My Dad was a policeman. He wasn’t always a cop, but that’s who he became, and I believe he was proud of the designation. He volunteered for the Army Air Force at the end of WWII (his Mama had to sign for him because he was 17 and his older brother was already in the Army), but the hostilities ended before he was sent to the Pacific. He ended up in Fairbanks Alaska as a propeller mechanic for B-29 bombers. He always said he thought plowing with a mule in Mathiston MS was hard until they made him work on metal bomber propellers in subzero weather. After he finished his enlistment, his Captain attempted to talk him into re-enlisting for another 4-year hitch. “I will, Sir,” Daddy told him, “Just as soon as I go back to Mississippi to see my folks and my girl.” “No, you won't,” the Captain replied, “you’ll fall in love and the Air Force will never see you again.”
Turns out the Air Force Captain was right. Daddy fell in love with Mama, they got married, I came along and Glen quickly followed and they settled down in Ruleville MS. Daddy tried several jobs, but none seemed to work out long term like he had hoped it might. For a while he owned his own service station, then flew and serviced a fleet of Stearman biplane crop dusters for Mr. Link on a dirt strip behind the Sunflower County Hospital. I remember Glen, Les and I playing in the front yard of our house and seeing him fly over and waggle his wings to let us know he saw us waving. He tried driving a butane truck for a local gas company and he and Mama planted a garden every year to try to make ends meet with his growing family. After a few years, they decided to move to Jackson to see if they could make more money and maybe leave a few bad memories behind. I’m pretty sure Mama’s dad passing away may have had a part in the whole process, but I can’t truthfully say I know much about it.
I had just started 1st grade when we moved to Jackson, and Glen and Les weren't in school yet. Daddy was driving a Hostess cupcake truck delivering potato chips, twinkies, snowballs, cupcakes and Stuart’s barbeque sauce to local stores and restaurants in south Jackson. Cupcakes, twinkies, chips and barbeque sauce became dietary staples at our house for a while. After a couple of years, he heard the Mississippi Highway Patrol was looking for recruits - especially those with military experience - to take their basic training course held at the old army airfield in Jackson. He signed up, was accepted and spent 10 weeks in the barracks at the base going through the training program. We spent 10 weeks without a dad and with not a lot of money, and I’m sure Mama was about ¾ nuts taking care of me and my 2 brothers by herself, but we all made it through, and nobody got hurt. Much.
Right before graduation, Daddy was approached by a recruiter for the Jackson PD, who explained he could make pretty much the same money as a police officer PLUS he could sleep at home every night and not be on assignment for weeks at a time in another part of the state. It was an offer he couldn’t refuse, and it immediately changed our lives for the better. They bought a brand-new house in Queen Lanes in West Jackson that had central heat and air, and we transferred to Raines Elementary School.
Daddy started his career in law enforcement by walking a beat in downtown Jackson. He got to meet all the local shop owners, businessmen and characters. Walking every day made him familiar with the area and taught him safety precautions, observational skills and questioning techniques. He also learned a good bit about body language, vocal inflection and eye movements and the thousands of combinations of all of them and what they might mean during questioning. The good news was that all this made him a better policeman; the bad news was that my brothers and I had to learn the hard way about what he knew and how we could avoid providing him with information we would rather he not have. We struggled to get away with anything at all and only became proficient in anti-interrogatory techniques when we got to high school. I was pretty sure we could have beaten a lie detector test but were only about 50/50 with Daddy. Our last resort was always to blame it on a brother, the younger the better. Jay was born about then, the rest of us learned why Mama did all the cooking while she was in the hospital. Those were lean times at our house while she was gone, and I’m guessing times like that were why take out was invented.
After a few years on the beat, he was transferred to a 2-man patrol car and had to adjust to a rotating shift cycle that meant a month on day shift, the next month on night shift and then the following month on graveyard, then it all started over again. Learning to sleep at odd hours with 4 boys was not an easy thing for him or for us, and we had to learn when and how to keep quiet when he was trying to sleep when we were getting ready to go to school or just coming home. I quickly learned that there were sometimes better than others to practice saxophone or play baseball in the backyard. Les’ solution for our noisy littlest brother - he was a crawler, highly mobile and vocal - was to put him in one of the lower kitchen cabinets and put a pencil through the handles. That worked well until Mama found him one day while looking for Tupperware. We were warned not to let that happen again.
Somewhere in this span of time he passed the Corporal’s exam and got 2 chevrons for his uniform sleeves and a raise. He was also promoted to a single occupant “accident car” whose job was to respond exclusively to traffic accidents so regular patrol cars wouldn’t be tied down with traffic issues and could patrol their assigned area. He didn’t really care for the accident car assignment. He said he liked working alone but didn’t like the twisted metal and blood and death he saw on a daily basis. “It’s not always a good thing to be on a first name basis with ambulance drivers” he said, “because if they’re around it generally means a serious injury or somebody got killed.” I could see where that would wear on you after a few weeks.
