep along the Ganges River in India. They followed up with a 13-month journey through the Indonesian archipelago, which they recounted in a book, 'The Drums of Tonkin' (1963). Trips by Land Rover followed, first in the Great Rift Valley of Africa and then along a 24,000-mile route from Greece to India in the footsteps of Alexander the Great. Their last expedition, in 1969, was to map the Amazon River from its headwaters in the Peruvian Andes, which they navigated in a small boat they built themselves. Their National Geographic book 'Exploring the Amazon' (1970) made the disputed claim that the Amazon, not the Nile, is the world's longest river. (The Schreiders added the Para River in the Amazon's mouth to its overall length, though others considered the Para part of another system; most cartographers today agree that the Nile is longer.) That same year, 1970, the couple parted ways with the magazine. They divorced a few years later and pursued individual careers. Mr. Schreider became a freelance writer and crossed the Atlantic Ocean in his 40-foot sailboat, Sassafras. He was on a lengthy cruise of the Greek islands in 1994 when he died of a heart attack at the age of 79 aboard his sloop. Ms. Schreider joined the National Park Service as a museum designer. She created exhibitions within the Statue of Liberty for the United States bicentennial in 1976 and at Yellowstone National Park. Throughout her life, she painted portraits and landscapes in oil, inspired by her travels, which were shown in several solo exhibitions. She was included in the book 'Women Photographers at National Geographic' (2000). 'She was voracious to discover the world and the beauty,' Ms. Armstrong, her niece, said in an interview, adding that she always had her drawing supplies close at hand. 'She could literally with 10 swipes of the pencil get the whole drawing. She could capture the moments right as they were moving through villages.' Helen Jane Armstrong was born on May 3, 1926, in Coalinga, Calif., in the Central Valley, to Breckenridge Armstrong, who managed water districts, and Ina Bell (Brubaker) Armstrong, a farmer and artist. She earned a B.A. in fine art from the University of California, Los Angeles, where she met Mr. Schreider, an engineering student. They married in 1947 while they were still undergraduates. She is survived by a brother, Donald B. Armstrong, and her partner of 25 years, John Ryan, a retired professor of geography at the University of Winnipeg. A second marriage, to Russ Hendrickson, ended in divorce in 1983. The Schreiders' plans for a delayed honeymoon road trip grew more and more ambitious, until Mr. Schreider suggested driving all the way from the Arctic Circle to the tip of South America. Ms. Schreider agreed, and the couple departed from Circle, Alaska, in the treeless tundra, on June 21, 1954. Along for the journey was their German shepherd, Dinah. Because the Pan-American Highway had not yet been completed over some mountain ranges in Central America, the Schreiders rebuilt an amphibious Ford jeep that had been manufactured during World War II, which Mr. Schreider described as a 'bathtub with wheels,' to take to the sea. The ungainly La Tortuga first entered the Pacific Ocean in Costa Rica in 10-foot surf, a terrifying experience for the couple that nearly ended their journey. 'La Tortuga reared like a horse, Helen grabbed for the dash, Dinah was thrown to the back, and I held grimly to the wheel,' Mr. Schreider wrote in '20,000 Miles South.' The jeep later passed through locks of the Panama Canal to the Caribbean, where the Schreiders steered south, provisioned with a month's supply of Army C-rations. They island-hopped for 250 miles, coming ashore onto pristine beaches where children covered La Tortuga in flowers. After 30 seagoing days, they landed in Turbo, Colombia, where a customs official asked, 'Is it a boat or a car?' 'It's both,' Mr. Schreider replied. At the southernmost tip of the continent, there was a final amphibious crossing in a 10-knot current of the Strait of Magellan to Tierra del Fuego, where they completed their journey on Jan. 23, 1956. Back home in the United States, Ms. Schreider told a newspaper reporter that she had been 'game for anything.'
