He was working as a sportswriter for both the Hazard Herald and Hindman News – “I got $2 a week from each paper,” he said – during his last two years of high school.
“I saw her sitting there across the court,” he said with a laugh. “Ten minutes later we were madly in love!”
There’s a reminder of another of his loves – University of Kentucky basketball – in the living room, too. A blue and white ball autographed by standout UK guard Tyler Ulis is cradled atop a Wildcat statue that was a gift from his son, Terry.
Across the room there’s a bucket filled with new potatoes from his garden: “I keep them in here because it’s cool,” he said. “It’s too hot in the garage. They’d spoil.”
Yet, for all there is to see in the room, what catches you most is what you can hear.
There’s a continuous “tick tock…tick tock.”
It comes from clocks that are everywhere – in cabinets, on shelves, below the TV, atop end tables. There are more in the kitchen and down in the basement.
One is shaped like a pyramid, another like the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. There’s one you wind using a pull cord the way you’d start a lawnmower. Another clock looks like a tape measure revolving around a sphere.
Dixon bought them at estate sales, garage sales and second-hand stores.
“If I can’t fix ‘em and get ‘em running, I don’t keep them,” he said.
And that’s what you’d expect from Benny Dixon.
No one manages time better than him.
He is 94 years old and claims “I can do anything I done when I was a teenager, ‘cept maybe I do it just a little bit slower at times.”
He still drives his car, puts out a big garden and does his own cooking.
He doesn’t wear glasses and said he only takes two medications a day.
“Well, and I also take 5 milligrams of Cialis every morning, too,” he said with a grin. “Oh yeah, I can still get it on! And I don’t care who knows.”
His most impressive feat though can be seen regularly at the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base Rod and Gun Club by Huffman Prairie on Hebble Creek Road.
He’s been a trap shooter there for over 60 years and he’s still a deadly shot.
This past Tuesday afternoon – at the weekly Old Timers’ shoot – he repeatedly raised his Ljutic shotgun to his shoulder, eyed the fast-arcing clay targets and shattered 23 of 25 of them.
That was good enough for third place.
Some five years ago, at a Friday Night Calcutta shoot in Middletown, he hit 50 targets in a row and won $2,228.10.
He still shoots there regularly and sometimes at other trap shooting competitions including the Eastern Hills Rod, Gun and Conservation Club in Batavia and in Batesville Indiana.
He was a regular at the Grand American in Vandalia until it moved to Illinois in 2006 and he’s often shot at the Missouri Fall Handicap just south of Lake of the Ozarks.
And for more than two decades he had a winter home across from the well-known Silver Dollar Shooting Club in Odessa, Florida northwest of Tampa.
But he’s best known at the Base Rod and Gun Club, where he shoots two and sometimes three times a week.
Last September the club held an Honor Shoot to celebrate him and it drew close to 100 competitors.
Dixon was embraced in a more familial way this past week when Terry and his 32-year-old son Morgan – both visiting from Punta Gorda, Florida – came out to watch him shoot and hold court with the other old timers who congregate each Tuesday at the club.
More than just a shooting competition, it’s a social gathering which sometimes might include games of tonk, the gin rummy style card game, and usually comes with some good-natured banter.
Like other people, Terry marvels at his dad’s well-being:
“His previous doctor retired, and his new general practitioner gave him a physical and told him, ‘Your vital signs are better than mine!’ His standing heartrate, his blood pressure, all of that was fine.”
The only health professional he sees regularly is his chiropractor whom he visits weekly.
“I’ve shot so much in my life that my trigger finger now tightens up,” Dixon said as he held out his right hand. “I get it, and my release finger worked on every week. And my shoulder gets some work, too.
“That’s it.”
Morgan nodded at his grandfather and smiled: “I want to be like him when I get older.”
Dixon claims his remarkable health and welfare are the result of a few personal rules he’s followed his whole life:
“I don’t know if it affects you, but it might have something with the way I’ve lived.
“I mean, can you imagine a man almost 95 and I’ve never drank a bottle of beer in my life. And never smoked a (expletive) cigarette! But good-looking women have had to run for their lives.”
Dale Schock, the longtime manager of the Base Rod & Gun Club, has heard those claims before.
“He’s a storyteller alright,” Schock said with a laugh. “Are there some lies in there? We don’t know. None of us have been around that long to say.”
‘I can’t walk 15 miles for a date’
Dixon grew up in a “holler” in Eastern Kentucky.
“We lived along Irishman’s Creek near Amburgey in Knott County,” he said.
He was the youngest of 11 kids living in a two-bedroom house that had no electricity, running water or indoor plumbing.
“If you took a bath, you did it in the creek,” he said. “In wintertime, you did it in a No. 2 washtub after heating water.
“If you didn’t hunt for game or grow vegetables in your garden, you didn’t eat. There was a store down the way where you could get a bag of potato chips or they had summer sausage hanging from the ceiling.”
The mail, he said, was delivered by a lady riding a mule.
His dad, once a coal miner, was waylaid with cancer and died when Benny was 16.
“My mom was a full-blooded Cherokee Indian and she had her hands full raising all of her kids,” he said.
