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Yahoo
19-04-2025
- Yahoo
HIGH POINT CONFIDENTIAL: A beacon of darkness High Point scandal sheet covered the city's seamier side
HIGH POINT Long before America had the National Enquirer, High Point had The Beacon. Most old-timers of a certain age in these parts remember — or have at least heard about — The Beacon, a titillating weekly tabloid of the 1940s and '50s that relished looking on the seedy side of life in High Point: Extramarital affairs. Sensational slayings. Crooked businessmen. Contentious divorces. You get the idea. 'It was the local scandal sheet, but people sure read it,' the late Joe Brown, a former High Point Enterprise reporter and editor, once told The Enterprise for a story about The Beacon and its pseudo-journalistic exploits. 'People bought it on the street, but then they hid it under their coats when they went to work because nobody wanted to be seen with it.' Of course, being seen with The Beacon wasn't nearly as bad as being seen in The Beacon. Imagine being the subject of one of these juicy stories: 'Wife Catches Hubby In Hotel Room With Girl.' 'Drunk Smacks Aged Mother In Face.' 'Husband Catches Man In Wife's Bedroom.' 'Well Known Local Man May Be Arrested For Carnal Knowledge.' One particularly embarrassing front-page story in 1948 told of a local couple's separation — The Beacon actually published their names, though we won't do that here — in which the wife filed for divorce because her husband could not perform in the bedroom. 'Immediately after their marriage,' The Beacon wrote, quoting court records, 'the plaintiff discovered that her husband was entirely impotent and incapable of sexual relations or cohabitation.' This is the same publication that published front-page photos of grisly crime scenes, including the brutal 1951 murder of Mary Hopkins and the 1942 murder of Thomasville police officer George Arnold Kemp, whose body was found at the bottom of an elevator shaft. In other 'Hall of Shame' moments, The Beacon once wrote about a local middle-school music teacher having an affair with a prominent businessman; contacted a psychic about the 1954 mysterious disappearance of High Point waitress Veronica Cox; called Elvis Presley a 'champion hog caller'; told the story of a well-known High Pointer who impregnated a 15-year-old girl and then tried to get her to have an abortion; chronicled the journey of a man who had a sex-change operation in the early 1950s; featured the story of a young man who married a pretty High Point nurse, only to discover his bride was actually a man; and told the tale of 'Floggin' Flossie,' a paramour who, when confronted by her lover's angry wife, beat the woman senseless with an umbrella. The Beacon was the brainchild of Wade Renfrow, a former Enterprise reporter who decided to launch his own newspaper ... if you can call it that. A fearless scandalmonger — think Jerry Springer with an old, rickety typewriter — Renfrow tattled and titillated. Salacious stories not only peeked into couples' bedrooms but also routinely exposed philandering husbands who'd gotten caught with their pants down, sensationalized gory murders, overplayed incidents of domestic violence, scandalized interracial relationships, ridiculed drunkenness, and skewered mighty businessmen and holier-than-thou politicians. Renfrow ran The Beacon from 1939 until 1952, attracting countless readers — and no doubt making countless enemies — with his reckless, no-holds-barred, tabloid-style journalism. He was sued — or threatened with legal action — on several occasions. Copies of The Beacon sold for a nickel apiece, and the sales boys frequently sold out when the paper hit the streets on Thursday mornings. Just ask acclaimed journalist and author Jerry Bledsoe, who grew up in Thomasville and worked as a Beacon paperboy during the mid-1950s. 'It never took long to sell all the papers I was allowed to have,' Bledsoe told The Enterprise for an article in 2007. 'Easiest money I ever made as a kid.' When Renfrow sold The Beacon in 1952, about a year before his death, the new owners vowed to change the paper's sullied reputation. For a time, they did just that, replacing the lurid copy with stories that were far less juicy and, frankly, far less interesting. It wasn't long, though, before more lascivious stories began to creep back onto the front page. The owners tried one last time in January 1956, proclaiming in a front-page story, 'Beacon To Avoid Filth In Militant New Policy.' Adultery, divorce proceedings, illegitimacy and other scandalous topics would become taboo, the article stated. Alas, that announcement may have sounded The Beacon's death knell. Within a year, the paper folded. Today, it's but a memory for those old enough to remember one of the most colorful chapters of High Point history.
Yahoo
08-02-2025
- Yahoo
HIGH POINT CONFIDENTIAL: The blind bootlegger Mysterious slaying baffled authorities in 1944
EDITOR'S NOTE: This is the first story in a three-part High Point Confidential series. HIGH POINT In the summer of 1944, as young U.S. servicemen were fighting a war overseas, local law enforcement authorities were engaged in a battle of their own here in High Point. That April, a pretty young woman named Alice May had been found brutally murdered, her half-nude body carelessly hidden beneath a pile of brush in a patch of woods on the outskirts of town. According to the county coroner, the 19-year-old brunette had been choked, struck in the mouth with a blunt object, and her throat had been slashed so violently that it severed her windpipe. She also had what appeared to be fingernail scratches across her throat. May's murder (which we wrote about in a four-part High Point Confidential series three years ago) understandably shocked the community. Equally shocking, however, was the city police department's inability to solve the slaying — despite what seemed to be a wealth of clues and potential leads — further frustrating and frightening city residents. As the unsolved case dragged into the summer months, local journalists bemoaned the police department's futility. The High Point Enterprise, for example, openly questioned whether the department was in over its head and might need some assistance from the State Bureau of Investigation. Two months after the slaying, with public confidence continuing to erode, the last thing the authorities needed was another unsolved murder in High Point ... but that's exactly what they got. This time, though, it was the Guilford County Sheriff's Department that would be stumped by the mysterious killing. It happened after dark on the evening of June 9, 1944. The victim was Robert Lee 'Bob' Beck, a 47-year-old Davidson County native who had spent most of his life living in or near High Point. At the time, Beck — who was blind — and his wife lived on the old Greensboro Highway, just north of High Point. Around 10 p.m., Beck was listening to the radio when he heard a knock at the front door. His wife, who was lying down in a rear bedroom, heard the knock, too, but it was her husband who went to the door. 'Don't move or I'll shoot you!' she heard a man yell. 'Don't shoot him!' another man shouted. The next sound she heard was the firing of a .45-caliber pistol. She ran to the front of the house just in time to see her wounded husband stumbling away from the door. She helped him to the bathroom, where he collapsed, and she immediately called for an ambulance. Meanwhile, the shooter and his sidekick retreated to their vehicle and sped away. The darkness prevented Beck's wife from getting a good look at either of the two men or their car. An ambulance rushed Beck to the Washington Street branch of High Point Memorial Hospital, but doctors held little hope for his survival. The bullet had ripped through his left arm and lower abdomen, nearly exiting on his right side. There was little the doctors could do to save him. As Beck lay feebly on his deathbed, Sheriff John C. Story and his deputies tried to extract whatever information they could from him. The officers suspected Beck recognized his killers' voices, but if he knew the identity of the two assailants, he wasn't saying. Around 4 a.m., Beck — who may have been the most important witness in his own shooting — died. He was laid to rest in his family's burial plot at Oakwood Cemetery. Sheriff Story and his deputies were baffled by the mysterious killing. Their only working theory seemed to be that Beck, a known bootlegger, might've been offed by a couple of business rivals, but who were they? They had slipped away from Beck's house in darkness, and the only witness who might've been able to identify them was dead. Would the authorities somehow crack the case and nab the two killers, or would Bob Beck join Alice May in the 'Unsolved' file? EDITOR'S NOTE: Part two of 'The Blind Bootlegger' will be published in Tuesday's High Point Enterprise.