Yahoo
17-02-2025
- Yahoo
A tribute to NC's moonshine legend, a JoCo kingpin with cigars and Cadillacs
At the height of his whiskey-soaked infamy, Percy Flowers earned over $1 million a year, enough to buy a fleet of Cadillacs and ride around hardscrabble Johnston County like an untouchable kingpin, a pistol in his pocket and a cigar on his lip. He owned more than 5,000 acres of farmland, all of it stocked with moonshine stills tucked in the woods, hidden inside tobacco barns and concealed under bluffs of the Neuse River — an operation so vast he bought sugar in 40,000-pound loads. Flowers' bootleg hooch enjoyed such a reputation that night clubs in Manhattan developed a code for the bartenders: four fingers wrapped around the glass meant fill 'er up with Johnston County corn liquor. And yet, in more than 50 years as a notorious moonshiner, Flowers spent almost no time behind bars, partly because he paid off jurors and scared witnesses away from courthouses. When he did serve time, he served it for tax evasion. But beyond his fearful image, Flowers enjoyed the reputation of a country-boy Robin Hood, showering his neighbors with money. For decades in Johnston County, churches got built and sharecroppers got fed thanks to his illicit liquor cash. Once, on a rare night in jail, he offered to buy T-bone steaks for all 164 inmates. 'Largess, dash and arrogance characterize Flowers at work and at play,' wrote The Saturday Evening Post in 1958, profiling the moonshiner over six pages. 'He is a cool gambler, hardy drinker and sports enthusiast. He likes to drive expensive, powerful cars, of which he customarily has three or four available, with the accelerator jammed to the floor-board.' Somehow, no book has ever told the story of Eastern North Carolina's king of backwoods booze, an oversight that Raleigh author and folklorist Oakley Dean Baldwin has thankfully corrected. In 'J. Percy Flowers, Master Distiller,' he traces the moonshine wunderkind from his first batch as a teenager in roughly 1919, when he stumbled on a still in the dark and discovered a farmhand named Lester bent over some barrels. It took a year of Lester's teaching before Flowers could turn out a passable jug, but he managed to produce a blend that neither burned a hole through a drinker's esophagus nor struck him blind from lead poisoning — risks of the moonshine trade. What land Flowers could buy he leased to tenant farmers growing tobacco, cotton and corn, shielding his true source of income. What land he couldn't buy he still managed to pull into his sphere of moonshine influence, recruiting cooperative farmers and stuffing cash inside their mailboxes in exchange for keeping mum. 'While we're dealing with a man who hasn't had half the respect for the law a good citizen is supposed to have, he has a lot of good qualities,' a federal judge once said. 'I don't think he's a mean man, a vicious man. If he were, he wouldn't have as many friends. I'd like to have as many.' Despite his flashy image, Flowers remained an unapologetic country boy, keeping a barn full of fighting roosters and a kennel full of fox hounds — one of which, named Coy, cost $15,000. By the Depression, Flowers was distilling liquor inside 1,500-gallon 'submarine' tanks hidden underwater. He equipped his cars with short-wave radios to monitor police traffic. Every three or four months, he walked into First Citizens Bank in Smithfield with $20,000 in small bills, exchanging them for hundreds he kept locked in a safe, stacked a foot high and a foot deep. He once shot a sheriff in the bottom as he bent over a still, peppering his rear end with birdshot. He once clubbed a 'revenuer' over the head with a pistol. He once threw punches at a news photographer who tried to snap his picture, telling him, 'I'd give $5,000 for a shotgun. None of you better come to Johnston County.' Police once poured 348 gallons of Flowers' whiskey down a Smithfield gutter. Yet in the courtroom, juries would deadlock. Charges got dropped. Sentences got chopped in half. Once, Flowers got off with three days in jail when he explained that 22 sharecropping families depended on him. Another time, in 1936, when a judge sentenced him along with two brothers, he successfully argued, 'Your honor, won't be nobody to look after the farm. Will you let us go one at a time?' Another time, he followed along behind a federal agent scouring his land for a still and playfully offered to double his salary. 'If you do what I tell you,' he told the revenuer, 'you can retire a whole lot sooner, with a lot more money.' The story of Johnston County liquor escapades strikes a personal note with Baldwin, who spent a long career as a Wake County sheriff's deputy. He met Flowers in person only once during the 1970s, when he stepped inside the moonshine czar's country store. At the time, the future deputy was still living in his native West Virginia and had only come to Garner to visit his brother-in-law. But from behind the counter, Flowers eyed Baldwin warily, asking who he was and where he came from, uttering the phrase that makes any northerner nervous: 'I knew you weren't from around here.' Flowers died in 1982, not too many years after Baldwin clapped eyes on him. Though he had largely run out of money, he still owned more than 200 fox hounds and dozens of fighting cocks by Baldwin's count. Few criminals he would meet in the ensuing decades could supply a book's pages with such delicious detail. 'This story really needs to be a movie,' Baldwin said. 'One day, I think it will be.' Moonshine is, of course, now bottled and sold legally — a tradition made far less glamorous by becoming respectable. But Baldwin imagines Flowers rising out of his boozy legend, reborn as a folk hero. Imagine the tourists Johnston County could pull off Interstate 95 with a Percy Flowers Moonshine Festival, complete with virtual-reality Cadillac races and rooster fights. What fun it would be to wear a souvenir wide-brimmed hat cocked at a jaunty angle, chomp on a candy cigar and sip firewater out of a fruit jar — thumbing one's nose at a boring, straitlaced world.