He decided to go to night school and see if he could get his GED. “I spent three of the best years of my life in 8th grade” he said once, “and then I joined the Army Air Force when the school said they were going to move me to 9th the next year.” Mama helped him a lot with his studying and writing papers because he had never been much of a reader. Oh, he could read all right, it just wasn’t something he did for fun or relaxation. They worked at it diligently - Mama was a teacher whose classroom was our home - and he not only passed the GED but the exam for Sergeant also.
Daddy was a big man; he was 6’3” and usually around 230 most of his life. He was gruff, had definite likes and preferences and didn’t put up with or participate in small talk. JL was as country as cornbread, had a Mississippi accent you could almost see when he talked, and wanted chitlins for his birthday instead of a birthday cake and would rather grill burgers, chicken or pork chops on weekends than go to a restaurant. He liked watching the occasional football game on television, but usually didn’t sit still for more than a few minutes at a time. He had strong beliefs about right and wrong, but that didn’t always stop him from making an exception for himself from time to time.
We were pretty sure he knew at least ¾ of the people in Jackson and the surrounding area, and seldom went anywhere with him where he didn’t introduce us to somebody he knew, and it seemed his memory for names and faces was encyclopedic. His friends and acquaintances were from every possible walk of life, and we met salesmen, doctors, lawyers, business owners, preachers, bar owners, criminals with every type of record possible and regular people from every skill and educational level possible. There were hundreds of other policemen and law enforcement officers, including sheriffs, Marshalls, captains, lieutenants, radio operators, highway patrolmen, MP’s and retirees. We learned quickly how to make eye contact, how to speak to them and, most importantly, what not to say to them.
My brothers and I held a healthy fear of him for most of our lives. He rarely spanked anybody because the very act of threatening to do so almost always corrected our behavior or elicited fervent promises not to transgress again. We didn’t argue with him because “because I said so” was said with so much finality in tone and pronouncement that we were pretty sure anything but acceptance on our part might actually trigger him into physical action. We didn’t want to see that at all. We didn’t say it, but I’m pretty sure we were secretly scared he would lose his temper and kill us. Glen asked Mama once if Daddy might kill one of us if we didn’t do what he said. “No,” she replied, “but he might make you wish he had.” That didn’t do much except reinforce the substantial fear we already had.
He was a pretty good mechanic and seemed to enjoy working on cars and lawnmowers but wasn’t much of a teacher. His frustration threshold was pretty low, and when he asked us for a ratchet with a ½ inch socket he expected an immediate and correct response. We could usually get one or the other right but rarely both immediately and correct at the same time. He didn’t seem to know how to respond when we handed him the wrong thing or couldn’t eyeball the difference in ⅜ and ¾ wrenches or confused a flathead screwdriver with a nut driver or Phillips head. His response was usually something along the lines of “Damn, boy, let me do it” instead of “here try it this way.”
He sold used cars out of our driveway to make extra money. “Boy,” he told me once, “don’t take payments, don’t take checks and don’t try to sell junk that folks will bring back to you. It’s easier to sell to people you know if you can, because even people you know will lie to you about half the time, but somebody you don’t know will lie to you about everything and in a quick second. You need to know how to know a lie when you hear it.” We were waiting impatiently for him to tell us how to do that, but the secret never came. We had no doubt he could do it, he just didn’t bother to explain. One of the good parts of his auto business was that all 4 of us learned how to drive in cars he had bought to sell, and it was like us getting a new ride every 5 or 6 weeks. The only catch was we couldn’t get too attached to one because we never knew when a buyer might come along, and there had better not be any empty beer cans under the seat.
All of us quickly became aware that every policeman on every shift knew our cars and tag numbers and reported to him regularly about where we were, how fast we were going, what time it was and who was with us in the car. We became adept at riding gravel roads and backroads or cruising neighborhoods outside the limits of the JPD to evade observation. He also thought we didn’t know he checked odometers every morning. It was obvious after a few times of asking us “where in the hell did you go to put 120 miles on that car last night?” We adapted by learning to unhook the odometer cable at 75 miles and remember to hook it back up before parking at home that night.
I don’t remember him playing baseball with us or giving us tips on catching or hitting, and we finally realized it was because he never played baseball when he was a kid. His family grew up dirt poor sharecroppers, and the kids worked in the fields from the time they were old enough to walk. Baseball would have seemed a frivolous waste of time at his house.
He had some faults. He smoked a pack or two of cigarettes every day and saw no problem with smoking inside or around us. I’m pretty sure we all smelled like ashtrays but weren’t aware of it at the time. He darn sure wasn’t going to barbeque without an ample supply of beer and never drove on any trip of 25 miles or more without a cooler of beer within reach. He didn’t stop driving unless Mama got tired of us whining about needing a bathroom and made him pull over, and that was a stop on the side of the road and had better be quick. I remember many agonizing moments that seemed like hours after his initial announcement of “I told you to go before we left.” I never saw him drink liquor but he always had some on hand for guests, and at Christmas gave gifts of moonshine in mason jars to many of his friends.
