This handsome senior citizen is my dad.
From the time I was 3 years old until I was in my early 20's,
Dad was a policeman in a beach city in Southern California.
(Before that, he was a Hospital Corpsman,
serving with the U.S.M.C. in the "Korean Conflict".
We didn't meet until I was 6 months old.)
After he got back, he worked and went to school to become a policeman.
Some of my childhood memories are traumatic:
the night he caught 3 burglars,
people kept walking by and no one would call the station
to get him help.
They didn't want to get involved.
He had no choice;
One day he came home, horribly shaken
Some drunks had taken their 2 year old out on a boat.
The baby fell overboard and drowned.
I remember the riots,
watching him get ready to go out in a squad car
to patrol with 3 other officers,
The day one of his friends was shot to death,
when he pulled over on the freeway to help someone
who appeared to be having car trouble.
There were always loaded guns in our house.
I was taught to respect them from my youngest years.
His Sam Browne belt hung over a kitchen chair.
I would never have dreamed of touching it.
If we went out to eat,
we knew Dad would be wearing his long corduroy jacket
with his holster under it.
We knew we would be sitting in the back of the restaurant and
Dad would be sitting with his back to the wall...
Police officers are always on duty.
Sometimes, we never made it to the restaurant,
movie or wherever we were going.
If we came across an accident and no black and white was on the scene,
Dad pulled over and took charge until one arrived.
Sometimes, he would put out flares, direct traffic or help accident victims.
My brothers and I would gripe and complain,
but we knew that was life with Dad.
When I was 17, Dad became partially disabled.
One day on patrol in his squad car, he spotted a stolen car.
The chase was on!
The car raced into a residential neighborhood,
with Dad hot on his tail.
Dad said later he kept praying there were no kids in the street.
The first chance he got, he rammed his cruiser into the felon's car
and pushed it up on the curb.
He knew he had been hurt.
Just how badly, he didn't know at the time.
He needed a spinal fusion.
He spent weeks in a metal brace,
then months in a plastic collar after the surgery.
He lived with the physical pain for a long time.
He has never been able to turn his head since then;
only his whole upper torso.
Today, we all tease him about the dents in his truck from backing up.
I have the greatest admiration for our police.
They try to do a necessary and frequently thankless job.
And risk their own lives in the process.
The next time you're mad because you get pulled over for something,
think about my dad.
Think about his friend who pulled over
to help the stalled car on the freeway.
Think about the police officers (and firemen) who were running
UP the stairs in the Twin Towers,
when everyone else was scrambling to get out of there...
I like cops...
