THE HOARDER'S WAREHOUSE

  In the Industrial Park, near Domestic Ave, I found a treasure trove. Looking for a warehouse for the Sheriff's Office, I  stumbled on the building by chance, noticing the doors open and a car parked outside a seemingly vacant property. Being a cop, I was nosey.

  The warehouse belonged to an old gent that'd passed on and his family, living up North, was disposing of his property. When their agent opened it, however, their plans required a drastic re-evaluation. Inside were stored over 50 automobiles, none newer than about 1950. The vehicles, covered with an inch of dust, ranged from a Studebaker Champion to a Duesenberg luxury sedan. The family, before this discovery, had no idea what Grandpa had squirreled away in the building. They knew he was eccentric, but, hell at that age who isn't?

  The cars weren't all. A large office area was full of his other collections. He had stacks of old comic books. Newspapers. The prizes that were given in cereals and Cracker Jacks. Toys in unopened boxes. Hundreds of plastic models, none opened or assembled. All this stuff piled so densely that you had to turn sideways and scoot through to trans-navigate the room.

  I was told later that the family sold the whole works, sight unseen, to another collector for $100 K. Talk about bargains. You could almost hear the old hoarder spinning in his grave.

  Oh, yeah. There was one other vehicle, sitting off to the side: a 1948 GMC pickup truck that had been owned by just one family since it was new. Being a pack rat of sorts myself, I bought that one for $1200 and drove it home.

EXPERT ADVICE

  Local governments love to hire consultants. At a staggering cost every year. Why? So when they want something they think the voters may not like they can blame it on the consultants. We're just doing what the experts recommend. Right!

  Don't get me wrong, there are legitimate and needed consultants. We're talking about the ones who make a living recommending what the folks that hire them want. I worked with enough to know the difference.

  The slick ones come to you and sniff around until they know what you're after. The blatant ones, don't waste time and, up front, ask what you want them to prove. It's a disgusting waste of tax dollars perpetrated by spineless politicians.

  Once the City hired consultants to recommend changes in how we did things, intent on making the agency more efficient. Might have been a good idea if they hadn't hired dopes. For their 10K fee--a lot in the sixties--their final recommendation was to put men on the beach riding ATV's; a recommendation the City dropped in the trash can immediately.

  And, some of their surveyors were suspect. Let Mike Grimm tell of his interview with one. The expert was using the Chief's office.

  "When I got sent in there to be interviewed, he talked to me for a bit, enough that I could see he was in way over his head. Then he wanted to playact a hypothetical situation. 

  "He told me to go out in the hall and casually stroll through the door as if I were window shopping on the street. He would be a bad guy running out of the bank, with a bank money bag, right in front of me. He wanted me to react as if it were the real deal. 

  "So we did it, he bumped into me, I shoved him away, pretended to pull my piece and told him to freeze. He wasn't happy. I was supposed to be off duty, he said, and not carrying. 

  "He said we had to do it over and he was going to act like a real bad guy so I'd better act like I would if it were for real. I mumbled something about not wanting to hurt him and he took exception to it, saying I'd better worry first, about not getting hurt myself.

  "So we did it again. I walked in through the door and he ran into me, hard. Kinda surprised me and I grabbed him, as much to keep my balance as anything. He started yelling and tried to twist away from me so I jacked his ass up and slammed him into a corner, immobilizing him. Then I stopped and he wanted to know what I would do next. I told him that in a real situation I'd put the cuffs on him. He told me to just try it and immediately started yelling again and thrashing around trying to get loose so I bent him over a two-drawer file cabinet and put the cuffs on him-- with just a little extra squeeze to try and get the point across. 

  "That was about the time you and someone else came busting into the room to see what was going on. Apparently he hadn't done this with any of the guys he had interviewed before me and it was a big surprise.

 "As I recall, he didn't try it with anyone he interviewed after me either.  He was one weird dude."

