The Arizona Highway Patrol as I Disremember It

By Paul E. Palmer Jr.

Author Paul Palmer first began idolizing highway patrolmen when he was a boy living in Gila Bend, Arizona. As the patrolmen stopped by to visit his father, Paul soon realized that these brave men were true heroes. He had no idea then that one day he would work with the same men he held in such high esteem.

As he shares a chronological glimpse into the life and career of an Arizona patrolman, Paul begins with his first job in 1966 as a dispatcher in Holbrook, Arizona, where he jokes his best view of the town was in his rearview mirror. While providing amusing portrayals of the men and women he worked with, Paul relies on slightly exaggerated real-life experiences to depict the wonderful, wild, and wacky people who made up the Arizona Highway Patrol. Paul shares his experiences of the next 40 years, serving in both civilian and sworn capacities and how he developed lasting friendships with the heroes who put their lives on the line every day to ensure the safety of others.

The Arizona Highway Patrol as I Disremember It provides an unforgettable look at the humorous side of law enforcement through the eyes of one of its own.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Dec 12, 2011
• ISBN: 9781462068845

Paul E. Palmer Jr.

Paul E. Palmer Jr. is an Arizona native who enjoyed a lengthy career with the Arizona Highway Patrol and Department of Public Safety, where he served in both civilian and sworn capacities. Paul currently lives in Sun City, Arizona, with his wife, Lynn.

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The Arizona Highway

Patrol

As I Disremember It

Paul E. Palmer Jr

iUniverse, Inc.

Bloomington

The Arizona Highway Patrol As I Disremember It

Copyright © 2011 by Paul E. Palmer Jr.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

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ISBN: 978-1-4620-6883-8 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4620-6885-2 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4620-6884-5 (e)

Printed in the United States of America

iUniverse rev. date: 12/02/2011

Contents

Dedication

Acknowledgements

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty One

Chapter Twenty Two

Chapter Twenty Three

Chapter Twenty Four

Chapter Twenty Five

Chapter Twenty Six

Chapter Twenty Seven

Chapter Twenty Eight

Chapter Twenty Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty One

Chapter Thirty Two

Chapter Thirty Three

Chapter Thirty Four

Chapter Thirty Five

The Arizona Highway Patrol

As I Disremember It

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Paul E. Palmer Jr

Dedication

This book is dedicated to the men and women of the Arizona Highway Patrol and the Department of Public Safety. The sworn and civilian men and women of AHP/DPS are not only the greatest people I have worked with, but the greatest of my friends.

Acknowledgements

First I must thank my wife Lynn, who in 1968 did not realize what she was getting into when she accepted a proposal of marriage from this once skinny highway patrol dispatcher. She has stood by me and supported me and provided me with two great sons. Thanks to my son Gene for the artwork on the title page of this book. This is how he apparently saw his dad when he sat down with colored pencils and paper when he was a young child in the early 70’s. Thanks to my son Chris and grandson Jacob for the cover photo. They never realized that their photo would somehow one day wind up in a book they probably never thought their father/grandfather could put together. Thanks to Marsha McNeese for suggesting that I write stories for the Arizona Highway Patrol Association magazine. Those stories ultimately became this book. The book would be pretty drab without the artwork that begins each chapter. I thank retired Lieutenant Bill Chewning badge #41 for drawing these fantastic cartoons. And thanks to the crazy and wonderful people who appear in the following pages. The people you will read about are actual people and their names have not been changed. I hope I have not embarrassed them. The stories you are about to read are taken from actual events with some additional creative wanderings of my mind tossed in. And most of all I thank God for the gift he has given me that allows me to bring a smile and perhaps some joy into people’s lives. I hope I have been able to make someone’s bad day a little easier.

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Chapter One

Gila Bend

I always say that I was born and raised in Gila Bend. That’s not entirely the truth. Gila Bend didn’t have a hospital, so I was born in Phoenix. The doctors told my mom that we could leave the hospital after I stopped screaming from the circumcision. As I recall, that was about a day and a half. But from that time until I graduated from high school and joined the Navy, I lived in Gila Bend.

