Savannah, 1966

As I said in last week’s blog post, I was 18 and clueless, but also a brand new newspaper photographer, sometimes sent places I was not legally old enough to go, or clever enough to avoid.

Last week’s photograph of the little boy at the fence of doors was on a little-traveled street on the outskirts of Savannah with just a few scattered homes, at least some of them tar-paper shacks, best as I can remember. Today it’s a pretty heavily populated residential area, hemmed in by the arc of a freeway. No more than a few hundred yards away from that fence were patches of woods, and this, one of them, is where I was sent to meet a group of revenue agents who had a tip on an illegal whisky making operation.

When I arrived I found no one had been apprehended, but they did have the still. As I looked around trying to find an angle that would show the story as best as possible I made a couple of exploratory shots, including the photo above, while physically moving into the scene.

Suddenly one of the agents yelled at me, “Get down,” grabbed me and pulled me down, just as a bomb went off. They were dynamiting the still. Hey! This was the first still, and revenue op, I had ever been to. How was I supposed to know?

So any photograph of the still was lost, but the explosion had blasted all the sour mash up into the tree tops, and now it was raining moonshine.

Some context: This was 1966 in provincial America, in the Deep South. Photographers came to work in a coat and tie, every day. So now one of my two or three work uniforms “smells like a brewery.” And my camera is sticky. And at that point in my life I had not yet tasted the demon rum, so there was no upside.

Further context: I still lived with my parents (18, remember) and they never drank. They did not rail against the evil of it; they just didn’t do it, setting an example. So now I have to go home this way.

For more of Bill’s photographs, go to https://www.billdurrence.com/index