Description:
Joe Poe talks about his career as an Oklahoma City police officer.
Transcript:
Interviewee: Joe Poe
Interviewer: Buddy Johnson
Interview Date: 6/28/2007
Interview Location: Ron J. Norick Downtown Library, Oklahoma Room
Buddy Johnson: Today is June 28, 2007, and we’re at the Downtown Library in the Oklahoma Room. We’re recording a session for Oklahoma Voices. I’m Buddy Johnson. I’m a librarian at the Downtown Library. Today, we’re going to talk to Joe Poe, who’s a police officer and security officer at the Downtown Library. Joe let’s start at the beginning. Tell us where you were born and when you were born.
Joe Poe: I was born in Poteau, Oklahoma in LeFlore County January 19, 1937.
BJ: Did you live in Poteau or were you around on a farm or in town?
JP: We lived out in the country. We lived on a farm. We had a small farm out there, and my daddy was a coal miner. I grew up in Poteau.
BJ: If you dad was primarily a coal miner, was the farm just food and subsistence? Were they cash crops?
JP: No, no cash crops. We raised strictly for ourselves until World War II broke out, and then my dad went to California to work in the shipyards in Oakland. When the war broke out in December of ’41, I was almost six years old. After Dad went to California to work, Mom decided that we were going to California too, so we went to California too, me and my baby brother and sister. My sister was three years older than me and my brother was born on December 11, 1941, right after Pearl Harbor was bombed. We went to California and everything was set up for tenants to live out there and work in the defense plants. We lived at a place called Stenson Beach, which was on the coast of California and had been a resort area until the war broke out.
BJ: So you had pretty nice digs while you were there.
JP: Yes. We got to play at the beach all the time until they closed the beach in the evenings because the Coast Guard would come in with dogs and walk the beach. They were always afraid that the Japanese submarines would surface and shoot at targets on land just for the heck of it. At night, they would surface, and if they could see a light then they’d shoot at it with their deck gun on the submarine. They were always afraid that they would land saboteurs and spies on that beach. Above our house was the fortifications for the defense of the coast of California. They had big concrete bunkers and big, heavy bombardment guns that pointed out to the sea. I can distinctly remember one time, probably sometime in late August 1942, that we could look out one evening towards the sea, the ocean there, and it was just covered with ships. The next morning, they were all gone. This was probably the invasion fleet for the island of Guadalcanal. I started school there in September 1942 in a one-room schoolhouse right there close to the beach in California. We were there until December, and Mom decided it was time for us to go back home to Poteau, so we went back home.
BJ: Was she a little scared or didn’t like California?
JP: She was scared there.
BJ: It sounds like all the fortifications might make you be a little nervous or wary.
JP: She was, and it was. Of course, us kids didn’t pay attention to anything like that. The war was just something that was coming and going. Later on, in years before the war ended, we began to realize what was going on. All my uncles and aunts were in the service somewhere or another. At the time the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor, I had an uncle, my daddy’s brother, that was stationed on the battleship Tennessee, which was sitting on Battleship Row in Pearl Harbor. He wasn’t one of the casualties there.
BJ: Let’s jump back real quick to your parents. Your dad’s name was what?
JP: Charles A. Poe.
BJ: And your mom’s name?
JP: Elois. Her maiden name was McClain.
BJ: How did you family come to be in Oklahoma? Do you know that story?
JP: Yes. They came from – Daddy came originally from Kansas, his family did. His mother was a full blood Frenchwoman. She was born in France. They moved to Hartford, Arkansas, where my granddaddy worked in the coal mines at Hartford. Then they moved to Poteau, or in that vicinity. My mother was born in Arkansas and they had moved to Poteau.
BJ: Were they just following the coal mines?
JP: Yeah. That was coal mining area back there. All over that area was coal mining communities.
BJ: Did you know your French grandmother? Was she around when you - ?
JP: Yes. She died in 1942 and I can barely remember her.
BJ: I guess she learned to speak English and everything.
JP: She was very good at English, yes.
BJ: You moved back to Oklahoma in late ’42, and then you pretty well stayed in Poteau the rest of your growing up years?
JP: Yes, I did.
BJ: Okay. When you got through to high school, what did you see in front of you? Did you have any goal or dreams or anything like that?