Most of my memories revolve around the state yard in Gila Bend. My dad was the maintenance foreman and we lived in the state yard with other highway department employees and highway patrolmen.

Dad took photos for the patrol and I can recall hearing the quick call going off in the middle of the night to call him out for photos or some other assignment. I would lie in bed and hear the irritating tone of the quick call. BEEE BAAA BEEE BAAA. It sounded like a fog horn going through puberty. And it was loud! We had a phone and I could never understand why the dispatcher didn’t just call. I guess the dispatcher felt that if he was awake, everyone should be awake. That was my first memory of the Highway Patrol.

I guess I was about six, around 1950 when I first began noticing highway patrolmen. Officers would always stop by the house to see Dad when they were going through town and they seemed to enjoy watching me goof off and make a fool of myself. I’d always run out to meet them when they stopped by. One that amazed me was Lt. Vern Fugat. He and dad would be standing out by the cars in front of the house and I’d run out to see one of my heroes. Lt. Fugat always had a pinch of snuff in his mouth. That was before they began calling it smokeless tobacco. He would stop talking, pull his lower lip in just a bit and launch a stream of tobacco juice clear across the road raising dust on the other side. I was amazed! These two adults went on talking as if nothing had happened! Dad chewed too, his favorite being cigars. He’d take a bite off the cigar, park it in his mouth where he wanted it and every once and awhile he would launch a stream. But dad didn’t have the distance Vern had. That guy had talent! When Mom went to the store I always asked for licorice. I’d chew it for awhile pretending it was tobacco and try to launch a stream like Vern. But my dumper didn’t work quite right and the front of every shirt I had was stained black.

In the 50’s there were only a couple of patrolmen stationed in Gila Bend. Their area went from Gila Bend north to 51st Avenue and Buckeye Road in Phoenix which was US-80, along SR-84 east to Casa Grande, west to the Yuma county line and south on SR-85 to the Mexico border. There was only one patrolman on duty at any given time. He might go to work in the morning and not be home for several days. I wonder if they had overtime back then.

When officer Norman Cole wasn’t working, he liked to come over to our house to watch TV. As I remember you could barely see the picture through the interference that people called snow even though we had a forty foot antenna on the roof. During the summer storms, the wind would turn the antenna and my brother would always send me up on the roof to turn the antenna towards Channel 5 on South Mountain so we could get better reception. I could never figure why I had to turn the antenna north to hit South Mountain. Norman came over one evening to watch TV and there was a monsoon storm raging. Sure enough, I had to go up on the roof. Here I am in a lightning storm holding on to a metal pole and antenna trying to turn the thing towards South Mountain. I’d watch the lightning as I turned the antenna. The static electricity in the air caused the hair on my arms to stand straight up and I believe I was the first person in Gila Bend to have an Afro. As I turned the antenna I watched St Elmo’s Fire dance down the guy wires into the ground. I’d holler down, N-N-Norman is the p-p-picture clear yet? Of course it never was. After awhile I’d get it as close to good as I could and I got to come down, For the rest of the evening my hair would stand on end, my eyes as big as saucers and I would stutter every time I tried to talk. I’d ask Norman, N-N-Norman how do you like the p-p-picture? To this day, I’m afraid to change a light bulb.

I can only remember one somber Christmas in my entire life. That was in 1958. I was awakened early on the morning of December 22nd 1958 by the voices of my parents coming from the kitchen. I walked into the kitchen and by the looks on my parent’s faces, I knew something was wrong. They told me that Officer Louie Cochran, who was stationed in Yuma had been killed in a traffic accident. (Louie was the first Arizona Highway Patrolman to be killed in the line of duty). His vehicle had been rear ended by a drunk driver and the vehicle caught on fire. They couldn’t get Louie out and he burned to death. (Ironically, he was driving a Ford). I had only met Louie a few times, but he was a Highway Patrolman, a hero, and I felt the loss! Highway Patrolmen didn’t die! Christmas came and went and my parents did all they could to make it a happy one but there was still a sense of loss, a feeling I would later feel too many times during my career with the department.

