Moonshine
Becomes You
Horace J.
Digby --
SandBagger News
Beauty, talent and a jar of moonshine.
What else could SandBaggers want in a woman? And, if she
happens to be the daughter of SandBagger legend Bill Putaansuu
. . . so much the better.
It all
began about twenty-four years ago, just after Mt. St. Helens
erupted. Retired FBI agent Tom Manning remembered that
in all the Tarzan movies he'd ever seen, the way to quiet
a volcano was to toss a virgin in it. Manning
figured if he could get his fellow SandBaggers to chuck a
virgin or two in Mt. St
Helens, things would quiet down a bit.
"The hazardous part will
be finding a virgin in Cowlitz County," SandBagger Walt Naze
advised Manning.
"It's hard to keep
them around. Virgins have a very short
shelf life"
Manning decided that the smart thing to do was to go
with a mannequin. "Mannequins are readily available, they are cost
effective and the SandBaggers can probably be trusted with
one," he told reporters.
Local dress shop owner
and fellow SandBagger Barry Morrill provided one of his
mannequins and assured Baggers that her
bonafides were
intact.
"They were intact when I
loaned her to Jerry Kivela and Hal Boyd," Morrill later
said. "But now I keep hearing rumors."
The story of the SandBaggers'
daring quest to quell the mountain, along with a photo of
them loading Morrill's mannequin into a chartered airplane,
were picked up by the Associated Press Wire
Service and reported in Playboy
Magazine. That's where Ralph Moen, of the great State
of Tennessee, first read about SandBagger
exploits. Impressed by Bagger willingness to make such a stupid
gesture during a time of grave emergency, Moen immediately
applied for membership.
Through a
lengthy correspondence, first with Manning, then
with Putaansuu, Moen pled his case. A Tennessee cured
ham somehow became part of his membership
application. Coated with crushed pepper, the cured
ham looked anything but
cured. Guessing it might be food, Jerry Kivela invited fellow
SandBaggers to his home for dinner. Steve Kridelbaugh prepared corn on the cob by taking a
bite out of each ear—years before Mike Tyson, I might add—and
Herb Hadley entertained by
walking through a closed screen door (Copperfield eat
your heart out).
In return for the ham,
Baggers sent Moen a "thank-you" salmon packed in dry
ice. That salmon allowed Moen to prove himself a
true SandBagger. Lowering it on a fishhook into an
icy-mountain lake, Moen waited for the right moment and then
reeled it in with great commo-tion, convincing the local
game warden he had just caught the first and only
pacific-coast salmon ever found in the Tennessee
mountains.
Moen
replied to the gift of a salmon by sending two jars of genuine
Tennessee moonshine directly to retired FBI agent Manning
through the U.S. Mails. Imagine
Manning's conflict. Here he was having great fun as a
SandBagger, but as a former G-man he knew his duty.
The contents of those jars had to be
tested.
That testing had been ongoing for nearly twenty years, when
suddenly, just four years ago, without explanation, the
remains of the second jar disappeared.
SandBaggers were clueless (their natural state) until last
Friday, when the lovely and talented Sandra Putaansuu
arrived with a jar she found in her father's
basement.
SandBagger Institute expert Roland Richards immediately began
testing the contents. "God
willing, we'll soon learn what this stuff is—if we don't
go blind first," Richards said. Then after testing
the first nip, he gasped and called out a toast, "To
our absent
brothers."