JP: Yes. For a young person growing up in Poteau, you didn’t have much to look forward to, exactly, in Poteau. You knew that you were going to have to go somewhere else like most of your relatives did. Leaving Poteau was a difficult thing to do, but when I graduated from high school, that’s what I had to do.
BJ: Which direction did you take?
JP: I wanted to see America, particularly the western part of America. I went to Seattle, Washington and went to work out there. I worked out there for about six months, and then I went back to Poteau. The next year come spring, I went to Hobbs, New Mexico and went to work in the oil field. I worked there for about five or six months working on a drilling rig. I worked for Western Well Service, which did fracking work on the oil wells. Then I went to Poteau. I enrolled in junior college there in Poteau and was taking some college courses there, and I drove a school bus while I was there. The next summer, I left and I went to California to work in the cannery at Modesto, California. When the cannery closed, I went back to Poteau and enrolled in college there. I drove a school bus. The next spring, I left and went to Coeur d’Alene, Idaho.
BJ: This was in the late ‘50s, probably? You were about 23 years old?
JP: This was in 1958. I was – from 1958, I had a pickup truck, a 1952 GMC pickup truck. It was a nice little truck. Me and another fella from Poteau went to Coeur d’Alene, Idaho and walked in the ranger station there. We didn’t have job, and we told the ranger there that we was looking for a job. He said if you’re here Monday morning, we’ll hire you. We were there Monday morning.
BJ: Were you a Ranger, then, or what kind of work did you do?
JP: We went to work for the survey for the U.S. Forest Service. We did survey work for these logging companies for building new roads into the timber. I worked with the crew and I ran a level for them. [clears throat] I spent two years out there working for them. I guess I was a pretty good hand. I liked to work and I liked the place. That was one of the best places a young man could be, right there. After a couple of years, I had bought myself a new Chevrolet pickup truck. I had a pocket full of money. I was homesick, single, and they asked me to stay. They wanted to send me to Missoula, Montana to the smoke jumper school. While I had been working there, the assistant ranger had been a smoke jumper, but I turned them down, but I turned them down and I went back to Poteau. I went to college again for about a semester, and then I got married and went to work for a trucking company out of Poteau. I worked for them until I went into the Army. I was in the Army at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri for six months.
BJ: Did you join or were you drafted?
JP: I joined the 45th Infantry Division. This was in peacetime. There were no wars going on. I joined the National Guard, the 45th Infantry Division, and they sent me to Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri for six months of training. When I came back, a good friend of mine that I grew up with, Charlie Brown, had come up to Oklahoma City to go to work in the police department. He got hired and he talked me into it, so I came up and I got hired. I was sworn in in November 1963, just about a day or two after Kennedy had been assassinated.
BJ: What kind of requirements did they have then? You already had some college. That probably helped you some. What did it take to become a policeman then?
JP: Back then, [laughs] you had to be tough. That’s the way they wanted you because things were a lot different then. If you could remember old Oklahoma City the way it was in 1963 and 1964 and 1965 –
BJ: This would be pre-Urban Renewal?
JP: Before Urban Renewal. Reno Street was Skid Row, and California. Downtown Oklahoma City was downtown. That’s where everything was. They had just built Penn Square Mall. That was the first mall that I believe we had. Everything was Downtown, pretty much. That’s where we put all of our police department, the biggest part, right downtown.
BJ: You mentioned Skid Row and Reno and California. Were there bars along there or was it deserted? What kind of places were down there? What made it so bad?
JP: There were lots of bars, and they were what we called flophouse hotels. That means $1.50 a night. They were prostitutes, drunks, winos. This was a nationally-known area, Skid Row, like a lot of big cities had.
BJ: Ours was just kind of known around to be one of the toughest?
JP: It was tough. The policemen I worked with, the break-in officers I worked with, were tough. They were Indian. One guy that broke me in was a heck of a fine fellow. He was an ex-Golden Glove boxer, and he spoke Indian. He was tough, and he did like to fight. [laughs]
BJ: That was your training then?
JP: That was part of your training. That was a big part. If you didn’t pass that part, you weren’t working here anymore. There wasn’t many nights that we didn’t go out and we didn’t have a fight. I can say that much.
