When Polk was growing up, that area was considered the outskirts of Beaufort, and Polk rose each morning before school to tend to chores that included cleaning glass milk bottles. “I never drank pasteurized milk until 1955,” Polk said. “We made our own butter, too.” His home was on Boundary Street, near where Firehouse Subs and Riverview Baptist Church stand today. The family moved after Polk’s father purchased nearby land from other family members and began developing the neighborhood that today is known as Polk Village.

Polk graduated from Beaufort High in 1958 and starred as a fullback for the Tidal Wave football team and as a hurdler for the school’s track team. The University of Tennessee offered him a football scholarship, “but they wanted to make a blocking back out of me,” said Polk, who weighed 225 pounds back then, beefy by standards of the day..

He opted for Mississippi State instead. Polk also decided to join the National Guard, a move that would still allow him to play college football right away, too. But before he could enroll at Mississippi State, he wrecked his Edsel while driving from Starkville, Miss., to National Guard training in Florida. While waiting for the repair, he met the woman who would become his first wife.

He never made it back to Starkville. Instead, Polk got married and took a job as a Beaufort County Sheriff’s Office deputy. Today, the department employs about 245 sworn officers and 95 support staff members. But when Polk began his law-enforcement career in 1960, just nine Sheriff’s Office deputies patrolled the 923 square-mile jurisdiction. The myriad inlets and salt marsh that etch the landscape made Beaufort County seem even larger than that and gave rise to distinctive communities that arose in relative isolation.

Polk believes he is the last man alive to have worked for Sheriff J.E. McTeer. The renowned “High Sheriff of the Lowcountry” served from 1926 until 1962 and gained notoriety not only for his long tenure, but for his skills as a purported witch doctor. By conjuring “white magic” and by bending social norms and law-enforcement convention, McTeer forged a relationship with secluded sea-island African-Americans enjoyed by few sheriffs before or since.

But that community didn’t pose the county’s greatest criminological risk, according to Polk. In those days, the biggest crime problem Beaufort faced were Parris Island recruits absconding from the Marine Corps Recruit Depot and stealing cars and clothes during their getaways, Polk said. “We’d round them up and give them back to the MPs.”

Initially, Polk worked the night shift and made $4,725 year, his salary supplemented by annual bonuses based upon the number of warrants he served. He left in 1966 to join the S.C. State Law Enforcement Division, commonly known as SLED.

Polk remained stationed in Beaufort, but he was called away frequently. He sometimes served as a driver and bodyguard for a state dignitary, such as Sen. Robert Waddell of Beaufort or former South Carolina governor and Saudi ambassador John West. Sometimes, Polk provided security at college football games at Clemson or USC.

But there were more pulse-quickening assignments, too. He stayed in a Charleston motel for three months during the Charleston Hospital Workers Strike of 1969. That labor dispute stands as one of the city’s most significant and drew Coretta Scott King to Charleston in support of striking workers. A year earlier, Polk was among those assigned to investigate the Orangeburg Massacre, in which S.C. Highway Patrol officers and African-American protesters clashed on the South Carolina State campus following a demonstration against racial segregation. Three of the protesters were killed and 28 injured.

SLED also raided restaurants for selling hard liquor, which before 1973 was a violation of South Carolina law. “A lot of our work at that time was centered around illegal alcohol,” Polk said. That could be physical work, evocative of Polk’s years as a high school football star. “I was a pretty good-sized fella and could run,” Polk said, recalling a raid in Jasper County in which his team came upon a moonshine still … and the man running it. Jasper Sheriff J.P. Raymond looked at Polk and said, “Go get him, Butch.”

Other agents watched as the suspect led Polk through a shallow pond, then a pluff mud bank, while a panting Polk pursued. He finally caught up and brought the suspect to the ground with a tackle that would have made his Tidal Wave teammates proud. When the moonshiner was searched, officers found a voodoo root in his pocket.

“I suppose he ran so hard because you weren’t supposed to get caught with one of those roots in your pocket,” Polk said. “I got some ribbing, too, because everyone knew I worked for Sheriff McTeer. People always thought I might have learned some magic myself.”

Despite leaving local government for state work and often getting called away from Beaufort, relationships Polk forged in the earliest days of his career were much alive in the waning days. Sheriff Morgan McCutcheon, Beaufort County’s sheriff from 1977 to 1988, was a friend dating to the 1960s, when Polk was a deputy and McCutcheon was part of Parris Island’s military police force. McCutcheon gave his SLED-agent friend an office in the old Sheriff’s Office headquarters and carved out another well-appointed space for him when the current law enforcement center was built on Duke Street. McCutcheon’s successors, David Lucas and Carl McLeod, reserved the same accommodations for Polk.

However, Polk said that after P.J. Tanner was elected in 1998, “He tried to move me into a broom closet.” Rather than simply relocating his office, Polk retired, then tried to take Tanner’s office for himself in the 2002 election. Tanner, who remains Beaufort County’s sheriff, was reelected and has faced opposition just once since Polk’s challenge.

Polk entered retirement with few regrets and many fond memories. He tinkers around his home in Yemassee, where the walls are festooned with paintings by his late wife Michal Rice Polk, an accomplished artist who passed away in October 2021 at age 78. The home’s living room offers a few hints of Polk’s long career in law enforcement, such as the gun cabinet he’s owned for years. These days, though, he retrieves guns to go hunt doves in Argentina or large game in the Far West, rather than fugitives making late-night getaways across Lowcountry terrain.

“A lot of the people I worked with are gone now,” Polk said. “But I got to do interesting work, and I got to serve my friends and neighbors while doing it. That’s a pretty satisfying way to make a living.”