What
was your past experience in law enforcement?
I started off in the Air Force back in ’75 – lets you know how old I am – and I worked as a base policeman in the Air Force on active duty for 4 years. When I left the Air Force I returned to my home in Pennsylvania and I started working for a county police department in Pennsylvania. I worked there for 3 years. After my first year there I was promoted to corporal, and I had a small division of about 5 officers that were under me at that point. After a year of being corporal, I had applied for a sergeant’s position, they had a road sergeant’s position come up and I put in for it and I remained on that list for about a year. Just about the time I was there for 3 years, I’d applied to… in Philadelphia they had started a new transit authority police department and a lot of my buddies from inside the county were going into the city – better pay, benefits, whatnot – so I had applied. And about the time I came up for my sergeant in the county P.D., I’d gotten called in for interview processes in Philadelphia. So, long story short, I decided to take the position in Philadelphia. So I went into Philadelphia and I had to go through another whole police academy again, another 18 weeks this time. But it was a pretty interesting deal. We worked basically in the subways, in the elevated trains, and down in what they call the tunnels down there. And after about 2 years of that I’d had about enough and me and my wife at that time, we decided that we needed to just change things all together. So my brother-in-law and my sister were gonna move to Texas, so I thought about it and I called around to P.D.’s down there and saw how I could transfer my training from Pennsylvania to Texas and it wasn’t that hard of a thing to do. So we moved and I started working for a college. It was the Alamo Community College District which is two-year colleges, but they have about 5 different campuses in the city of San Antonio. So I started working for them as a patrolman. And I spent 2 years with them. We were a regular campus police department down there. As a matter of fact, all of our campuses were right inside the city, so we had open roads throughout our campuses, not like we enjoy here where there’s only one way in and one way out. We had bars and stuff that were within the campus boundaries and we had shootings and stabbings and car thefts and car break-ins, so we stayed really busy. When I first started working, we had about 60 police officers and then through the 2 years that I – actually 3 years – that I was there, we ended up cutting it down to about 45 officers which made it really hard on the officers. Where we used to have 5 officers per shift per campus, now we were down to 2 and 1. So it was getting really dangerous and it was getting really hard to keep up with all the crime. So I took a position with a county sheriff’s department that was just south of San Antonio called Atascosa County as a road deputy and I spent 5 years with them as a road deputy. Which probably brings me close to the 20 year mark at that point. I never retired, but got divorced like all cops do. (Laughs.) Married somebody else and, at the time, I’d gotten involved with a San Antonio gang that had been doing some things in our county. And it was getting to the point where we were hunting each other, kind of. Basically what it was, they’d done some drive-by shootings and actually they’d killed 2 people in our county. And my wife at that time was frantic. You know, we had a ranch on 60 acres and every time she’d see lights out on the dirt road she’d freak out. She thought this gang was coming to blow up the house or do whatever they had to do. So after about 3 or 4 months of going through that we decided it was time for a change and we moved and we ended up here in Virginia. She took a job and I worked for some security companies, you know, keep my time going. And I eventually ended up in Craig County, but I was only working part-time up there with the sheriff’s office and then, as things would have it, we went back to Texas and we got divorced. (Laughs.) Then I just came back here on my own. I’ve always been a police officer so I have the interest in it and I just decided this is where I want to be, back in Virginia, and I just returned here on my own. While I was working here in Virginia, I was working for a company called Wackenhut that handled some of the lower-rent income apartment houses here, so they had armed security out there and I did that for a while. And I ended up meeting a girl over in Virginia Beach while I was vacationing and I moved from here to Virginia Beach, I just transferred within the office of Wackenhut. And we spent about a year and half over there and I finally talked her into coming back over here. So we transferred back over here and probably within about 3 or 4 months of coming back, I applied for one of the officer positions here at Hollins and that’s basically that story. (Laughs.) That’s how I got here.