BJ: When you first started in ’63 and into ’64, do you remember your first day? Was it intimidating? Was it like the Army where they try to haze you a little bit? What was it like that first day or first week or so?
JP: To begin with, back then when you went to work, they swore you in and they gave you a badge. That was all. You got your badge and your cap badge. You bought your uniform, your cap, your gun, everything. That came out of your pocket. Your first day at work would be walking into a lineup room and you wouldn’t know anybody. How we were treated, I can distinctly remember, an officer walking up to me and putting out his hand and shaking hands with me and telling me his name. His name was Bill Feder, and how he was glad to have us. I never forgot it. He was a fine fellow. That helps a lot. Then they’ll put you with an older officer, working with him, and he’s going to have to break you in right.
BJ: I guess being in the Army and all that, you’d had some firearms training so that helped. Did you get a car first or what sort of patrolling did you do initially?
JP: You ride in a car. The first car I rode in was car 15, which was the Reno car. Thirteen, 14, and 15 cars were two-man cars that rode strictly Downtown. They were break-in cars. You rode with an older officer and he tried to teach you everything he could. After a while, they would send you to rookie school.
BJ: Did they kind of want to see if you had what it took to do the hard part and then they’d train you?
JP: Right. They didn’t want to waste time and school on somebody that couldn’t make it. I think I started at rookie school the last of March of ’64. I’d been riding in a car seat for about four months. After rookie school, there was a pretty good chance you were going to be riding by yourself from then on.
BJ: Really? Okay. You mentioned that there weren’t many nights that went by without a scrape. Can you tell us about those first years down on Skid Row? They cleaned it up. Well, I guess they tore it all down, I guess, after about ’66 or ’67 or so. Those last years of Skid Row, do you remember any of the more memorable scrapes you got into?
JP: I remember we had a lot of scrapes.
BJ: Did you just come by these in patrols or did you get a lot of calls?
JP: Once in awhile you’d get a call, but a lot of times you’d be patrolling. We patrolled alleys a lot. You could drive those alleys. A lot of times, you would just come up on somebody being stabbed or something like that. That was common. Knifings were very common. Occasionally there was a shooting, but not many.
One of the biggest shootings I remember was a shooting on what we called “Short Broadway,” which would be about the (unintelligible) block on North Broadway. That was on Halloween night and there was an armed robbery of a liquor store. I was breaking in rookies by now, and I had a brand-new rookie riding with me. We got a call. There were two detectives. They were vice squad detectives that were working prostitutes. I think they were in the unit block on Broadway at an old hotel. They had watched a man come across the street from the alley there, and he had a Halloween mask on. When he walked up to the front of the liquor store, he raised up his sweatshirt and pulled out a big, chrome-plated .45 automatic. They knew that they were fixing to have a robbery there, so they called for help. I was close by, so I stopped right around the corner and I went around there. They had stayed in the hotel and they heard the shooting start. The liquor store operator was a woman. When the guy tried to rob her, she pulled a pistol out and shot at him. He turned and shot back at her with that .45 and he hit her, and he knocked her good. Then when he started running across the street, the two detectives stepped out and they started shooting at him. I shot at him, and by the time he got to the other side of the street, he was down. When I walked over there and looked at him, he was laying down face up with that Halloween mask on. That big, chrome-plated .45 automatic was there in his hand. We shot a bunch of window glasses out for sure, but he was the only one that got shot and he was killed.
BJ: What goes through your mind, especially as a young officer, when they tell you on the call that they’re armed? Are you second-guessing? In those minutes before you encounter them, what’s going on?
JP: I always learned two things. One of them is if you’re right on top of an armed robbery, that is dangerous. You’re better off if you’re several blocks away because if you walk up on a really bad guy and he’s an armed robber, and he’s in the process of robbing something, he’s going to shoot somebody. If you can catch him in his car or on the street, you stand a lot less chance of having a big shoot out and somebody getting hurt or killed. That was always scary on a hold up alarm, too, because if you were right across the street from the hold up alarm, which I had been, when the alarm went off, the chances are the guy is in the building and he’s got a gun in somebody’s face. That’s when, to me, they’re at their most dangerous.
