By Benjamin GroffMedia© | benandsteve.com | ©2026 July 8, 2026
Part III: Judge Cannon Remembers
By the time Oklahoma County District Judge Joe Cannon took the bench, Prohibition had been dead for decades.
The copper stills had mostly disappeared.
The old bootleg roads had become paved highways.
But the stories remained.
Judge Cannon had spent his life around the law.
He became a lawyer, served the public, and eventually sat on the Oklahoma County bench, where he earned a reputation for being tough, thoughtful, and unwilling to forget that every case involved a human being. He would remain a judge until his retirement in 1988.
The names changed.
The crimes changed.
But now and then, someone would mention the old days.
“The bootleggers,” an attorney might say.
“The whiskey runners.”
“The fellows who hid stills out near Stella.”
And somebody would invariably ask:
“Remember J. W. Sims?”
The judge would lean back.
Not because he had known Sims.
No one was quite sure anyone alive still had.
But because Sims had become a symbol.
A man who lived in a strange time.
A time when the government outlawed what many people considered ordinary.
A time when a farmer might become a criminal overnight.
And a criminal might still be regarded as a neighbor.
Judge Cannon understood that tension.
The law had to be enforced.
But history was rarely as simple as heroes and villains.
J. W. Sims was arrested.
That much the newspapers recorded.
Yet what happened afterward?
Did he pay a fine and go home?
Did he swear off whiskey forever?
Did he build another still deeper in the woods?
No one knew.
The records grow silent.
And silence, Judge Cannon would tell young lawyers, is often where history becomes legend.
Perhaps that is why people still remember the name.
Not because J. W. Sims was the most notorious bootlegger.
Not because he made the best whiskey.
But because his story reminds us that Oklahoma was built by ordinary people living through extraordinary times.
People who bent the rules.
People who broke the rules.
And people who spent the rest of their lives deciding what those rules should have been in the first place.
Judge Joe Cannon spent his life enforcing the law.
J. W. Sims spent part of his life running from it.
And somewhere between the two lies the story of Oklahoma itself.
The Man at the Still
Epilogue: Cannon Ball Joe
By 1959, J. W. Sims would have been an old man.
If he were alive at all.
The newspapers no longer mentioned him.
The abandoned farm near Stella had long since returned to weeds and scrub oak.
The copper still was gone.
The bootleg roads had become county roads.
But whiskey?
Whiskey was still flowing.
Oklahoma had been fighting Prohibition for nearly forty years.
And now Governor J. Howard Edmondson had decided to end the charade.
Before the people could vote on repeal, he ordered the state dried up for real.
The job fell to the Commissioner of Public Safety.
Joseph R. Cannon.
Oklahomans knew him by another name.
“Cannon Ball Joe.”
The nickname fit.
He attacked bootlegging operations with enthusiasm.
Highway patrolmen raided roadhouses.
Private clubs were shut down.
Hidden liquor caches were seized.
Bootleggers who had operated for years suddenly found the law knocking on their doors.
Cannon Ball Joe intended to prove a point.
If Oklahoma wanted to remain dry, then it would actually be dry.
No more “liquor by the wink.”
No more secret bottles passed beneath counters.
No more hidden stills in the woods.
And perhaps, just perhaps, somewhere in Oklahoma an old man named J. W. Sims sat in a chair on a porch and read about it.
He may have smiled.
Because men like Sims knew something politicians eventually learned.
You could smash a still.
You could seize the whiskey.
You could arrest the bootlegger.
But you could never quite arrest the idea.
For decades, Oklahoma had fought a war against liquor.
And liquor had fought back.
Finally, in 1959, the people voted.
Prohibition ended.
The stills disappeared.
The bootleggers faded into memory.
But the stories remained.
Stories about men like J. W. Sims.
And stories about the law enforcement officers who chased them.
Men like Cannon Ball Joe.
Together, they became part of Oklahoma folklore.
One running from the law.
The other is running straight at it.
Both are leaving footprints on the same dusty road.
A note from the writer, One of the descendants of the Sims family drove my rural route school bus. Years later, as a teenager working summers cleaning floors at the school, he would tell me stories about J. W. Sims. It has taken me many years to gather the pieces of those stories and compare them with the historical record. Some parts proved true. Others were undoubtedly embellished over time. Every bit of it, however, was fascinating. The man who shared those stories with me passed away several years ago. On a recent trip back to my hometown, I visited with his relatives and asked for their blessing to tell the tales their father, uncle, and family member had entrusted to me. What you read is not just history? It is memory, folklore, and the enduring power of stories passed from one generation to the next. Benjamin H. Groff II
GroffMedia© | benandsteve.com | ©2026
