Gone With The Wind

For 'Gone With The Wind' Ralph wanted to do a past history piece which incorporated some local detail like Port Perry, Ontario (near where he lives) and playing up on some of the gags of the Upschitz Creek label.

Again we may have gotten a little carried away with the story. O.K. a bit more than a little. We had to really struggle in order to cut it down to a size that we could even remotely stick on the back of a bottle.

Ralph had the wagon logo on a piece of paper from a lumber camp up north. The snowy background was taken from a painting, changed to black and white.


Here’s the story:

In the beginning… well not quite the beginning… sort of sometime in the middle really, anyway we go back to Colin and Ralph Campbell’s ancestors, Ralph and Colin Campbell. These two men, who have incidently refined inbreeding to a fine art, thought it might be fun to start a brothel. Upon reflection, however, they realized that they would have to run it by hand until they could afford girls.
They dropped that idea.
They thought they’d open a chili stand. Townspeople closed it down.
They took up bootlegging instead.
Now they hauled their highly illegal brew to bars and brothels by horse and wagon, armed with a pistol and an old shotgun.
Their horses knew the route, down gullies, up ravines, and along back roads and alleyways. With the horses doing all the work the brothers were idle during the long hours of travel. After brief discussion they decided that they should, at least, do some quality control of the product.
They found that the most dangerous part of the route was near the new sawmill at Upschitz Creek. There a tribe of vicious German squirrels resided. These resented being used as live bait for Muskie fishing, particularly by Ralph, and would throw nuts and insults (calling the brothers Zik Puppies), shaking their little rodent heads and pelting horses and brothers alike with acorns, grubs, and squirrel shit.
The brothers, in their self-induced stuporous state, tried to shoot their tormentors. The only thing they hit was a branch (a son of a beech) which snapped, fell, and dropped a whole contingent of the maddened rodents onto everything. Squirrels scratched and nipped, horses bolted and kicked, Campbells screamed, wagon broke.
Ralph ended up in the tree, Colin in the creek.
After the incident the only thing they carried loaded was themselves.
Another time they happened upon a fair being set up in Pt. Perry. Ever alert to an opportunity for making money they decided to open a back of the wagon chili and wine booth.
Ralph’s chili recipe is probably the only document in culinary art that has a warrant out for its arrest and immediate destruction. When you add the combination of the chili’s ‘special spices’ to an alcoholic distillation that itself is none too stable, the result is devastating.
As the town’s paper later reported, ‘The goode peoples, after sampling the wares of the boothe, felt ill and let flay fartes of a most foul odiousness. Many gagged and were put through severe physical discomforture, requiring the entire contents of their stomachs to be purged.’
The enraged citizenry, those that could still walk, became a lynch mob. The Campbell brothers, now well into their forth bowl and third bottle apiece, and finally aware that they were the centre of a rising tide of anger directed towards themselves, dropped their pants, aimed at the thickest part of the crowd, and let out such a gaseous cloud of foul odour that the entire main street was engulfed, allowing them to escape, barely. They left behind only two pair of travel stained trousers (at least we hope that’s all the stains were) and the now infamous bouquet. They were well and truly…
GONE WITH THE WIND.
Ralph and Colin Campbell, two men who have spent more than half a century… drunk.

Whew. The label stories by this point were almost becoming book length. We were also getting a bit more brazen about the situations we could put these brothers in, as in the next story as well.