BJ: So you wait for them to come out or catch them when the civilian isn’t in quite as much danger?
JP: I think that’s a good policy.
BJ: I’d agree with you. How long did you stay in that Reno trail in 15?
JP: I went to another car, which was another training car, and we called it car 10. I started riding on it in I guess late 1964. I stayed there for about ten years.
BJ: What district was that? I guess everything was still out of Downtown.
JP: It was basically – it came into Downtown.
BJ: I mean the station was Downtown.
JP: Yeah, the station was Downtown. They had just built the new police station. The fact is we moved into the new police station in ’64, but I had started in the old building. The car district, that car 10 that I rode, which was a training car, I always had a new rookie riding with me. It ran from 10th Street to 23rd Street Northwest, and then from Broadway over to May Avenue.
BJ: There was a lot of retail in that area, so you probably did do a lot of alarm calls and holdups and stuff like that.
JP: A lot of alarm calls, and I got a lot of calls Downtown.
BJ: Let me ask you. You said you were training rookies. How many of them passed your mettle? Did you have to tell the captain, “This one’s not going to make it.”?
JP: Right. I had to make reports on them. I would have a rookie for about five or six months, and at the end of that period, I’d have to evaluate him. Most of them worked out real good. Some of them made high up ranks.
BJ: Did that help you along later on if one of your rookies – you probably didn’t need special treatment, but it probably didn’t hurt to have one of the guys you trained make higher officers or administrators.
JP: [clears throat] It didn’t really particularly do anything for me, other than the fact that they knew me and what kind of person I was. That was what they knew about me. One of them was a female officer.
BJ: Well, and you have a sense of pride. That’s what I was going to ask you, too. There was a lot of change in the ’60s when you got African American officers and women officers coming in. Did you train many of those?
JP: Yeah. There were African American officers when I first went to work there. That wasn’t anything new to us. Women officers came in about 1973. That’s when I was still training. I trained a woman officer there. She was a good officer, and she went on through the ranks and made one of the division commanders, a major, before she retired. I always told her when she was major that if she stayed, there was a good possibility she would be one of the first women chiefs. I really believed that.
BJ: Back to in your patrol car there. One thing people love to hear about are how stupid and dumb criminals can be. [JP laughs] Did you run into any stupid guys out there?
JP: You do that. You sure do. Otherwise they might not get caught. [laughs]
BJ: I remember one you told me awhile back happened in the winter in the snow. Do you want to share that one with us?
JP: In the snow. We had an alarm call at 23rd and North Pennsylvania. It was about three or four o’clock in the morning, and it was snowing like the dickens. We went up there and a place called Bean Bag City had the back door kicked in on it. There were some bean bag chairs taken out. That was kind of a popular thing then. In the snow were tracks. There was a set of car tracks leaving the scene, and then there were some footprints leaving the scene behind the car. They went right down Pennsylvania to about 21st or 22nd, and then they turned right. What they had done, we realized, was they had filled the back seat of the car up with bean bag chairs, and the two old boys that were with him had to walk along behind. They only lived a few blocks over there. We tracked them all the way up to where they had parked the car, got out and walked up to a rear apartment back there. Me and my partner and a couple more officers went up there and pounded on the door, and they opened the door. Two of them – I looked in and two of them were sitting in bean bag chairs and they had snow all over their shoes. That was the end of their career.
BJ: Yeah, it doesn’t sound like they were headed to a big life of crime if they weren’t any smarter than that. Did they try to claim they didn’t do it or anything like that?
JP: At first they didn’t, but then later on, one of them appeared in court and claimed he didn’t have anything to do with it.
BJ: I was going to say earlier that the ‘60s were pretty turbulent for America with a lot of change going on. One of things or stereotypes that you see is a certain disrespect for the law and for society’s rules and stuff. Did you find that a lot in Oklahoma City? Did you start to get insulted or things like that, any of those things you see a lot in the movies?
JP: Well, yes. In the late ‘60s, we began to have problems. I was working the night that Martin Luther King was assassinated, and problems began to develop real fast there that night. They kept us over late. We had to stay and work late. They issued us riot batons. I believe that was the first time they issued us helmets. [pause] This was also a time with the anti-war demonstrations, too, that they were having. We were sent to Oklahoma University several times on anti-war demonstrations down there to reinforce the Norman Police Department and the Oklahoma Highway Patrol. There were several things, racial disturbances –
BJ: Did they train you all? I guess you had Watts in ’65 and Detroit in ’68, and of course the King problems after the King assassination. Did they try to train you guys ahead of time about any of that?
