Jim Jenkins: Remembering Dennis Rogers, a friend of mine and the people

By JIM JENKINS

Dennis Rogers, for 31 years columnist for The News & Observer, died Saturday at the age of 77. His former colleague Jim Jenkins, who retired as an editor and columnist on the editorial page in 2018, offered this remembrance.

“Ride easy,” we’d say sometimes on parting ways at the end of the work day. It was a sort of joking reference to “Easy Rider,” the counterculture film featuring a motorcycle trip.

Dennis Rogers, The News & Observer columnist for three decades, was known to reference his Harley sometimes, and he didn’t like it when I’d ask him if I could take his bike out for a spin. (Thank God he never said yes.)

Dennis was a Vietnam veteran, a kid from hardscrabble beginnings, a biker, a fellow so skinny he seemed to ripple like notebook paper in a stiff wind.

I was none of those things. But we were, in the years we worked at The News & Observer, great friends. I have it in writing: When I interviewed Dennis earlier this year on the publication of his book about his Army boot camp, “Spit Shine,” he inscribed something in my copy I didn’t read until later. The interview had been good in that I hadn’t seen my old friend and his wife, HollyAnn, for a while, but it was tough because Dennis’ health was failing him. I gave him my word I wouldn’t write anything about that at the time.

But then I got to the parking lot and opened the book and Dennis had written, “To Jim — my best friend at The N&O.” I broke down. Last Saturday, I broke down for my old friend one more time.

So let this be known, as it already is by literally hundreds of thousands of people who have read The News & Observer through the last 40 years: Dennis Rogers was the best columnist, ever, in North Carolina and certainly among the best in the United States. He performed at a remarkable level for over three decades, a good bit of that spent traveling tens of thousands of miles every year profiling the people of Eastern North Carolina.

Dennis kept going through a life that began in poor circumstances in Eastern North Carolina, and he joined the Army and went to Vietnam. On coming home, he entered the University of North Carolina and made Phi Beta Kappa, something he never told people, unless they saw him opening a beer with the PBK key.

Oh, Dennis’ writing was graceful, his ability to turn a phrase and find the details in a person’s life that had shaped him or her was amazing. But people talked to Dennis because they sensed he liked them and respected them. His honesty found its way into everything he wrote.

Let’s get some things “on the record” that Dennis would want in any remembrance: He liked food despite his undernourished appearance, and he made spaghetti with oregano because it was mentioned that way once on “The Andy Griffith Show,” something else Dennis liked. He was a righteous man when it came to civil rights and women’s rights. The best times of his life were likely when he and his wife, his beloved HollyAnn, traveled America for a couple of years in ever-larger RVs.

Life was, as it is for most, wonderful and happy and sad and sometimes tragic. He never recovered from the death of his younger daughter Melanie in an automobile accident, the worst thing that ever happened to him. But he loved his grandchildren, his daughter Denise and most especially HollyAnn, who joined him on a multitude of adventures.

It is not melancholy or an exaggeration to say that for literally hundreds of thousands of North Carolinians who read Dennis Rogers through the years, there has been a death in the family. Rare was the kitchen or den, the bulletin board or refrigerator that did not have a Dennis Rogers column affixed to it. Those columns are being re-read now, and that would most emphatically please Dennis.

Ah, well. One more time. Ride easy, old buddy.