A former beat partner of mine passed away this week, at the age of 64. He was only a brief bit of time older than me.
He retired roughly seven years ago or so. He became a Sergeant and worked Patrol as a supervisor for a number of years. He gained his stripes prior to me.
Before that, he was a helicopter pilot for the US Army following Vietnam and he also flew helos for the department, to include the Hughes 300 and the Hughes 500. Two completely different crafts. And he was a damned good pilot. Safe and sane. Measured and calculating. He didn’t take chances. He respected the air and the machine.
I can clearly remember he told me this one day: he left Aero because he realized his time was running out. He had pushed the life span envelope sufficiently that he believed he was only a minute or two from a really stunning and impressive conflagration and crash. So he left helos.
We worked District 4 together and for roughly three years. It was one of the finest times of my life. I smile just thinking about Ken and me and Gene and Steve and Jerry and Steve and Dave.
I became an RTO, then an FTO, and transferred to Detectives. In the meantime, Ken stayed in Patrol and then passed the exam for Sergeant.
All through that, Ken had a demon: alcohol. His demon was large and weighed numerous hundreds of pounds. And he was given chances to overcome that demon — that he never quite surpassed. Administratively.
Ken was a massively likeable guy; no one ever refuted that. But his drinking began to affect his work life and his personal life. Concurrently, his wife Char — a radio dispatcher for the department — contracted breast cancer (which she beat) — and now is suffering from bone cancer. And the passage of her husband. I understand her predicament.
Ken was a great guy. His wife Char was also a wonderful woman and supported Ken every chance she got. I supervised her in Communications when I was a Newbie Sergeant. She made my life much easier than it could have been — whilst, simultaneously, the other dispatchers and call-takers made my life a massive and throbbing blastocyst of living Hell. The life of a Comm Sergeant back then was a thing of distaste and hopelessness. Char helped me out. I should have told her that. But I never did.
Char, I’m telling you here: I appreciate you more now than you’ll likely ever know.
Ken and I meshed because we were both verbose and we were intelligent, and had a great time in Patrol, often at the expense of the various mouth-breathers we encountered.. He was roughly my size — a little less bulky — and we both knew we wouldn’t win fights if we were pugilistic every day on every call. We had to be smarter and more cunning and more insightful. In summation, we had to be manipulative via our brains and not our guns or our batons or our OC or our physical strength. Because that’s what we had available to us in Patrol, and nothing more.
Oh yes; and a radio.
At the time, I worked out with weights and was benching 300 pounds. I had and have always had an issue with avoirdupois. In Patrol, I was slim and nasty and what Joe Wambaugh would describe as a Street Monster. But Ken was slimmer and more svelte and quicker and the asshole always made me look like an ignorant rock.
Fuck you, Ken. Bastard.
One day we decided to shave off our moustaches. I had, up to that point, possessed a moustache since I was 17. He had just turned 40 (slightly ahead of me, thank God!) and challenged me during his birthday party. He would shave off his moustache if I would shave off mine. I bought the premise. So did he. We both admitted later that we had made a huge mistake. I felt as naked as the day I was born. He did too.
That was the only time in my life that I’d been without a moustache. And only Ken could have gotten me to do that.
I repeat at the risk of being repetitive: bastard.
Now I have to tell you this story.
One afternoon, we got a call of a burglary alarm at a dentist’s office near Marconi and Walnut, on the west side of Walnut. We both arrived simultaneously. He took the back and I took the front. We were the only two units available for the call though — now — such a call would demand three or four or more units.
A bit of background: a burglary alarm call in the morning, on day shift, would be expected. Every department pisses away valuable Patrol resources on alarm calls every morning — usually activated by people going to work and messing up the alarm codes.
However, on Swing Shift — the 1500 to 0100 hrs shift — a burglary or robbery alarm call took on an entirely different meaning altogether. They were customarily valid. Especially on weekends.
Trust me: I was lucky to have Ken.
And we were the only two guys available for the county in that district at the time. And we both knew: this could be some entirely crafty and amusing shit.
An amazingly-techno thing — then — was to have a singular earplug running from your portable to your ear. You could be sneaky. You could hear things the citizens couldn’t hear. So I sneaked up to a series of doors in this business complex. Ken was in back. He peeked around corners. He told me there was a guy actually inside, and he was moving towards a specific door. Ken counted the doors from the west and said: that’s where the guy was. He’s moving towards the front doors. That door in particular. Thanks buddy.
I moved to that specific door and waited. I pulled out my baton and braced it horizontally against the door to a dentist’s office. And then, shock of shocks! The door opened an inch!
Once slightly open, I rammed my full (then) 210 pounds against the door and stunned the living shit out of one surprised burglar, knocking him across the dentist’s lobby. A set of handcuffs later, we both had an active arrest from a crime in progress. We were happy little District 4 units.
But as happens with Real Life, we moved away from each other. In 2004, however, after I’d lost 84 pounds, my soon-to-be-wife and I attended a DSA Christmas party in a tuxedo and gown. Ken and Char were both there in same. And that is how I’d care to remember them.
Beautiful and wonderful and mature and stunning in their love for each other.
Ken is laughing and the Christmas tree at that party is resplendent in its trimmings. Char holds onto Ken because she loves him so.
We were grand. We were younger.
I miss Ken already.
BZ
