(828) 526-0173 | [email protected] | Copyright 2024 – All Rights Reserved.
Benny, the Police Force
Written By: Donna Rhodes | Issue: 2020/09 – September
If you’ve seen The Princess Bride, you’re bound to remember how the big, big Fezzik is appointed to The Brute Squad to impose order on the Thieve’s Forest. Well, that mirrors the story of super-size, no-nonsense Bennie Rogers and his term (c. 1912-1945) as the Police Force, aka Brute Squad, of Highlands.
Bennie was big, his hand doubling the size of most. Some say he was as mean as he was big.
In the words of Olin Dryman, “… they (Mayor Davis, et al.) said if we can’t do nothing with him, we’ll just make po’lice out of him. So ol’ man Davis met him on the street … and said, ‘Well, Bennie, we’ve hired you to po’lice in Highlands.’”
Bennie barked, “The hell you have.”
Olin said, “Yeah, (Davis) just pinned the badge up on ‘im and said, ‘Now you’re our po’lice.’”
And so he was for 30-plus years until retirement in ’45 when Bennie lost his leg, bit by bit, from diabetes. It started with half a gangrenous toe, then the other half, but before the doc at Angel could remove the foot, Bennie went to Asheville and had the whole leg removed. As Bennie saw it, the Angel doc was going to keep taking it off a snip at a time while taking him for a whole lot of money. Bennie had that leg buried in a lot adjacent to his house (the lot will soon be home to the Highlands Fire Department). The limb lumbered to a new home.
Rumor has it Bennie wasn’t above removing a percentage of moonshine evidence just to make ends meet. One night he and Olin (Bennie was training Olin to take over his position) discovered a 50-plus-gallon still run by a couple of locals. One bootlegger got away, but Bennie grabbed a half gallon of evidence and took the other moonshiner back to jail, leaving Olin to trash the barrels of ‘shine.
Olin waited and waited for Bennie to return. Finally Olin’s brother showed up and helped him haul the remainder of the moonshine, copper still, etc. back to the jailhouse for safe keeping.
During the night the escapee and most likely Bennie syphoned (ciphered, as Olin told it) the remaining ‘shine through holes in the jailhouse windows.
Such shine-anigans were symptomatic of the times. As the old Brute Squad anthem goes, “I’ll eat when I’m hungry, and I’ll drink when I’m dry, and if moonshine don’t kill me, I’ll live ‘til I die.”
To learn more about the colorful pillars on which Highlands sometimes teetered, read Ran Shaffner’s Heart of the Blue Ridge. Visit highlandshistory.com or email [email protected].
by Donna Rhodes
