February 2011 Shield Back in the Day
Recently on the retiree Yahoo group site, there has been a bunch of talk about characters that were a daily part of the lives of Dallas police in the sixties and beyond.
One guy was well known to many. If you called him Mr. Cunningham, you would do okay. But if you were say a rookie, and made the mistake of calling him “Alley Oop” or just “Oop,” well watch out! It seems that he was a prize fighter back in his salad days, and was still in good shape when I remember him as late as 2001 or so. The really strange thing was that he actually drank gasoline. Sometimes you might see him trying to pour that last drop of gas from a closed stations gas hose. He used a milk container to collect the gas.
But again, if you made the mistake of not calling him Mr. Cunningham, you might have a fight on your hands. He mostly hung around Central division.
Sadly, I heard that this Central hall of famer died a few years ago. I would be interested in hearing what he died of. Obviously his diet of petroleum didn’t do him in.
Other divisions had their own type of strange folks, but Central claimed “Oop” as ours!
Police work is all about good guys, bad guys, and “exceptional” people as they were once called. Being “exceptional” was a code for just about any weird person an officer would run into out on the streets. I wonder if the DPD still uses that term?
We of course used to encounter folks acting crazy as DPD officers do today. That’s police work. I would tend to ask the guy, “Are you just crazy or just drunk?” Nine times out of ten they would say crazy. Most were a little of both.
There was a writer for the Dallas Morning News in the 1940’s named Ken Hand. His column was called “Last Night on the Police Beat.”
I’ve read some of his work and it’s always interesting and sometimes amusing. These were not the stories of a serious nature for the most part, but the day to day activities that showed being a police officer was one of the most interesting professions that one could and can do.
I’d like to know where Mr. Hand got his stories. Did he hang around 106 like another newspaperman I remember from the late 1970’s? This particular guy that I remember wore a suit, and always had on the Stetson style western hat that the detectives wore in those days. As a young rookie, I thought he was a police officer. He seemed to be trusted by the plain clothes officers at 106, since if he wasn’t, he wouldn’t be hanging around for long.
We all should remember Chief Carl Hansson. He was the longest serving police chief in Dallas. He served from the 1940’s until Chief Curry in the early sixties. He also created our badge numbering system that we have today. I’m not sure this is correct, but I read on a retirees post that Chief Hansson didn’t get along with legendary Homicide Captain Will Fritz. It might have had to with the status and popularity of Captain Fritz. I’d like to know from someone out there if this was true.
I found a story from the DMN from 1941 when Chief Hansson was a sergeant. A woman that lived at 3600 San Jacinto called the police late one night because she thought a burglar was in her house. Officers E.D. Jordan and J.C.Sanders arrived to investigate. Sergeant Hansson also showed up and with guns drawn the three intrepid men searched the house. They burst into the room that all the banging was coming from and found the family cat with a sardine can which the animal couldn’t extricate himself or herself from. Sergeant Hansson was taken to the Emergency Hospital with some evil looking scratches from the attacking cat. The officers were apparently amused and unhurt. Okay, what’s wrong with this picture?
The cat was taken to the fire station at Ross and Leonard where tin snips were used to free the cat from the can. Okay you can breathe now.
One night in January 1941 Officer A.N. Boggs was basically making a nuisance of himself by continually asking the dispatcher to “Go ahead.” The dispatcher was getting more and more disgusted with the officer which as we all know is not a good thing, especially when you want to check out to eat. Finally, for the sixteenth time, the dispatcher asked Boggs “What do you want?” Boggs answered that he thought that the dispatcher was calling him! Later it was heard “Houston squad 71 go ahead.” They were hearing the Houston police department all along. Funny, I remember hearing Houston from time to time myself on the DPD police radio.
As we’ve seen in this column before, the DPD lost a lot of officers just before and during WWII. The motorcycle unit was done away with only a few bikes left still in service for escorts, funerals and the like. Lt. A.N. Vittrup had to explain once again to patrol officers that they could not wear bow ties in place of the regular straight ties that officers wore. He said “I’ve seen some bow ties lately. Let me caution you that they are not regulation. Bow ties have been abandoned except for motorcycle men. And motorcycles have been abandoned.”
I know the way motor jocks think, and I’ll bet that the ex jockeys in the detail room did not want to give up their bow ties even if they now found themselves in Patrol.
Ken Hand was a sort of self styled comedian. Or he thought he was! On January 1st 1941 he gave out his New Years greetings;
“A Happy Happy Arbor Day to the firm of Welch, Walsh, Rader, Fritz & Company.” Of course he was speaking of Chief J.M.Welch, Assistant Chief Douglas Walsh, and Inspectors Charles Rader and Will Fritz.
To the readers of this column-all three-a glorious Fourth of July. To the City Editor, a happy Whitsuntide. To Simon Legree, the night City Editor, a sprig of parsnips.
As we know, even kind of funny newspaper writers are a thing of the past.
W.H.Croom, II #3973
Dallas Police Retired
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