After two years of high school, Benny said he joined the Army to get his mom some financial relief: “I wasn’t in that long and got honorably discharged to come help her and go back to high school.”
That’s when he got his newspaper jobs.
“I was a major talker, I could talk to anybody, and the people from the Hazard Herald come to me and said ‘How would you like to make $2 a week?’
“I said ‘Absolutely!’
“I mostly covered high school basketball and football games. And if I could find a way to get there, I’d go to Kentucky Wildcat basketball games and even the Cincinnati Reds if I could figure out a way there.
“And pretty soon the Hindman News come to me, too, and offered me $2 a week to do the same for them. It was mostly sports, but sometimes other news, too.”
He started to laugh at the memories: “I’ll tell you, with that press pass I felt friggin’ important!”
He can tell stories of famed Kentucky broadcaster Cawood Ledford taking him under his wing at games and how he ended up sitting on press row next to Happy Chandler, the Kentucky politician and Commissioner of Major League Baseball who was a graduate of the UK Law School and an ardent Wildcats basketball fan.
“He’d get so into it, he’d beat the hell out of you, son!” Dixon laughed.
If Happy put him to the test, so too, he said, did Coralee Williams, a girl who was his schoolmate Carr Creek High:
“She was interested in me and said ‘We have to get together.’
“I told her, ‘Listen Coralee, you live in Littcar, and I live in Amburgey. I ain’t got no car and I ain’t got a mule to ride either. I can’t see you. I can’t walk 15 miles for a date.’
“She ended up marrying Ernest Sparkman. He played basketball for the University of Kentucky in 1944 and became a well-known broadcaster. He owned WYMT, the television station in Hazard. He died a few years back (2010).”
Etta Marie Hooker was from Sassafras, Kentucky and either because the trip to her place was shorter or the love was stronger, he quickly found a path to her doorstep and her heart.
They married at the courthouse in Whitesburg, Ky. She was 18 and he was 21. When she died in August of 2017, they were two months shy of their 65th wedding anniversary.
Their life was spent in the Dayton area, where they raised three children.
“He’s been as great a dad as any child could want,” Terry said. “He supported all of us in what we did. He was loving, and he had a lot of fun.”
Terry once owned CD Connection, the highest-grossing independent record store in the Southeast. His wife, Dr. Cheryl Dixon, who was along for this Ohio visit, is a well-respected anesthesiologist in the Jacksonville area.
Benny and Etta Marie’s daughter Tammy now lives in Centerville and son Tracy is in Beavercreek.
The Dixons ended up in Ohio when Benny had to make a career choice after graduating from high school – because of his military hiatus – as a 21-year-old.
“All the jobs back then were in the coal mines,” he said. “But my brother had gotten a job as a plumber at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, so I decided to come to Dayton, too.
“For me, it was a scary situation coming here. I had been raised in the holler and now there were people everywhere.
“I saw an ad in the newspaper and went for a job interview at Delco. I took along my high school diploma, but all they wanted to know was ‘Can you run a punch press?’
“I said, ‘I can damned sure do that!’ And every other machine they mentioned, I said I could run it, too. Truth is, I had no idea. I’d never even seen this stuff.
“They gave me a physical and put me to work that night. It was January of 1953, and I started out making $1.30 an hour. I ended up working at Delco for 32 years.”
He began trap shooting after he got to Dayton.
At Delco, he became part of the DIAA team that consistently won the factory championship.
He pulled out a magazine clipping detailing the 1972 championship and how he had led the field hitting 50 targets in a row.
‘That’s just a number’
His first trap gun was a Winchester Model 12 pump action shotgun.
The Ljutic he uses now was hand-made in Yakima, Washington and he said it retails for around $17,000.
The expenditure is worth it, he said: “If you’re competitive and can get the job done (under pressure), you can make a little money.
“Sure, you get nervous sometimes, but I try to tell myself: ‘Hold your head down and put your eyes on the target. Never leave sight of it. Focus.’”
That can be easier said than done at the Base Rod and Gun Club, where he said the wind can be tricky at times:
“It comes up unexpectedly. Why do you think the Wright Brothers chose Huffman Prairie to develop their plane and learn to fly? That wind there gave them lift.”
While the Base Rod and Gun has been his trap home, the Grand American was the place where he mingled with the sport’s best.
“I got to know a lot of people over the years,” he said.
“When I lived in Florida, I knew a guy – Jack Titus – who lived right across the street at the Silver Dollar (gun club). Then he came up for the 1989 Grand American and called me from Springfield.
“He said, ‘Benny, my motor home blowed up here.’
“I said, ‘I’ll be over and get you.’ And he stayed with us for two weeks.
“He ended up winning the whole friggin’ Grand American! Paid him $23,000!”
Dixon’s voice softened: “He died in 2013.
“That’s the one hard thing about living a long time. You outlive all your old friends.”
And so, he’s made some new ones.
He competes against the guys in their 70s and 80s every Tuesday. And he battles all ages on Wednesdays at the club.
“I don’t look at it as me being 94,” he said. “To me, that’s just a number.”
And on Tuesday afternoon, the only number that counted was 23 out of 25 targets.
“I finished in the money,” he said with a smile. “It was a good day.”
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