JP: They started trying to train us some after this all began, but they didn’t – nobody had the experience. Nobody really knew how to do the training that was going to be needed in the future. As things began to happen across the country, then they began to learn how to train us. Then we started organizing what now they call the SWAT team. They called it the Tactical Squad back then. The police department had purchased some scope-sighted rifles with the scopes on them and some riot equipment and tactical equipment.
BJ: Were you trained in that as well?
JP: I was a trained sniper.
BJ: It seems like they would have had to train you all from being tough guys to having to be more sensitive to the crowds and stuff like that.
JP: The training wasn’t there. It was just that you had to adapt personally.
BJ: A new policy would come down and it was up to you to figure out how to make that work?
JP: You had to be very adaptable back then. Then we went on in to the 1970s after we got by the anti-war demonstrations and a lot of the racial problems. In 1973, July became when we had the prison riot in McAlester. I was working that night, and they had us all come in and issued us our tactical equipment, scope-sighted rifles, and they sent us to McAlester. We were at McAlester State Prison by about 5:00 that morning. The riot was in full going then. They were burning cell blocks and the highway patrol had brought in a bunch of men. Tulsa Police Department, Norman Police Department, brought in lots of men. We had a lot of men there.
BJ: What kind of things did you see going on there?
JP: They sent my people, which was two sniper squads, to the airport. The next morning, we were supposed to load into helicopters that belonged to the National Guard and they were going to airlift us to the roofs of the prison compound. From there, we were going to be stationed with our rifles to do what needed to be done.
BJ: All the time, were you thinking – I guess you were trained, but were you thinking, “This isn’t what I signed up for?” Was it kind of exciting? What did you expect out of that?
JP: This was a very exciting thing and the worst part was we hadn’t been trained for this. We were more worried about the gas they were going to use on the cell blocks because it was going to affect the way we could function with those scope-sighted rifles. We were really concerned about that. We had gas masks, but shooting through that scope-sighted rifles with a gas mask on was going to be very difficult to do.
BJ: Luckily then they got it under control, and you didn’t have to get into too much.
JP: We got on the helicopters. They started the helicopters up, and we knew we were gone, but before they got off the ground, Governor Hall called it off. We were somewhere we didn’t want to be, and we spent the rest of the day waiting there at the airport to see what they were going to do.
BJ: I wanted to ask you quickly about the demonstrations and things. I think in ’69 there was a sanitation strike and things like that Downtown. You said you guys had learned on the fly how to deal with that, but were they pretty peaceable overall, or were you just directing the crowds and marchers? You didn’t really have to disperse. I guess they had a right to demonstrate. Did you get into any trouble on the streets then?
JP: The way they handled that was it was quite a deal, the sanitation strike was. They helped everybody over for an extra shift, and we went out to Westwood to the sanitation department there. We spent most of the day out there. The thing we were trying to do is some of the workers were driving the trucks, and the other people were trying to prevent them from driving. We were trying to keep the peace between the two groups there. Some of the people got arrested. It wasn’t a bad confrontation, I don’t think.
BJ: Just the usual thing when you get thousands of people together?
JP: When you get a lot of people together like that and they’re worked up, it could have been a lot worse. I’ve seen what they’ve done in Watts and other places. It wasn’t that bad.
BJ: I wanted to ask you one other thing. I remember you told me a story, and this might have been later on so we can get to it later if it was, but you told me a story once about there was guy who had called you out and wanted to fight or whatever. Are you not remembering this story? You had to fight him. He just wouldn’t leave you alone and he kept wanting to fight with you. You finally had to fistfight with him. Do you remember that story?
JP: [pause]
BJ: Don’t recall it?
JP: I’m thinking.
BJ: It seems like you kept warning him not to push it and he just kept wanting to go after you. I just wondered if you remembered that one.
JP: Was that the one that happened up at the old library where the guy tried – he wanted to fight me and he kept challenging me?
