Gaye LeBaron: Police tales show a different Santa Rosa

It is almost “other-worldly” to read Rodney “Smokey” Sverko’s memoir of his 40 years in the Santa Rosa Police Department. The way things were when he began his career in law enforcement were … well, consider the matter of the hat in the street.

Without today’s mobile communications system, the officers of the early 1960s, once out of their patrol car, were strictly on their own.

If a cop got into difficulties and could not get to one of only three call boxes scattered through the downtown - perhaps chasing a fleeing purse-snatcher or holding a liquor store robber at gunpoint or maybe worse - “We were trained to throw our cap into the street,” writes Sverko, “and hope that one of the two Yellow Cab drivers in the city would see it and call the station.”

Or, consider this: “When I first joined the force, there was one homeless person in Santa Rosa. She slept in doorways on lower Fourth Street. We named her ‘greycoat.’”

While this Utopian statistic can be modified by the number of small, cheap, upstairs rooms, many of them over the 30-plus bars between E Street and the railroad tracks in pre-Urban Renewal days, it is nonetheless startling by current standards.

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Sverko’s recollections are so much more than simple nostalgia. They are about the rate at which change occurs. One must watch over a single town through the years, as Sverko has, to understand how quickly it happens.

In this age when everything is questioned and nothing is trustworthy, where the newspapers and airways and social media are filled with reports of officer-involved shootings and demonstrations about whose life matters, it’s bittersweet to read the recollections of “old cops” like Sverko, who will tell you that not since the invention of the automobile has his chosen profession seen such upheaval.

A star student in SRJC’s first Administration of Justice program, mentored by its founder, Stan Anderson, Sverko went to work for the legendary Dutch Flohr but only after he heeded the chief’s instructions to “Join the military, get some whiskers and come back and I’ll give you a job.”

In 1963, after a three-year hitch in the Army, an oral board interview where he was advised to forget everything he learned in college, keep his weapon in his pocket and “stay out of bars, both on or off duty,” he was hired, and sent off to Oakland to “buy one complete uniform and charge it to the City of Santa Rosa.” He was issued a badge. He already had a gun. His salary was $426 a month.

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Santa Rosa police stories always begin with Chief Flohr. He was something akin to “The Law West of the Pecos.”

His name was Melvin but everyone called him Dutch. A star athlete at Petaluma High School and Santa Clara University, he became chief of police in 1940. He had spent six years as a deputy sheriff and a year as Healdsburg’s chief. In his 34 years as head of the Santa Rosa force, it was always clear that this was Dutch’s town. He had been charged with its care. And he expected no less careful attention from his officers.

Sverko writes that each of his promotions under Dutch - to sergeant in 1968 and to lieutenant in ’73 - occasioned a trip in the chief’s car to a spot on Alta Vista that overlooked much of the city. Both times, Sverko was instructed to take a good look. And the message was the same “See that city? You damn well better take care of it.”

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A couple of decades ago, I had the good fortune to sit down with former cops from the ’40s and ’50s, the generation before Sverko. There was lots of talk about Dutch. “Sidewalk justice” was the term they used to describe his methods. Drunks were taken home. Kids out too late, having too much fun, sat in the station until their fathers came for them. Transients were told: “Petaluma is south, Healdsburg is north. Take your pick and here’s your bus ticket.”

Dutch had his rules and he expected them to be followed. He didn’t like dark glasses. He wanted his officers to look people in the eye. “Let ’em see your eyes,” he told the men (In those years in the department there was just one woman, a juvenile officer named Nancy Smith.)

Of course, as the world turned, Dutch’s paternalism hit an occasional bump with the new awareness of civil liberties. He was pretty sure the town’s first coffeehouse (with dim lights and guitar music) and/or the counterculture book store that was the first to sell the newly legal “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” and “Tropic of Cancer” were dens of inequity.

But, for the most part, Santa Rosans of the time remember Dutch for showing up in full uniform to lead the Recreation Department’s annual Pet & Doll Parade, or filling his war-surplus jeep with toys donated by the department stores, parking it in South Park and watching kids come running from all directions.

His officers all remembered, as does Sverko, the department’s New Year’s Eve tradition. Dutch, with all his men on duty all night, would call the cars in, two or three at a time, to come to his home. There his wife, Wilma, a respected (revered, even) teacher at St. Rose School, would serve them ham and eggs in the dining room, with white linen and candles.

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The men I interviewed in the ’90s were Lee Gleason, George Scinto, Karl Meister and Walt Gesek.

Three of them fired their weapons only once in the line of duty - into the ground and over the head and into the trunk of a robber’s car. Two of the three targets gave up. No one was injured.

The fourth, Gleason, said, “I had my weapon out once, and the guys gave up.”

Gleason was the one with the marijuana story. “I took a marijuana cigarette (not “reefer” or “joint” - very formal) off a transient,” he said,” and … Dutch and I got to thinking about it so we took some of the seeds to Tony Campiglia at The Flower Shop – you know, there on Santa Rosa Avenue, across from Cohen’s junk yard. We asked him to plant the seeds, to grow us a couple of marijuana plants.

“When they were five or six inches high, I took them to a meeting of the Sonoma County Peace Officers Association and passed them around so the fellows would recognize marijuana when they saw it growing. They’d never seen it.”

Night patrols were always adventures. The men knew how to walk an alley. “There were tricks,” Gleason told me, “If you went into an alley and the rats weren’t running and the cats weren’t coming out of the garbage cans, you knew someone else was in there.

Mainly, the men looked for burglaries in progress. Business owners were asked to leave a “safety light” on and the blinds open. If the shades were down, it usually meant that a safecracker was at work.

Two classic tales from the night patrol: The owner of a bar on lower Fourth Street called the Sport Club called police at 2 a.m. to ask for help getting a patron to go home, so he could lock up.

When the officers arrived they found the man seated on a stool, elbows on the bar, chin on his hands. He was dead.

“The guy was cement,” recalled Meister, “Solid as a rock. He’d been dead for hours.” The stunned bartender could only talk about the people who had sat on either side of him, off and on, through the night.

If Santa Rosa, in those years, didn’t have homeless people, it certainly had its “bon vivants,” men who enjoyed the bar society, many of them respected members of the community.

One of these, a well-known businessman, was out on the town when he ran out of cash. He went to his store, opened the safe, took out some bills and slammed the safe closed - on his necktie. Up close to the knot.

In the early hours, after the bars had closed, the night patrolman, making his rounds, saw a light that seemed too bright and checked. He found the man pressed to the front of the safe unable to move, found some scissors and cut off the necktie. Some lives are easy to save.

I’m sure that today’s cops have stories that we could laugh at, but they may not be told for years, if ever, in this climate of social mistrust.

Sverko stories may raise our eyebrows but they don’t surprise us - except when we consider how quickly everything changed.

His memories of the first drug bust, the first signs of gang activity, the first anti-war protest - they all seem like ancient history. But it’s been no more than a single lifetime.