Special to the Journal

“Never trust a bootlegger that you don’t know pretty well.”

That was the sage advice that former Daily Journal Editor Glenn Sumpter - a.k.a. Leard E. Lisk, Jr. - gave to a few dozen people assembled Monday night at Rockingham City Hall for the regular monthly meeting of the Richmond County Historical Society.

Sumpter was assuming the identity of and playing the role of Lisk, telling the audience about his adventures and misadventures, inventions and fishing trips, and prison sentences for crimes including bootlegging and counterfeiting.

In introducing Sumpter, Dr. John Stevenson - president of the Historical Society - noted that Lisk was born in Rockingham in 1917.

He worked on the family farm, helped out in a small grocery store that his mother ran, and spent a lot of time fishing off Hitchcock Creek - probably too much time, as far as his parents and school teachers were concerned.

He would quit school in the eighth grade and his fishing trips might have been a factor. When he was 15 years old, his family moved to Greensboro, Dr. Stevenson said.

After quitting school he took various jobs, including one with Duke Power, which was running a trolley line in Greensboro at the time.

At one point Lisk/Sumpter explained Monday night that on his first day on the job, he got real busy and forgot to “ring up” some of the passengers who were boarding his trolley car.

This meant that, at the end of the day, the books did not balance and he had more money than the number of “rung up” passengers indicated he should have. If he collected for a hundred passengers but only rang up 80, then he would have “extra” money that he collected for the 20 passengers that he failed to ring up.

He asked an older, more experienced trolley driver what he should do with the extra money, and this man said, “Put it in your pocket, stupid.”

Lisk did just that and maybe this was the first time he started crossing the line into some activities that were not 100 percent legal.

When the war ended and servicemen were returning and reclaiming the jobs they had left in the wake of Pearl Harbor, Lisk and many others were unceremoniously fired. By this time, he had a wife and family.

With $74 in his pocket, Lisk went to the place where so many young men seem to go to get answers to their moral, philosophical and economic questions - the corner pool room.

At the Jefferson Pool Room in Greensboro, he asked a man named Mouse Jones what he should do. The Mouse did not mince any words, telling him to go to Danville, Virginia and buy $50 worth of liquor and bring it back to Greensboro and sell it for $100. Lisk did that and the day after that he went to Danville and bought $100 worth of liquor.

After a while, Sumpter/Lisk explained Monday night, he learned that a distillery in Baltimore was selling to the liquor store in Danville. He figured he could save money by cutting out the middle man, so he started driving to Baltimore where he did in fact get the bulk rates.

Then it turned out that his car wasn’t big enough to haul all that liquor so he bought a second-hand Merita bread truck that had the Lone Ranger and Tonto painted on the side that: “Who would look for a load of illegal liquor in a truck that had a picture of the Lone Ranger on the side?”

Then he hired a man named Alton to start driving to Baltimore to pick up the liquor for him. Well, Lisk knew that Alton was a big fan of Harry Truman. But, apparently, he did not know just how big a fan he was. On the way back from Baltimore, Alton decided to stop by the White House and say “Howdy” to Harry (nobody ever said Alton was smart). Anyway, he parked his liquor-laden truck not far from the White House lawn and walked up to one of the security guards and asked when President Truman would be going out for a walk.

He was fairly persistent in wanting to know exactly when and where the President would exiting the White House, asking the sort of questions that might well be asked by a would-be assassin. And it was not long before White House security had him inside where they strip searched him and asked him a lot of questions. Sumpter noted that they did not ask him what he was doing in Washington in the first place.

Anyway, White House security called the Greensboro Police, who said Alton did not have a criminal record for anything other than a couple of traffic tickets, and he was released and went on his way.

Lisk decided at one point to buy a used (very used) airplane and fly the booze back from Baltimore. So, flying a second-hand airplane, he picked up the liquor as scheduled, but the trip back had to be made at night. And the airplane salesman had forgotten to tell Lisk that: (a) the plane’s lights worked fine and the engine worked fine, but (b) they could not be operated at the same time - i.e. when you turned on the lights, the engine shut down.