BJ: I think it was.
JP: Okay. He wanted to fight me. I’d put him out because he had shoved a citizen in there, and I’d put him out on the sidewalk there and told him to leave. I hadn’t had physical contact with him at this time, but he wanted to fight. He squared off with me and I told him to hit the road or I was going to put him in jail. No way. He wanted to fight. I had my tear gas and I squirted him in the eyes with the tear gas and the fight was over. [laughs]
BJ: That was it.
JP: He went to the sidewalk and I chained him up and put him in jail then. That’s the one I think you were thinking about.
BJ: That was later, then. I couldn’t remember.
JP: I had a bunch of fistfights that were pretty good ones.
BJ: Did you win most of those?
JP: You have to win. You can’t lose. That’s – if you lose, that’s dangerous. When you get into a confrontation or a fight with somebody and you’re the only person, they can get you down, take your gun away from you, and shoot you. That’s what happens to a lot of policemen. I’ve been in that position, and I don’t like it. It’s bad.
When I challenged two men one night at 23rd and North Meridian, I didn’t know what they had done, but I knew they had done something. [loud sound, possibly a chair scraping across a floor] They were breaking into cars. One of them jumped me from behind and grabbed my gun out of the holster. I grabbed the gun just as he was pulling it out, and I hung on to the gun and he had the gun, and then his partner was trying to get the gun. We fought over the gun. Finally we went to the ground, and I couldn’t get this straight or sequence the way it happened. When we got to the ground, I was on my knees I had a hold of the cylinder of the gun and I had what you would call a death grip on it. They guy with the gun was trying to pull the trigger, and I managed to get my other hand on the end of the barrel, and I twisted it just to the point to where it was pointing at the other guy, and then I let go of the cylinder. When I did, it went off. The bullet hit the other guy in the stomach, but it just barely grazed him. It was enough that he let go and got up. Now, I was the man. I pulled the gun out of the other guy’s hand, but I went face down onto the pavement. The other guy got loose and he took off. It’s dark, and when I got up on my knees, the only thing I could see was the pickup truck that they had been driving was coming right at me. I’m on my knees and I raised up just enough and I fired two shots at that windshield. The truck may have hit me in the leg, but I moved to the side and I fired three more shots at the truck. I didn’t know – I was kind of dazed, but I knew when I fired those first two shots at that windshield that I could see the man on the inside. I had intentions of hitting him because he was going to kill me. The truck went on past me, hit a parked car, and then hit a tree in the shopping center there. The other guy – I don’t remember. He was gone. From then on, somebody came up and helped me because I was – they had pounded me pretty hard in the face and head, both of them had. When the police got there, it didn’t take them long to figure out who the truck belonged to, and they went straight to the house and got the other guy. The guy that was in the pickup, he was dead. That was a very bad experience, and I hope nobody ever has to go through something like that. That’s something you have to think about.
BJ: Facing that kind of thing, on a daily basis, what kind of thing did you do to relax? What hobbies?
JP: I hunt and fish, and that gets me away from it all. When I go hunting and fishing, I try not to think anything about my work. It’s just a completely different world for me. I’ve hunted and fished ever since I was a kid.
BJ: Do you go back home to do that?
JP: Yeah, I go back to Poteau. That’s where I spent most of my time when I’m not working. In January 1997, I retired. I had 33 years in with the police department and I can say this. The police department was good to me, and I was good to the police department, I think. I tried to be good to the public. I always said that when I went out on the street, whether it was day or nighttime, the public got their money’s worth for eight hours. I always said that, and I always felt that way. When I retired from the police department, I was talking to one of the majors there that was a good friend of mine. I told him, “I hate to leave. I’ve had some good years here and most of my life has been spent with this police department. I don’t have any hard feelings towards anybody on this police department, and that’s the way I want to leave here.” He said, “I wish I could say the same thing.” [laughs]
BJ: That’s pretty good that after 30-something years you were able to do that, that you were able to come through without any grudges or problems like that.
JP: The best thing I ever did is when I took the foot beat Downtown.
BJ: Yeah, let’s hear about that. That was not long after the McAlester situation.
