Down Honey Joe Road
by Terry Berkson |
Readers of my last article, in the July 21 issue of the Mercury,
learned that Mary Stucin, 92, was a close neighbor and friend of Honey
Joe. She told me that he had two sons, Joe Jr., who had already passed
away at the age of 78, and Frank, who was now retired. Both men had
been in the military. Joe Jr. was in the army during the second world
war and achieved the rank of corporal. Shorty after he was discharged,
he went to work for Timken Bearing, where he distinguished himself and
locked in on a life long career by coming up with several inventions.
The job took him to Canton, Ohio a long way from the humble Fly Creek
farm where he grew up.
Frank, the younger son, won a football scholarship to Cornell
University while playing for Cooperstown High School. He was in the Air
Force during the Viet Nam War and, as a pilot, flew 250 missions. He
remained in the military for 26 years, chalked up 8,000 hours of flying
time and retired as a full colonel. Mary said that Frank and his wife,
Ann, were now living in Florida. When I called, he was surprised
that anyone would be inquiring about his long deceased father, but he
was glad to help me separate the man from the myth. The reader might
remember from the last article, that I was first told that Honey Joe
was a bootlegger and a hermit. Frank told me that his father’s making
of mytheglin out of honey and grain was a lot more casual than the
label “bootlegger” would suggest. “He didn’t charge much for the
stuff,” Frank said. “Maybe a dollar a gallon. But all kinds of high
ranking people, doctors, lawyers etc., would come to buy it, I guess,
because my father made good stuff and because of Prohibition, and the
fact that they couldn’t easily get it elsewhere. My father’s still
didn’t make him a lot of money. It was just one of the many things he
did to eke out a living during hard times.”
Frank recalled that even the locally famous state trooper, Sergeant
Cunningham, who was in charge of the district and had an office on Main
Street in Cooperstown, used to come to his father for mytheglin. At
that time, state troopers used horses as well as automobiles, but the
rough and tumble Cunningham, who would put on impressive demonstrations
of great horsemanship, didn’t know how to drive a car and would have to
call upon one of his men to drive him up to Honey Joe’s for some home
brew.
Contrary to what Mary Stucin said about Honey Joe being some kind of
a writer in the old country, Frank said that his father had been a
farmer in Slovenia, which was part of Austria at the time he was born
in 1887. “When my father first came to America he worked in the steel
mills of Pennsylvania. He saved his money, which eventually enabled him
to buy the farm in the Fly Creek Valley for $2,500.” Frank said that
his father did read a lot, that he was interested in politics, and that
he was a staunch Republican.
Honey Joe wasn’t only big, he was strong and had a reputation for
it. At fairs in Cooperstown, Richfield Springs, Oneonta and elsewhere,
he’d enter dead-weight-lifting competitions where he’d frequently walk
away with the prize, which was usually monetary. “My father had a Model
A pickup,” Frank said. “I remember one rainy day we were stuck in deep
mud. He got out and easily lifted up the back of the truck so that I
could slip a board under the wheel.”
During all of Honey Joe’s activities on the farm, from cutting
timber to shearing sheep, he always kept up with his colony of bees and
the harvesting of their produce for which he was named. He located his
bee boxes only a quarter of a mile from where he lived, which was on
what is now called Honey Joe Road. Years later, when his wife Antonia
left the farm and headed for Cleveland to start up a bar and
restaurant, Honey Joe could not bring himself to leave his beloved
land. They parted amicably but the split left the work weary farmer to
enter his senior years alone and eventually in poor health.
“We used to worry about him,” Mary Stucin said. “Every couple of
days I’d send the hired hand over to check on him.” One day the hired
hand found that the old man, who had long since given up on his bee
keeping, had passed on.
Time tends to bury and distort. We dug a “bootlegging hermit from
Panther Mountain” and found a husband, a father, a political thinker
and talker, a strong competitor, a maker of mead and a light footed
dancer. Not a bad go at life. Long live the memory.
Photos provided by John Purcell.
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