Old Friends

Yesterday an old friend stopped by the Casino where I work. We had not spoken face to face in twenty years. Lee is retired from police work now and he and his friend Dennis, currently a police captain in an Arizona town were coming back from a road trip to the California coast on their Harley Davidson motorcycles. We spent the better part of two hours re-living the past, catching up on family and bemoaning the decline of good lawmen in this country.

Lee was twenty one years old when he came to the La Paz county Sheriff's Office as a Deputy in 1983 from a small town in eastern Arizona. I being the resident Deputy in the town in which we were both stationed, broke him into the new job and he and I became friends. Lee has always had an outstanding sense of humor and always seemed to view the humor in even the worst situation, and he is the type of man who would stick with you in a fight. We fought and tamed a lawless community that had been abusing the good people there long before we came, and the methods we used were effective, but crude and definitely unacceptable in todays politically correct environment.

In visiting with Lee's friend Dennis I found that he and I had mutual friends in law enforcement in southeast Arizona and I was able to re-acquaint myself with old comrades with whom I have not had contact in many years.

It is important to me to stay in contact with men such as these to help remember the stories of the past, and to re-kindle friendships with a breed of men that have always been willing and able to place their lives between the peaceable and those who prey on society. Between the three of us visiting together yesterday, there was a total of ninty fives years of experience in the profession of protecting others. To be alive to remember the past after all that we have been through, is amazing in itself. To be considered to be a peer to men such as these is humbling.