Speeding whiskey runner loses 100 mph high speed chase in Northeast Texas

Above photo, if you can figure out why an outlaw bent on slipping through Texas with an illegal load of whiskey would have come blowing by the 1950’s Y Motor Courts at Hughes Springs running a hundred miles an hour in the quiet dark of a rainy winter night, the story told here makes perfect sense.

From The East Texas Journal

By Hudson Old, Publisher

HUGHES SPRINGS, TEXAS – It was close to midnight when they pulled off the highway to wait.
East of town on the road coming up from Louisiana, newly sworn-in Cass County Deputy Frank Slock settled in for a nap under the wheel of the Sheriff’s new V-8 Ford Custom Victoria, according to the Naples Monitor.
Ice water ran in the dozing deputy’s veins. Frank Slock wasn’t a local recruit. The Monitor reported that he’d driven up from the Texas coast city of Baytown for this job. A conflicting account from an Oklahoma paper’s version of the same story said that Cass County Deputy Allen Driften was the second officer in the sheriff’s car.
The stories agree that it was a rainy winter night in February, 1951. If the Monitor got it straight, Deputy Slock slept while Sheriff Johnny Thompson kept watch. A 28-year-old veteran of World War II, the new sheriff’s department had busted 30 Oklahoma whiskey runners coming out of Louisiana in his first two months on the job.
Both stories say the Texas sheriff had informants working the connections between Oklahoma speakeasys and Louisiana distributors. Both reported Sheriff Thompson’s intent to take down a man whose record made clear his underworld affiliations.
Herman Washington, said the Monitor, was involved with “one of Oklahoma’s most famous syndicates in the bootlegging racket.” In a government agent’s report of a 1936 raid outside Hugo, he was arrested for operating a “tourist camp and road house” 15 miles west of town where “state liquor raider Dave McConnel said whiskey was being openly sold.”

In 1907, Oklahoma came into the union as America’s first dry state. While the law made provision for prescription liquor, it wasn’t until 1959 that Oklahoma became the last state to legalize the sale of alcohol. groomed
For half a century, the state’s prohibition laws groomed generations of Oklahoma moonshiners, bootleggers and whiskey runners giving rise to an era of speakeasys, organized crime, gambling, vice, special police forces creating legislative battles between the wets and the drys.
“Oklahoma will be dry for as long as our voters can stagger to the polls,” once predicted Will Rogers, the Oklahoma godfather of cowboy humorists.
Through the years following his tourist court arrest, Herman Washington operated in the cat-and-mouse underworld, more often than not a half step ahead of authorities.
“Little Dixie lying low on liquor,” said an Oklahoma City Times account of a state crime bureau agent’s report of a raid on Washington’s home.
“Washington’s record dates back to the 1930’s and he has been rumored as the area’s kingpin supplier with an elaborate transport pipeline operating in Texas,” the Times reported after that raid came up empty.
Meanwhile, in the July, 1950 Democratic Primary election back in Cass County, Johnny Thompson made cracking down on liquor laws and exposing the East Texas highway “pipeline” between Louisiana and Oklahoma.
“During the last war I served two years in the European Theater, five months of which were spent in army hospitals in Germany, France and the United States,” he said calling to attention his transformation from a “Cass County farmer” to a solider who fought in World War II.
He made his announcement that June in the Atlanta Citizens Journal.
“If you see fit to elect me, I will strive at all times to see that the laws of this state are fearlessly, efficiently and impartially enforced. I have worked hard all my life. I will work even harder in the sheriff’s office to show you what a young man can do with this job if you will give me the chance,” he promised.
The sheriff made good on his word.
Taking office in January, he was immediately in league with agents of the Texas Liquor Control Board and city marshals, reported a Citizens Journal story describing a raid at Linwood Rainge’s Ice Cream Parlor in Atlanta.
“The liquors were cleverly concealed in caches that had been designed for concealment from searching officers,” the newspaper said. “In making the search, Sheriff Thompson pulled a curtain hanger that loosed steel pins in the concrete floor, causing a wall to slide away. Under the wall was a small hole in the floor for admittance to an iced-down drum that contained 138 bottles of beer.”
The lawmen had the upper hand the night that Oklahoma’s Herman Washington met Cass County Sheriff Johnny Thompson.
The fabled Oklahoma whiskey runner had been set up.
Before the sheriff’s wheel man drove them out east of town to lie in wait, they “set up a road block west of the city, leaving two other deputies there to stop any vehicle that reliable information said would be coming through with whiskey,” said the Monitor.”
Around 3 a.m. the sheriff punched Deputy Slock awake “after he spotted the new Chrysler they’d been tipped off to check traveling at a tremendous speed coming around the curve at the Y Motel Courts.
“This is it!” the sheriff told his deputy.
In the Chrysler, Washington was in the back seat and his wife was driving. When the lawmen pulled out in pursuit, “Washington crawled over the seat and took the wheel without ever losing speed,” reported the Monitor. With the cops closing to 100 yards, Washington ran the road block at the edge of town, starting the chase through Daingerfield where both made the perilous turn toward to Mt. Pleasant.
The sheriff opened fire.
The war veteran officer emptied his pistol at the speeding Chrysler before opening up with his rifle, reported the February 22 edition of the Oklahoma City Times in the style of Chicago journalists lending a sports-page flair to organized crime reports. “Sheriff Thompson said the car left the roadway when a bullet hit the right-hand front tire,” as they topped a hill to see the Chrysler “disintegrating” as it rolled multiple times.
“Mrs. Washington was thrown from the car and Mr. Washington was freeing himself when the sheriff got to the bridge where the Washington car came to rest after hitting a willow tree,” the Monitor reported.
Washington raised his arms to surrender.
Mrs. Washington “had wrapped three blankets around herself, anticipating the crash. Sheriff Thompson summoned an ambulance from Mt. Pleasant where both were hospitalized.”
Mr. Washington was treated for “broken ribs, a broken collarbone and possible internal injuries before being released to the officers and taken to the jail in Linden. His wife suffered cuts and bruises.
“A Durant woman is in a Mt. Pleasant hospital and her husband is poorer by $350 in fines and $4,000 in whiskey as the result of Sheriff John H. Thompson’s efforts to stop a liquor pipeline through Cass County,” said the Times story’s lead.
Sheriff Thompson told the Monitor he was scared only one time during the chase, when the Ford began swaying going through the curve outside Daingerfield.