Requiem For A Friend--Dewey Lee Rogers--1942-2019

Dewey Lee Rogers--Photo by the Rogers Family

Sometime in August of 2011, at Banner, Kentucky, I met one of the most unique and interesting people I ever knew.  He was my friend, my auction ring man, and one of the best overall people I ever knew.  I had just opened my weekly consignment auction at Banner which I continued to operate for several years before closing it due to my wife's increasing health problems.  I knew very few people in the area although I had grown up about 25 miles away.  I had not lived or worked in that area in several years.  A slim, neatly dressed man in a white shirt and khaki pants walked into the auction house a few minutes before the sale was scheduled to begin and struck up a conversation.  He never mentioned his name and I never asked for some unknown reason.  But it was obvious that he knew a lot about the auction business. Since most compliance officers with the Kentucky Board Of Auctioneers have always been retired Kentucky State Police detectives and this man was neatly dressed, old enough to be retired, and well versed in the business, I immediately thought he was probably a compliance officer checking out a newly advertised weekly auction.  So I said, "If you work for the board, my license is right over there on the wall.  Go check it out."  Dewey just laughed and said, "No, I don't work for the board."  

Dewey and Lorene Rogers--Photo by the Rogers Family

At the time, I did not have an established auction crew other than my wife Candice who was cashiering, a clerk whose full time job was as  a librarian at the local community college, and a general flunky who had walked in just a day or two after I rented the building and claimed he was a ring man.  I knew fairly soon after I hired him that he was not a ring man and shortly after that I figured out that he was also a thief.  After I started the auction, things were going about as well as could be expected with a green crew and a bad ring man.  Just as it was  becoming apparent that my so-called ring man was incompetent, Dewey just stood up and started working.  Since I had no idea who he was, my first reaction was to tell him to sit down and we would run the sale.  But after about the second item he helped me sell, I realized this old man knows what he is doing.  So I let him work the entire sale and it went much better than it would have otherwise.  After the sale ended, I walked over to him and asked how much I owed him.  He just grinned and said, "You don't owe me nothing."  Then I asked "Are you  coming back next week?"  He just grinned again and said, "I don't know if I am or not," and walked out of the building to his vehicle. About fifteen minutes before the sale was scheduled to start the next week, Dewey came walking in the door.  I walked up to him and said, "Are you going to work tonight?"   He gave me that same grin and asked, "Do you think you need me?"  "I said, "I do but I don't like for people I don't know to work for me.  Who are you?"  He said, "I'm Dewey Lee Rogers."  We shook hands.  He worked that sale and nearly every other sale I ever had in Floyd County Kentucky and we quickly became fast friends until the day he died on May 23, 2019.

Dewey & Lorene Rogers--Photo by the Rogers Family

Our relationship quickly bloomed into a wonderful professional relationship between an auctioneer and a ring man and an even better friendship between two Appalachian men with a lot of common interests.  He had worked as a coal miner and an auction ring man most of his life and lived his entire life on Mud Creek in Floyd County.  He loved auctions and the auction business and he would have been a wonderful auctioneer if he had ever chosen to get a license.  I still don't understand why he never did.  I offered several times to let him serve his apprenticeship under me and he always just said he wasn't interested in having his license.  When we worked auctions, he was absolutely in tune to me and my style of working.  We were a great team and he made me look better and funnier.  He was a very funny man himself and when we were both on top of our game we could have given Laurel and Hardy a run for their money and still run a smooth, fast paced, professional auction at the same time.  It was a tremendous pleasure to work with him.  He made an auction tick like a clock, kept the crowd honest, and did a hundred different things which made him irreplaceable. He knew the great majority of the locals who became our regular customers and passed on valuable personal information about every one of them.  He knew who was honest, who was not, who wrote bad checks, who stole, and who you could trust. In a short time, I realized that if I ever had a million dollars in a cardboard suitcase and needed a place to park it, I could hand it to Dewey and say "I'll pick this up in a week or two."  It would have been there untouched when I went back to get it. I always make a practice of introducing my crew at the start of each auction for two reasons.  The customers need to know who is working the auction and what their job is and the staff need to be recognized instead of ignored and treated like burger flippers or temps in what should be a full time job.  I quickly developed a stock introduction for Dewey.  At the start of every sale, I would introduce him to the crowd by saying, "This is Dewey Rogers.  He has worked for every auctioneer since Adam had to sell Abel's personal property."  It might have been an exaggeration but it was simultaneously close to the truth.  Dewey had been attending auctions since he was old enough to travel anywhere alone and he had worked as a ring man for somewhere in the neighborhood of fifty years. He knew a lot about people and a lot about most kinds of merchandise and how to get an honest dollar out of anything.  He understood, just like me, that at every auction someone is in control.  It is either the auctioneer or the crowd and it should always be the auctioneer.  We worked together to the point that we were both proud to tell anybody who asked what each of us thought about the other.  To me, Dewey was the best ring man alive.  To Dewey, as he often said, I ran the best country auction anywhere around. 

Dewey Rogers--Photo by the Rogers Family

Dewey also had a lot of similar interests to my own.  Despite having a minimal amount of formal education, he was very intelligent, loved books and history.  He also loved to meet people and was literally the definition of gregarious.  He never saw a stranger and if he met one he knew them before they parted ways.  He absolutely loved his wife of fifty years, Lorene Hamilton Rogers, and he made it clear to anyone who asked. The last photo above is my favorite photo of Dewey and Lorene.  I don't believe it is possible to see that photo of a man and a woman, both well past their prime, staring into each other's faces without knowing that they were in love even if you do not know another thing about them.  Lorene passed away on September 11, 2018, a few months before Dewey and he was lost in many ways after that.  His health deteriorated and his daughter, Nonie Justice, and her husband moved into his home and took care of him until his death.  With medication and effort, Dewey managed to return to doing some of the things he loved until the day of his death.  He was able to visit some family and friends, to drive on his own, and to enjoy some aspects of his life until his final day.

I have lost a wonderful friend and professional associate.  Dewey's family has lost a father and a hero in many ways.  The community has lost someone to admire.