JP: That was right after the McAlester riot. I came Downtown in 1974, and I came down on a six months’ trial because they were having a lot of problems Downtown. Me and another senior officer came down. We were training officers. Chief Purcer, who was a very good chief, sent us down here. He wanted to see what the problems were Downtown and if we could help them any.
BJ: And this like the old time, like you see in the movies where it’s literally a policeman walking around Downtown keeping an eye on things?
JP: That’s what it was. During that six months’ time, I think I did some good. I got to know a lot of people Downtown here. I liked it, and when six months was up, instead of going back to the training car that I’d be running, I told Chief Purcer I wanted to stay Downtown. He said, “If you want to stay Downtown, that suits me fine.” I stayed Downtown for the next 23 years and never regretted a day of it.
BJ: Skid Row was gone by then. They tore a lot of it down for the big projects during Urban Renewal, so what kind of challenges did you have after that?
JP: Well, when we first came Downtown in ’74, there was still a lot of Downtown here. The John A. Brown Company was still here. The dime stores were still on Main Street, and there were still a lot of stores and a lot of business Downtown. Urban Renewal was just getting going good. Finally, Urban Renewal pretty well cleaned out Downtown. During that time before Urban Renewal, it was a very busy Downtown. We had a lot of good things going Downtown that I really enjoyed. One of my high points Downtown was the ’89 Centennial. I can remember that. I enjoyed that day very much. We had a very good parade Downtown here and a good celebration.
BJ: You did all the parades, I’m sure, along there. What was the daily life? Did you have a route that you walked? How did you structure your day? Did you walk the same path every morning and see what’s going on?
JP: It was about the same path. It took most of the 100 and 200 block on Park Avenue and up as far as Dean A. McGee and Robert S. Kerr streets to as far as Kerr-McGee itself.
BJ: You were there 20 years and you said Urban Renewal did clean out a lot of retail activity. Did you just visit the office buildings? Were there a lot of problems?
JP: There were problems. There was still some retail business down here that stayed, and mostly the office buildings had a lot of people working in them. We had a lot of activity Downtown for a long time. I always hoped to see Downtown come back similar to what it used to be with the big retail stores.
BJ: It looks like it’s trying.
JP: It’s trying.
BJ: I’m going to prompt you a little bit because some of the stories you told me over the years – I’ve know you about ten years now – and some of them were about some of the colorful characters around Downtown. One of them, I think I recall you telling me about a guy who would go around checking all the vending machines for change and things like that. I think he might have been a panhandler and actually amassed quite a fortune. Do you remember that guy?
JP: There were several of them. I can remember a guy. His name was Claude Redmond and he was an old panhandler Downtown. He always kept a pint of whiskey on him somewhere. He got wise to me and I’d find it on him somewhere and pout it out. He’d stick it in his sock or in his trousers somewhere just to keep me from finding it, but he was always panhandling. He liked to panhandle women more than anything. He’d intimidate them real bad. He’d walk up to them and tell them, “I just got out of the penitentiary. Give me a dollar.” Most of them would give him whatever he asked for because he intimidated them. The last time I saw Claude, he told me, “Poe, you know what? I had an appointment at the Social Security office at 9:00 the day the building blew up, but I got drunk the day before and put in detox and missed it.” I said, “Claude, you’re the luckiest guy I’ve ever seen.”
BJ: He had a bank account, didn’t he, with several thousand dollars?
JP: They had a racket going. They were very prosperous with their panhandling because they got a lot of money. They sure did.
BJ: It seems like I remember you telling me once about an attorney or something who felt like he had special parking privileges around town? Do you remember that? You don’t have to use names.
JP: I never knew his name anyway. I’d stand there in front of the First National Building on Robinson where it says, “No parking.” He pulled up there and parked and got out of his car. I said, “Mister, you can’t park here.” He went to tell me that he could park here if he wanted to. I said, “No. You get in that car and move it.” He got mad, real mad. He got in that car and said, “I’ve got a good mind to give you a good thrashing.” I said, “If you feel like it, climb out of that car, buddy. I’ll send you home with your tail tucked between your legs.” He didn’t like that. He went over to the police department and complained about it, and the major told him he was lucky he didn’t get a good whupping. [laughs] That was the last of that.
