19-04-2025
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.