Other than that one incident, all my memories of patrolmen were happy ones. There was Jim Phillips who bought Fleer Double Bubble Gum by the box and always stopped by the house and gave us gum. But I think he really stopped by top see my sister. (They were later married). There was Norm Jackson, along with Dick Shafer and Ken Forgia who always had time to pay attention to a young kid who admired them. And as I got older, they were around to make sure I stayed out of trouble. Just the threat of them telling dad about something I did wrong was enough!

One day a friend and I threw methane blue into the Gila Bend canal. The science teacher was cleaning out the storeroom at school and came across a large bottle of blue powder called methane blue which was a medical dye. He told us to take it out in the desert to bury it. Well, we had a better idea. We poured it into the canal. It turned that dirty brown water into the prettiest blue you have ever seen. Problem was, it was used to water the lettuce fields west of Gila Bend and ruined acres of lettuce. Sure was pretty lettuce though. Gila Bend didn’t have a police department so I knew if we were reported one of the patrolmen would be the one to arrest me. For weeks I bypassed the patrolmen’s houses and watched my dad closely for any signs that he might have heard of the incident. Every time I saw a patrolman talking to dad I feared the worst. But we must have not been seen. No report was ever filed and I quit being scared every time I saw a patrolman walking up to the house.

Just about the time I left Gila Bend to join the Navy, J.R. Ham and Ed Rebel moved into the state yard. (Ed was later shot and killed during a traffic stop on I-10 near Marana in 1988) They were later followed by Ralph Shartzer. Not many people know this but Ralph is the reason Arizona does not go on daylight savings time. Ralph had the prettiest yard in Gila Bend. His lawn was lush and he had flowers that others could just dream of. Walking into his yard was like walking into a florist shop. So, when the state legislature was contemplating the daylight savings issue, Ralph lobbied hard against it. He was at the capitol on every day off and any other spare time that he had. Ralph won, and Arizona has never had daylight savings. Ralph’s reason for fighting daylight savings? He said that the extra heat and daylight would be too hard on his plants!

And the heat! Gila Bend is known for its heat. We used to be fascinated by the stick lizards that lived there. They would wrap their tails around a stick and carry it everywhere they went. They would run across the desert and when their feet started burning, they would jab the stick into the ground and climb up on it to cool their feet before they started out again. As kids, we never wore shoes, so we learned the lesson of the stick lizard. We would carry a towel or a piece of cardboard and run till we couldn’t stand the heat, then throw down the towel or cardboard and jump on it to cool our feet. This worked OK until we ran through a sticker patch. Then we hoped that the cardboard or towel would be big enough and thick enough to sit on while we pulled stickers out of your feet. To this day, I don’t know why we just didn’t wear shoes.

As you age, you don’t take the heat as well. In fact one day I was driving down to Gila Bend to visit relatives and I saw Officer Kim Cline make a felony stop on a vehicle and begin a foot pursuit across the desert after the guy. It was so hot, that they were both walking!

Talking about Kim Cline, I never did see the monster that he and officer Johnny Villaneda saw near Ajo. Kim recently wrote about the monster in an AHPA magazine article. I spent 17 years in Gila Bend and the desert around there. As a Boy Scout, I camped all over that area and never once saw the monster. I did however see a side hill gadger once. But that’s another story!