BJ: We didn’t talk about this earlier, and if you don’t want to talk about it it’s fine. We did have the bombing in ’95. You were still – that was at the end of your career on the beat. Were you around then? What do you remember about that morning? Only if you want to talk about it.
JP: I was here. I was at Park Avenue and Robinson when that happened. At first, I thought it was probably a natural gas explosion. Then I started working my way up that way. People were running south down the street and there were cars coming down Robinson that had the windshields busted. Some of the people were running and had injuries. I remember somewhere up there, there was another officer on foot. We stopped one woman. She was bleeding at the arm real good, and we stopped her and we called for an ambulance for her. The ambulances, I guess, were all tied up, but a patrol car came and picked her up and took her to an emergency aid station. We worked our way on up towards the building, and we began to learn more about what had happened by now from the radio.
BJ: Real quick. You were outside or you were inside? When you first heard that noise, you thought natural gas, but you’d probably never heard anything like that.
JP: No, I hadn’t.
BJ: Because the first thing you think is not, “Oh, it’s a bomb.”
JP: You don’t think about a bomb, you know? Even then, I always thought that – I couldn’t understand why it was there at the time.
BJ: You see people running one direction. Your instinct as an officer is to run the other way.
JP: Yes, and you could see lots of smoke coming up there. I went up towards the explosion, and a lot of other officers had already gone up there too. I met another scout car officer and I asked him what happened. He said it was the Murrah Building. It blew up. That’s all he could say. That’s all he knew. We were getting a lot of talk on the radio, but still we weren’t exactly sure what all was going on. Then they came on the radio and said to evacuate the area because they believed there was another bomb in the building. They sent me to Kerr-McGee to help evacuate the Kerr-McGee building. We started evacuating all the people out of Downtown. I don’t know what time it was. Time just didn’t mean anything that day.
By about 2:00 that afternoon, I could stand in the middle of Robinson Street there at Robert S. Kerr and I could look all the way down the street, and there was no one. I couldn’t imagine that ever happening. At some time, it started raining and it turned kind of cold. It had started out to be a warm, pretty day. By that evening late, it had gotten dark and rainy and cold. I’d made it up to 4th Street by now, and then I went on up to 5th Street. This was the first I had actually seen the front of the building. This was somewhere around four or five o’clock in the evening. I was there until about 7:00 that night before I went home, and then for the next 21 days, we were assigned to 4th and Robinson for perimeter duty.
BJ: You were probably in shock for most of that evening. Did you go to sleep? You probably couldn’t find a way to deal with what you’d seen. There’s no preparation for that. How did you get through the next couple of days?
JP: [sigh] It really didn’t affect me that much. That evening, I helped them hunt for parts of what they thought was truck parts. We found several parts of it around up there. I had found my partner that worked with me, and he had actually been in the building after the bombing and tried to help one of the victims out, but the victim was so far gone that he couldn’t handle him. Then they ordered evacuations of the building. To this day, I have never been in the memorial. I knew quite a few people that were killed there. I used to make calls to the Murrah Building, the security office there. I knew Don Leonard, who was a Secret Service agent there, and Mickey Maroney, and I knew several more people that worked in the building. I just don’t seem to want to go into the memorial, you know? Even though I work close to it and walk by it every day, I just never have been in it.
BJ: Thank you for sharing that with us. I realize it’s hard. I wasn’t even down there and it’s hard for me to go over that day myself, so I can imagine what it was like for you. Then you retired a couple of years after that, and you worked for the library since then. We’re just about finished. We’ve just got a couple more minutes. Do you want to say anything else that we’ve overlooked or anything that you’d like to share or share with your grandchildren or anything?
JP: There’s a whole lot more to life than what we can talk about in an hour. There’s a whole lot of things that I would like to relate to my kids and my grandkids. Maybe some way or another, I can sit down sometime and talk to them. It’s just such changing times, and I can see how times are changing. My dad always said he went through the great change, and he could remember the first automobile that he had ever seen. Then he related to the fact that he had seen that a man had walked on the moon. That was a big change in a person’s life.
BJ: Maybe we can do another session with you and your family to get those stories down for them too. We appreciate you sharing with us today, and we’ll enjoy listening to it in future generations. Thanks for your time, Joe.
JP: Thank you.
End of interview.