Well, as they were flying back, the engine did in fact shut down in the air. Lisk tried desperately to get the engine to fire back up, and finally succeeded, but only after shutting out the lights. He told a guy who worked with him to keep striking matches so he could see the instrument panel. The worker who made this trip with him was named Mike, not Alton, and Mike was able to handle the little chore.

Lisk followed some highways (probably 220) back to Greensboro, which probably meant that it was a bright moonlit night. Only, while you can fly a plane at night without lights, you really do need lights in order to land. And you also need an engine that will not shut down when you turn the lights on. But Lisk handled this by getting the plane dropped quickly, making a landing that was anything but smooth. But they did not crash and, as they say in the biz, any landing is a good landing if you can walk away from it. Since they stopped sooner and more suddenly than had been intended, there was a little problem with several cases of liquor in the back that started sliding forward. Mike started pushing the liquor back and trying to keep it from sliding into the pilot, ultimately succeeding in this little task but they did walk away from it, so it was a good landing.

Eventually, the trips to Baltimore came to an end.

As Sumpter explained it, Lisk decided to stop buying and selling tax-paid whiskey and start making his own non-taxed stuff. He bought a little farm and even raised a few pigs to make it look legit. Sometimes he would feed the mash to the hogs.

“They were the happiest pigs in the county,” Sumpter said.

But one day Alton, who was still not very smart, went into town without changing his clothes, the clothes smelling of fermented mash.

Somebody mentioned this to somebody who mentioned this to the revenuers, and they arrested Lisk and sent him to the federal penitentiary.

While he was in the federal pen, Mrs. Lisk got a job making fishing lures. When he was released after serving seven months of a 15-month sentence, Lisk joined his wife in making the lures. This was the winter time and their boss said he would not be able to pay Mr. and Mrs. Lisk until spring when fishermen would start to buy the lures. This was not a problem, but then their boss suffered a heart attack. He said that while he could not pay Mr. and Mrs. Lisk in cash, he would give them the lures they had made and maybe they could sell them to fishermen. And that’s how they started making fishing lures. Their lures included the Little Skunk, Pole Kat, Jumbo Skunk and Lisk Wampus Kay.

Well, in addition to Alton and Mike, Lisk had a guy named Wesley working for him. Or, according to Lisk, Wesley was really working for himself. At any rate, Wesley had a key to the building and, unbeknownst to Lisk, Wesley started making counterfeit money in the Lisk building. Protesting his innocence to no avail, Lisk was convicted and received a second prison sentence. In sentencing him, U.S. District Court Judge Hiram Ward said he was a fisherman and had used lures that were designed and sold by Lisk.

“I’m a fisherman,” Ward said from the bench. “Between his lures and my expertise, we fooled a lot of fish. I just wish he hadn’t tried to fool the Treasury.”

Lisk had been fooled fairly early in his bootlegging career by a man who represented himself as a moonshiner but was in reality a flim-flam man. Lisk had been dealing with Junior Johnson before Johnson left bootlegging for sanctioned racing, and he had found Johnson and some other bootleggers to be very honest with him. So, when he spoke with a man named Joe, he was disposed to think that Joe was as honest as Johnson and other bootleggers he had been dealing with.

He agreed to meet Joe near North Wilkesboro. At this meeting, Sumpter said, Joe told Lisk that, “I’ve got the moonshine. It’s up that dirt road there. Give me the money and you give me the keys to your car and I’ll give you the keys to my car,” a green vehicle parked outside the place where they were meeting.

Lisk waited and waited and waited. Finally, he asked the store owner about Joe and was told that the store owner had just met him for the first time. Lisk expressed confidence that Joe would ultimately return, holding up the keys, pointing to the green car outside and saying something along the lines of “I have the keys to his car parked outside.”

The store owner replied that the green car belonged to him, and not to Joe. That was when Lisk realized he’d been had, prompting him to vow never again to trust a bootlegger unless he knew him pretty well.