Benny Rourke can’t believe some of the adventures he’s had over his 87 years.
Rourke spent his childhood above the White House Café in Camden.
“The reason was that my dad had a John Deere dealership and there was a horse stable right next door,” Rourke said. “When people came into town on Saturdays, he would bring their horses and wagons there, untack them and put them in the stables. For 25 cents he would feed and water the horses until they were ready to go home. I gave it.”
He received a scholarship to attend the University of Arkansas (now Ryan University) in Batesville, where he was paid to drive his roommates “into the mountains” and preach. One day, his roommate became ill and the professor asked Rourke to take his place.
“He said, ‘Sing and pray and go home,'” Rourke said. “I came up with a sermon and gave it to them, and the professor called me and said, ‘They don’t want any other guy. They want you.’ .”
Instead, Mr. Rourke wrote a letter to Sen. John McClellan asking for a job. McClellan got it for him in Yellowstone National Park. The following summer, he wished to work in Alaska, and his wish was granted.
“Can you imagine being able to take a train through the heart of Alaska for free? Just exploring Alaska was amazing,” Rourke says. “We saw snow 15 feet deep and 40 degrees below zero during the entire construction period.”
He earned enough money to cover his tuition at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville and got decent grades, but he had so much fun that he spent all the money he earned in Alaska.
He asked his mother to cover his $17 laundry bill and hitchhiked to California to look for work. He was hired at a cannery outside San Francisco and was lucky enough to have a roommate who let him drive a ’57 Chevrolet convertible whenever he wanted.
Once I had enough money, I went back to school to study business. With just six hours left in his summer course, he persuades the owner of a gas station to hire him for an afternoon shift to fix up his apartment. He meets Sherry, his boss’s daughter, shortly after he sees her delivering lunch to her father at the train station.
Rourke graduated and, just as he was getting married, tried to buy a hardware store in Bentonville.
“I poured my heart and soul into the new store and completely redid it within six months,” he says. “The gentleman who owned the store had two funeral parlors, and he started embalming bodies on the second floor of the hardware store. The funeral parlor also served as an ambulance service. Anyway, I was hooked. I gave up, got married and took her with me.” I was there and all I can say is that it was the best six months of my life. ”
Rourke said Sam Walton had a store across the street and the two became friends. When the man who was supposed to sell Rourke a store reneged on his promise, Walton helped Rourke set up shop at Woolworth’s in Tulsa.
Walton later asked him to critique one of his stores in northwest Arkansas, he said.
“I tore it up,” he says. “Although I was trained differently, he still practiced the redneck style. I think it really hurt my feelings.”
The Waltons invited the Lokes to spend the night, but the Waltons decided it would be best to drive back to Tulsa, where they were in charge of 11 stores. A few years later, Woolworths transferred him to Kansas City, where he was asked to lay off 300 people as a cost-cutting measure related to retirement savings before closing.
From there he was to be transferred to St. Louis and then to New York. Sherry said no.
“She said, ‘I’m all the way up north,'” Rourke said.
They returned to Arkansas, where Rourke worked with his father and brother in the family’s hardware store. He wanted to modernize the store, but they hesitated. He moved on when he and Sherry took over Big Ben’s Old Fashioned Hamburgers, a restaurant in Fordyce.
“It was a chain restaurant, but it was the worst restaurant in Fordyce,” he says. “She worked in the back and I worked in the front.”
They improved their business, installing a drive-through window and allowing credit card payments for the first time. The rent was due to go up at the end of their lease, so they let it go and went into the scrap metal business, opening Big Ben’s Salvage on 80 acres in Fordyce, now run by their sons. There is.
The Rourkes’ home, built in 1961, the same year they were married, sits on 25 acres in downtown Fordyce and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Although Rourke has accomplished many things in his life, he claims his family is his greatest accomplishment. His children, Benny Rourke, Jr., Todd Rourke, and Brooke Moore, moved away for a time to begin their careers.
“We were able to get our kids back in an environment where we could do things together almost every day,” he said, including his seven grandchildren. “It was a blessing for Sherry and I to have them really close.”
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