Gila Bend almost caused me to be AWOL once. I was home on leave from the Marine Corps Base at 29 Palms. Yep, a swabbie stationed at a Marine Corps base! When I signed up, I didn’t know that the Navy provided hospital corpsmen to the Marine Corps, and even if they did, they wouldn’t send a guy who had lived in the desert all of his life to a Marine Corps base in the middle of the desert. Would they? They did! Anyway, when my leave was up I had a friend take me to the bus depot so I could head back. But I had forgotten that because of Ralph, Arizona wasn’t on daylight savings time. The bus was! I was going to be AWOL! I figured that it would be a long trip back to 29 Palms, so I went back home to stock up on food and gedunk. They don’t have gedunk in the brig! And to make matters worse, I wouldn’t be in a Navy brig. I was stationed with the Marine Corps, so I would be in a Marine brig. A sailor in a Marine brig! Too terrible to think about! I said goodbye to my family again and headed for the Interstate to start hitchhiking when I saw a patrol car coming up the road to the house. It was Lt. Chick Lawwill, the district commander in Yuma. After hearing my plight, he told me that it was no problem at all and told me to get in the patrol car. Chick took me to Yuma and on the way had the dispatcher make a phone call. When we got to Yuma, Chick drove straight to the Marine Corps Base and the Provost Marshall’s office. After he visited with a few Marines that he knew, he told me everything was set for me to fly to 29 Palms the next morning and get there in time so that I would not be AWOL. A Marine took me to the chow hall and then to the barracks for the night. The next morning a Marine picked me up and took me the chow hall for breakfast and then to the flight line. The scariest part was the only people on the plane would be two Marine Lt. Colonels and me, a lowly E-3 swabbie. But I got to 29 Palms with time to spare and didn’t have to face the Marine brig! Did Lt. Chick Lawwill have some kind of power or what?

Chick told me many years later that at times he would stop by the house on the way to Yuma around dinner time and dad would invite him in for supper. He always declined he said because he knew that as a state employee, dad didn’t make much money and there were eight of us kids. He felt that he would be taking food away from us. It seemed to me we always had enough to eat but there was one rule that had to be obeyed. It was necessary with 10 people sitting around the dinner table! It was bad manners we were told to take the last piece of meat off the platter. I remember one night it was storming out and we were all sitting around the table eating and eyeballing that last piece of meat. All of a sudden there was a clap of thunder and a bright flash of lightning and the electricity went out leaving everyone in total darkness. When the lights came back on, I had nine forks sticking in the back of my hand. Maybe that’s what Chick was really worried about!

When a new sergeant was needed in Gila Bend, Sergeant Russ Dunham, in a moment of weakness, volunteered. Russ turned out to be one of the local’s favorite patrolmen. Russ loved Gila Bend and in fact built a home and retired there. People on the department liked Russ also, but they didn’t like Gila Bend, so the only time they visited Russ was when he had to go to Phoenix. Russ said that the only time he ever saw other people from the department in Gila Bend was when they were coming out of the bathroom at the Gila Bend office. They never stopped by to visit him, he said, just to use the bathroom. He always knew when something big was going on in Yuma. He would spend more time than normal keeping the toilet unplugged.

Most people think of Gila Bend and think negative things. But look at the good things that came out of Gila Bend. Officer Ernie Hernandez wrote and recorded Gila Bend Blues while stationed there. I was born there. When I was there it was a thriving, bustling town. Then I left in 1962 and the town died and became what it is that you see today. Some people claim that the freeway bypassing Gila Bend caused this. But why did it happen just after I left?

And there were other good things to come out of Gila Bend. A lot of people don’t know that many of our brass started as officers in Gila Bend or lived in Gila Bend prior to coming on the department. People like Inspector Ed Shartzer, Capt. Jim Phillips, Lt. Col Dick Shafer, Lt. Col Ken Forgia, Lt. Dave McDowell, Capt. Doug Kluender and Director Rick Ayars. Well, ok. Maybe the good things to come out of Gila Bend are just me and The Gila Bend Blues.

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Chapter Two

Missing

The winter storm of 1967 which paralyzed northern Arizona had everyone busy. Officers were manning roadblocks or they were in snow cats on search missions looking for stranded people. I was with Sgt. Bob Harvey one day and we took a break and went to the El Rancho café in Holbrook for lunch and someplace to get in out of the cold. A few hours earlier someone had commandeered a road grader left alongside SR-77 north of Holbrook and plowed a path through the snow allowing stranded Indian families to get into town. It seems they all went to the El Rancho. When we entered, the lobby was full. Bob saw a small Indian boy about eight years old and asked, You’re Johnny Yellowhair’s son aren’t you? The bashful boy nodded and shyly looked down as Bob talked to his mom asking about the family. He then turned to another Indian couple calling them by