He once told me (long after I had moved out and “growed up” as he put it) that he and Mama made $27000 in their best financial year together. How you make a house payment and raise 4 boys on that is nothing short of miraculous, but I never thought of us as poor, and we never really went without much of anything.
He wasn’t always the family-oriented Dad you might see on TV and was a regular at more than one bar after work or on weekends. He was never late to work, never took a day off and did extra traffic duty for churches and ball games and parades, extra patrol shifts and anything else he could do to make a little extra money. I don’t remember him talking to me or my brothers about life or college or a career or a direction, but I don’t think it was lack of interest. I think he just didn’t really know how to talk to kids or have an extended conversation with anybody about experiences he never had himself. I think he was surprised that we grew up so quickly and presented him with so many variables and questions he had never even considered before that his first reaction was flight so he didn’t have to have us think he didn’t have all the answers. We were constantly making what he was sure were bad decisions - and they were - but couldn’t seem to understand we didn’t do it just to make his life harder, but because we were growing up and learning things the way we learned best; the hard way. I’m pretty sure this is a part of life he skipped over quickly when he went into the AAF at 17. He had to jump immediately from knowing nothing about much except farming to making adult decisions in a mostly adult world. I think he was the poster boy for “growing up quickly.” Skipping all the insecurity and doubt most 16 year olds go through left a gap in his personal development and he didn’t know how to deal with it when we were at that age because he had no personal reference point to draw from. The entire subject seemed to both confuse and trouble him deeply.
We didn’t always sit around the table and have dinner together after Glen and I got to high school. We were involved in a lot of things - boy scouts, band, sports, and had majors in hanging out and didn’t always have time for regular meals. We didn’t miss many, but we didn’t really want to sit down with the family to eat them. It seems like we always had someplace else to be or to go or were late to and didn’t want to miss anything that might turn out to be exciting. It usually wasn’t but there was always the possibility - however small - that the one time we weren’t there would be the memorable occasion talked about in the neighborhood for months.
He said he stopped going to church when he got away from his Mama, and he wasn’t about to go to church with us, even if Mama got us all clean and dressed. He expected us to go, and it was another of those things we weren’t going to argue about. He called all of us “boy” and “boy I told you…” was heard loudly and often when we made a mistake or didn’t do something we were supposed to do. You might find it hard to believe there were more of those occasions than we would care to recall, but there were.
Daddy was also a professional profanicist. He could curse fluently and seemingly without effort. The words we got into trouble saying just seemed to fall naturally from his lips and flavored his conversation with an ease and a fluidity that came from years of practice with little or no correction. I noticed as I got older that his use of profanity increased as a conversation went on for more than a few minutes past his conversational tolerance level; usually anything more than three minutes. The longer the conversation lasted the more profane he got until the other party decided to end it before the profanity got any worse or personal insults ensued. It was an effective technique for ensuring short conversations. He didn’t filter his speech for many people and didn’t seem to think anything of using the occasional damn or hell in front of the preacher or his shift captain. The only 2 exceptions I ever noticed were teachers and his Mama.
In my 50’s I heard him tell a couple of his grandkids he loved them as they were leaving, and I decided I was going to tell him the same thing just to see what he said. When I did, he said “I love you, too, boy. Always have, just never said it much.” My brothers and I had always suspected it but never had it confirmed, and it felt good to hear it directly from him. His conversations with us on the phone, just like in person, were short and he would never talk on the phone for long, and about 4 minutes was his limit before he would hand it off to Mama.
He had a soft spot for grandkids and my brothers and I were pretty sure he had been taken over by an alien presence. Grandkids could get money or candy or do pretty much whatever they wanted simply by asking. I don’t remember him volunteering money for any of us and asking was a chore we knew was going to take several hours (if not days) to successfully complete. The $2 we often got paled in comparison to the folding money those grandkids got after only one request. I don’t think any of them ever heard a “dammit boy, do you think I’m made out of money?” either.
Mama said we could tell he loved us because he worked hard to make sure we had clothes, food, a great house to live in and what may have been one of the last great neighborhoods in town. I decided she was right. He never tried to be Ward Cleaver, but we were all pretty sure our father knew best, cause he told us he did. He might not have been the world’s most perfect model dad, but he loved us and took care of us the best he could. Sarge, your boys said thank you and we love you, and for better or worse you helped us make it to adulthood. I was 62 when he called me “boy” for the last time, and it felt like it still fit. Still does even now, and I wish I could hear it one more time.
Thanks, Sarge, for allowing us to grow up without killing us. If I had been in your shoes I’m not sure I could have pulled it off.
Glenn, your dad didn't have any money to give you boys because every penny had a place. Been there, done that. After all you little angels left and brought your children around, he and your mom had some extra money to give and I know it made them feel so good to be able to do so. Sounds like you had a good time with those cars though. Good times. Great memories.