Buford Pusser met Pauline Mullins in Chicago. Pauline, who was originally from Virginia, already had two children when they married in 1959. The couple had a daughter, Dwana, and in 1961, the family moved back to Tennessee where Buford was originally from. In 1964, he ran for sheriff, promising to clean up the county without the aid of a gun. Initially, his preferred weapon of choice was an ax handle he used to smash stills and gambling equipment. Buford was a strapping 6-foot-3-inch, 210-pound former professional wrestler who wasn’t afraid to take the area’s organized crime syndicate head on. “It is nothing unusual for him to whip four or five [men] at a time,” one of his deputies told the UPI in 1967.
When her husband became sheriff, Pauline took a job as the cook for the jail and went above and beyond for many of the prisoners. “She was a good woman,” T. E. Sowell, a local constable, told The Tennessean after her death. “She used to take money out of her own pocket to buy prisoners soft drinks and other little extras the county doesn’t furnish.”
[Featured image by Matewan via Wikimedia Commons | Cropped and scaled | CC BY-SA 3.0 DEED]