  And an inept, stupid one. Mike was well over six-feet and 200 lbs. I remember when we rushed into the room, the expert was red-faced and gasping, his clothes disheveled, and his hair as mussed as a punk rocker's. Don't know what he was expecting but it sure wasn't Mike Grimm.

COUNCIL COMEDY

    The City Council always attracts a strange variety of ducks. Some mere puppets, hand selected by the rich folks to do their bidding, their autonomy limited to asking for privy breaks and seconding motions to adjourn. Some are pure nitwits. Others you can equate to self-ordained ministers who have heard the “call” and decide they are just what the voters need. Then there're the opportunists intent on lining their wallets by selling out to developers or whomever.

 Fortunately, for the community, most are good, decent, folks who legitimately want to accomplish what we really need. And they've done a pretty good job. Just look around Naples.

  But, it's the nitwits you remember most. One, who I’ll call Erhard Gerbil was the champion numskull. I was summoned to a budget workshop to defend the number of vehicles in the proposed budget. If memory serves, we probably didn’t have more than a dozen at the time. Erhard had decided that since we policed such a small area--about sixteen-square-miles--we could get by just as well on alternative forms of transportation. Once, Gerbil had asked why we didn't pedal our way to calls on bicycles and I'd explained why. This prompted my book, I'm Peddlin' As Fast As I Can.

  We were familiar with the budget workshop process. Every year, or at least when the new Council members came aboard, we had to educate them and answer the same questions. Some incredible! A couple of examples:

  "If your Uniform Officers could stop all the crime, couldn't we fire all the Detectives?" This idiotic question didn't require an answer. Anyone who'd ask it, couldn't comprehend why. And,

  "If you only run three shifts--days, evenings, and nights--why do you have to hire more than three officers?"

  And it was always difficult to explain to these dopes that some officers didn't want to work 365 days a year, and needed sick time, vacations, training, and stuff.

 None, however, could surpass Gerbil for blatant stupidity. He sat with his peers, at the semi-circular Council table, shuffling through a ponderous stack of papers. A slight, sixitish man, he had the scrubbed-pink complexion of a pampered infant. For attire, he favored Naples haute couture, the riotous pinks, greens, yellows and plaids of the golfing set.  

  Poor 'ol Gerbil had caught a dog fish in the gene pool, cursed with the Who cut the cheese? grimace of a restroom attendant in a Mexican restaurant.  His pained countenance, was in marked incongruity with his vivid and raffish attire. Indeed, stripped of his fine feathers, Gerbil could’ve resided in a Dickens novel, perched high on a stool at a clerk’s desk, green eyeshade shadowing pinch-nez glasses, quill pen meticulously inscribing precise numerals in a moldy ledger.

  This time it wasn't bicycles. "I’ve done some more research and maybe bicycles aren’t the best way to get this exploding police fleet under control. Are you familiar with the New York City motor scooter program?"

  I told him I was. "Yes, Sir. They're using Vespas, I believe, instead of horses to patrol Central Park."

  "Horses?" he said. I could see from the dreamy look in Erhard’s eyes that I’d made an error. Horses, huh? I could envision us hiring wranglers, buying tons of hay, and getting used to saddle sores. So, I quickly added:

"They don't really like or want the scooters but had to switch to them because of the Hippies. Seems the Hippies, who were causing all the problems, found out that if you applied a lighted cigar to a horse's, er, private parts, the beast immediately lost interest in police work and became totally committed to becoming a bucking bronco."

  A house of laughter caved in on Mr. Gerbil and that was the last we heard of bicycles and Italian motor scooters.

ORDERS IN THE COURT

   Some of our transplanted cops had to deal with culture shock in other ways. Ray Barnett, a graduate of the Pennsylvania State Police Academy and alledged Yankee at the time, found the court system here more than a tad unusual.

  We'll let Ray tell it:  I was testifying about a stop sign violation case and said, "Mr Brown was traveling south on 10th Street and blew the stop sign at 12th Ave No." The Municipal Judge called an immediate recess and called Chief Sam Bass to the court. They took me out in the hallway and said, "we don't talk like that in court."

