TALE OF TWO COPS

My father.

My family of origin had its share of policemen. My father and my uncle, married to my mother's kid sister, were on the same police force, our city's police department. They were both WWII vets of about the same age. My father had fired artillery across Europe after landing in France on D-Day. My uncle had been a US Marine fighting Japanese across the islands of the Pacific. 

Both men were well-adjusted survivors of the horrors of full-scale war and the Great Depression before that. My father had come from desperate poverty. He was raised in a cold-water flat with a ceiling that rained inside when it rained outside. My uncle's family were middle-class Irish, who owned an old Victorian house, converted into two apartments. 

My home city, now a sanctuary city, was a tough place during their careers as policemen. There were oil docks at one end of the city, where rough merchant sailors had brawls in dank taverns. The core of the city had been leveled by a nationally renowned fire in 1908. Decent housing and small businesses were replaced by junk yards and flimsy tenements, rental units for a succession of immigrant waves of unskilled workers. 

My father joined the police force after a major strike put him out of work at General Electric. He often reflected years later that he might have been better off climbing the corporate ladder. His first police job was an assignment to the night shift on the waterfront. As a beat cop, he had nothing but a night stick to defend himself during the many bar brawls he broke up. He walked his beat alone. If he was injured or overwhelmed, he had to extricate himself and stumble to the nearest street-corner call box to seek help. The likelihood of any relief from that course of action was minimal. He learned to win a fight and break up a brawl. 

My uncle's choice of police work was more direct. He had gone to school in our city, unlike my father who came from the city next to ours originally. My uncle knew people in the police department right away and got day shifts as a rookie. His Irish family had connections in the city government. He had been a golden boy, a football star, in high school. 

The two men climbed through the ranks in parallel. Their lives gradually reflected the prosperity of the 1950's as they gained promotions, based on exam grades. My father stayed on night shifts for years so he could build us our family home largely on his own during his days: An 8-room Cape-Cod style house on a lot once occupied by an old Victorian that burned down. I still marvel at his ambition and perseverance against great odds. 

My uncle had a different life. He and my aunt lived in his family's Victorian after they were married. They were able to save money to purchase a relatively new home across the street from the one my father had built. Our street was in a relatively safe and quiet part of the otherwise congested and run-down city. Politicians, policemen and firemen lived on every street around us. 

Which cop would you guess to be more liable to be corrupted? 

My father was a Roman Catholic who had not had a Catholic education, unlike my uncle who had attended Catholic primary school in the same parish where my parents worshiped long after my uncle stopped attending mass. My father's father had been the caretaker of his childhood parish church. The Catholicism of their home was one of daily ethical practice and discussion. My father never lost that habit.

My uncle, who worked as a detective, eventually became a bag man with a local crime syndicate. His job entailed smoothing things over when the gangsters, his pals, ran into trouble. There was the distribution of money to policemen and politicians for looking the other way. My uncle traveled to Las Vegas and Europe first class with his gangster friends. My mother's sister, his wife, became a lonely alcoholic and died young of cancer.  He eventually took early retirement after a major Federal bust of the syndicates in my city. He enjoyed a decade or so of comfortable retirement. He met a new woman who became his companion. 

My father volunteered for child protection work as a new detective. His job was prevention of child neglect and domestic abuse. And he was relentless. He had more prosecutions than had ever been seen previously in the city. He eventually took charge of an anti-street-gang unit. He was asked to run Civil Defense during the Cuban-missile era. He went back to detective work after a year. He disliked the politics in City Hall. He retired at nearly 70. He was the department's FBI liaison at the time. When my father retired, he took my mother to Europe, where he drove her around the whole continent in a rental car. They went to Ireland. They traveled across Russia after the Cold War ended. 

My uncle was a soft-spoken man. He seemed shy in groups, but I knew he was always observing. He was never unkind to me, though I did hardly see him despite his living across the street. He was out playing cards or traveling with his gangster pals quite a bit. His only son, my cousin, was my age and was gay. He spent much of his youth caring for his mother in secret. None of us realized that she was often black-out drunk when he arrived home from school. My cousin died a lonely alcoholic in a boarding house. Nobody knew he had died until years after he was dead and buried in a potters' field in a distant town.

My father was congenial, witty and never swore. People liked him. I remember him jamming the brakes on the car once when I was a little boy. He jumped from the car in our city's Broadway. He returned soon with a huge hulk of a man who squeezed onto the bench seat of the car. They chatted over my head amiably all the way to the police station, where I was entertained for some time by several men in uniform who were playing cards. I later found out that our passenger was an escaped felon whom my father had placed in Walpole Prison years earlier. I thought he was one of my father's close friends.

Two cops. Two lives lived in parallel. Both men enjoyed their lives after WWII until they became old men. My uncle died in the night mercifully of a major heart attack without being chronically ill. My father became severely depressed after his aging eyesight began to threaten his ability to drive. He could not face of life of not doing for my mother and being a burden, as he saw it. He died of a fractured skull after falling out of bed in 2003. 

I hope this story dispels any notion the reader may have of Divine Justice. We live in a time of trivialized morality and ignored ethics. Police officers are now not only male, not only Caucasian, not only heterosexual, etc.. Too often they are targets of projected outrage over an American urban culture verging on decline.  They are despised for trying to contain crime for the common good. They are despised for being human under fire or physical assault. They are expected to revive comatose heroin addicts and to treat obnoxious drunks with respect. They do the job which most of us would never want to do. 

My father and my uncle made the choices they made. My father's funeral was attended by hundreds of people, most of whom went out of their way to voice their appreciation of him as a human being. My uncle's funeral was a quieter affair. But in the end, it does not matter. What mattered to each of them was different. What each contributed or took from society was different. I am pleased to have lived long enough to realize that my father and I have made similar choices in an attempt to make the world a little better while we are in it. Perhaps that is as good as it gets.