  My immediate thought was I should have said failed to stop, not blew. Before I could explain, the Judge said, "You never call someone like that, 'Mr.'"

  That meaning Mr Brown was a black man. The Judge and Chief then excused my transgression while I stood there with my mind reeling.
  Never made that mistake again.
 And that was my first impression of the judicial system in Naples. 
  Ray made few mistakes at anything but he did admit to one other. Again, in his words.
  One I'll never forget is when I won a argument with a County Judge. In the dining room at the SO where we took our coffee breaks, the Judge said there was no such charge as drunkeness. I was dumb enough to go get a statue book, bring it into the dining room, and, in front of those in attendance, point it out to him.
 Later that week he had me re-type a search warrant several times before he would sign it. That's when I learned it's not always good to be right. Especially when you're dealing with a super-ego Judge.

ROOFEES

  The Naples Beach has always been a premier attraction. And long before we had shopping centers to attract auto burglars and assorted other thieves, the beach drew them like politicians to a lobbyist's free Caribbean cruise. But, let's face it, because of folk's disregard for security it was an easy way to make a slimy buck. How's that?

  Ladies think if they put their purse on the floor and throw a towel or newspaper over it, the thief will never look there. Wrong, madam!  That's the first place they do look because everyone does that. Of course there're many who are too lazy to even make that futile effort. They leave it in plain view it the seat. At least put the stuff in the trunk!

  But, sometimes, even that didn't work. Then, each automobile manufacturer had just a few key combinations for all their models. We'd commonly catch thieves with an 8" ring of keys--a hundred or so--that would open a majority of American cars. General Motors used very few keys for their entire fleet. Chances were good your Chevy key would open your neighbor's Pontiac.

  All thieves knew that and where to buy the keys sets. They also knew you could buy spare lock cylinders with keys. Using a bent-straight paper clip inserted in the small hole beside the key slot, you could remove that one, insert your own cylinder, and drive off.

  The best thieves didn't even need that stuff. On surveillance films we'd seen thieves approach a car, rock the window down a half-inch, drop through a string with a loop and a fishing weight on it, lift an interior lock button, and they were in. All in less than a minute.

  Some thieves had homemade "Slim Jims" that, when slid between the window and door, opened the lock with just an easy tug on the interior mechanism. Or, there was a Ford model that you could hand-bump on the rear corner of the trunk and the trunk lid would magically open. Thank God all that has improved over the years. Now, if we could just get folks to lock the damn cars.

  We had one cop, Byron Tomlinson, who had magical powers when it came to catching Auto B and E'ers. And everyone else. Byron could look down a beach-end avenue from a block away and catch the buggers in the act. Did it too many times to be explained by pure chance.  The rest of us weren't that gifted.
 Most of the activity took place at the Pier. The angle parking there, allowing the thief to get between two cars and not be seen, made it impossible for even Eagle-Eye Tomlinson to see them. You needed some elevation if you hoped to see anything. So, Mike Grimm, Ray Barnett and I took turns lying on the roof of the Price house, just south of the Pier entrance. The roof was made of copper. Directly in the sun. Even with cardboard, blankets, and camper mattresses, in about thirty-minutes we'd be medium rare--and we never caught a damn one.

  Mike decided to try other roof tops but none had a good view. Finally, he climbed to the roof atop the three-story old Naples Hotel at the end of the avenue leading to the Pier. He was afforded an excellent view--of the palm trees that  lined said street. Nothing else.

  Eventually, I guess we aggravated them enough, and Byron and the other uniformed cops caught enough, that they'd go elsewhere. Most were from out-of-town.

  But, they always returned, like the Snowbirds who fed them.

  Thanks to Mike and Ray

WHAT GOES AROUND

  When my Dad, in 1956, decided to move to the Elephant's Graveyard, it was a mega-amp culture shock for watashi. We came from Charleston, WVa, which wasn't NYC but did have 120,000 population, pot-holed paved streets, a jillion traffic lights, speakeasies, and a few hookers. All the amenities a cosmopolite expects. Naples, on the other hand, had two traffic lights and most streets were paved with crushed Coquina shells. (They did have three lights--the third in the 3rd Street South shopping area--but folks complained about it so much they'd turned it off.

  I'd been going to Marshall, trying to win a football scholarship. I was awarded,  instead, a cranked knee. So, the move to Naples didn't interrupt my very indefinite plans. At first, I enjoyed the fishing--wonderful at the time--then decided I should engage in something productive.

  I waited until the bi-weekly edition of the Collier County News came out, then looked in the employment section. Didn't take long. Two jobs, one as a stake-holder for a surveyor and the other for an ambulance driver at Pittman's Funeral Home. On exploring these opportunities, I found the previous stake-holder had been bitten by a rattler while surveying the Big Cypress. No thanks. And Dick Pittman really wanted an apprentice embalmer. Nope.

 Having worked part-time in construction since I was a pup, I started exploring that old trade. Found a job open the first day. Fritz Thurner, at Naples Construction Company, was building Naples' first beachfront condo, The Bahama Club. Asked Fritz what he needed and he replied "Laborers." Asked him what it payed. He replied, "a dollar and hour."

  Now back in West-by-God a laborer was paid two-fifty and hour, so I told Fritz I'd look around until I found something closer to my scale. Fritz just smiled. Didn't take me long to figure out why. He had the only construction company in Naples! So within a few hours I was pouring the tie-beam, concrete bucket by bucket- full, with two Seminole Indians.

 Lasted about two weeks. I'd never experienced such heat and when the two Seminoles almost passed out, I decided I was in the wrong tee-pee. 

  At the time every young male had a seven-year military obligation. Since I'd been in the Navy Reserves over two years, I decided to get on the Bloodhound bus, go to Miami, and ship-over to the Regulars.

  In Miami, the recruiter said he couldn't take me for two-weeks, but a Marine recruiter, lurking around the office, said he could take me the next day and he'd put me up in a nice hotel overnight. He was honest in telling me that the Marines weren't any picnic, especially boot camp at Parris Island. He wondered if I was up to that. I answered, "Sir, if it's any harder than what I've been doin' the last two weeks, I'm gonna be real surprised." And I was.

  And, irony of ironies, years later, when I went to work for the NPD, the money was so short I had to take a part-time job. Yep, you guessed it: working at Pittman's Funeral Home. Driving an ambulance.

HE SAID WHAT?????

  We once had a Lt on the NPD who could get close to the pronunciation of some words, but not quite there, phonetically.  Sometimes with hilarious consequences. We'll call him Ol' Tumble Tongue.

 Tumble was in Monday morning Municipal Court, Judge Tom Brown presiding. Usually Tumble, an enthusiastic ticket writer, would be defending a citation he'd written to some unhappy citizen. Then, we'd get to hear him say, "Miles-PERN-Our", as he always butchered the phrase. 
  Not today. Today he was testifying about an incident that happened near the Naples Pier. Tumble was wrapped up in his tale, explaining that the victim had been stung by a jellyfish type critter called a Portuguese Man-Of-War, a huge cousin of the jellyfish, that sometimes delivers deadly stings. Tumble explained another hazard. "They're hard to get away from, your Honor," he said. "Their testicles can hang down over 100 feet." As was his style, close to tentacles but no corona.

  Tumble Tongue had another problem. He had the approximate vocabulary of an earthworm. One late night, in the Royal Castle, we were taking a belly bomb and bowl of grease--hamburger and chili--break. The conversation was centered on who was the sorriest human being we'd ever encountered--a favorite cop topic since there were so many candidates. One cop offered, "I'd say G.H. is the worst, he's completely worthless, a sucker-puncher with no gonads at all." Thereby causing our ignorant--but inquisitive--Tumble to announce in his loud voice, "GONADS? What the hell're GO-NADS?"

 Had we known the Heimlich Maneuver back then, it could've been put to good use blowing debris from the throats of customers who nearly choked to death on their hamburgers laughing.

Thanks Ray for the help.