Trooper Down! (18 page)

“It's the daily routine that gets to you,” said a full-time teacher who's been married to a trooper for seven years. “Sometimes I feel like I have to do everything, from organizing birthday parties for the kids to getting the car fixed.”

Nor does she feel free to call her husband on duty whenever a problem arises. In seven years, she's phoned him only four times on the job.

“People I work with can pick up the phone and call their spouse any hour of the day for any little thing. But when I call Jim, I can't talk to him directly, I have to contact the telecommunications center and leave a message to have him call me back. So I feel like everyone who has a radio scanner in our part of the state knows my husband is supposed to call home. It makes me hesitant about calling him on the job, even when it's important.”

The biggest adjustment for most of these women, however, is the loneliness.

“It began immediately,” said a highway patrol wife recalling her days as a newlywed. “I'd come home from work at four-thirty and if he had to begin patrol at three that day, our paths never crossed for a week at a time. Having just gotten married, it was really hard for me. It's still hard, but we have the kids now and I've found a lot of things to do that keep me busy.”

Before the federal government passed a law in 1985 limiting the number of hours certain public employees could work, it was not unusual for troopers to patrol seventy hours a week with no overtime pay, a situation that did little to improve conditions at home.

“We were stationed in Wilkes County,” said a trooper wife, married twenty-five years, “and there were lots of times he would be called out on patrol when he was off duty. One night was particularly bad. Every time he'd get into bed the phone would ring and he'd be sent out on another wreck. It was near daylight when the phone rang for about the fifth time. He was trying to put his socks on when I said, ‘Honey, are you sorry you joined the patrol?' I could tell he hadn't slept and was dead tired.

“‘Hell, no,' he said. He finished dressing and went out the door.”

This same wife admits there were times through the years she asked her husband, “Do you love the patrol better than me?” And he'd always say, “I married you, didn't I?” Eventually, she realized she'd have to settle for that.

One young trooper told his wife point blank that the highway patrol was the number one priority in his life, he was number two, and she came in a close third. Then something happened that changed his way of thinking.

“I had to go to a bridal shower that day,” his wife recalled, “and he was supposed to get off at 5:00
P.M. 
I fixed his supper, put it in the microwave, and left. I got home about eleven-thirty that night and he still hadn't come in. I hardly ever call the station but I was worried about him, so I called the highway patrol office and asked ‘Where's Terry?'

“‘Who is this?' the telecommumcator wanted to know.

“‘It's his wife.'

“‘I'm not sure where he is.'

“I knew something was going on and my heart was nearly jumping out of my chest.

“‘But he got off at 5:00
P.M.
,' I said. ‘Now where is he?'

“She put me on hold, then came back on the line and told me Terry was on his way to the sheriff's office and should be home soon. I went to bed but couldn't sleep. By 1:30
A.M. 
he still wasn't home. Finally, at two, he came in, shaking all over. I'd never seen him like that.

“He'd been on a routine traffic check when a pickup truck went by at a high speed. Terry went after the truck in his patrol car but
the driver veered into a cornfield and he had to get out and follow on foot. A young boy was driving. As he saw Terry running towards him, he turned the truck around and tried to run over him. He made two or three attempts, nearly hitting Terry each time.

“Terry pulled his gun and shot at the tires until the boy gave up and wrecked. Other officers arrived to help make the arrest, and that's when Terry learned the guy had just killed his mother and stepfather and was running from the scene of the crime. The boy kept saying, ‘I wanted to kill that trooper,' referring to Terry. And we know that he would have.

“After that, I had trouble sleeping until Terry got home from work. It took me two or three months to get over it.”

Nearly losing his life—plus the shooting death of a fellow officer (Trooper Giles Harmon)—made Terry realize that something could happen to him on patrol. He began to rethink his priorities.

“Now he tells me that God is first in his life,” says his wife. “I'm second, he is third, and the highway patrol comes fourth.”

Another patrol wife recalls seeing a television station flash the news that a trooper had been shot and killed in the same vicinity her husband was patrolling. No names or details were given.

“I was on the couch when the news report came and I got so scared I couldn't move, even to get to the telephone. In a situation like that, you just lie there wondering what you're going to do if this or that happens. Then you hear the back door open and he comes in. And you want to wring his neck for not calling.”

Some women are familiar with the risks and problems associated with a trooper's job before they marry into the patrol. But it doesn't seem to stop them.

She is the epitome of the cool, elegant blonde. He's the classic “tall, dark, and handsome.” They met in the emergency room where she was a nurse and where he, as a trooper, accompanied accident victims. On her part, it was hate at first sight.

“I didn't like him at all. I thought he was arrogant, showy, and into numbers when it came to women.”

For months, she refused to date him.

“I was at a low point, having just broken up with someone, and wasn't really interested in getting involved. Then a friend invited me to a birthday party and that's where David and I finally got to
know each other. I was surprised at how intelligent and sensitive he was. I guess I was intrigued by him. And I had respect for the patrol. I knew those guys were real professionals.”

Within a few months they were engaged. Both were twenty-seven, but she says he still had some growing up to do.

“He was immature,” she says, “and because of it got into a few problems on the job. For one thing, he was too aggressive. At times, I wasn't sure who was right—him, the patrol, or the public. A month before we got married, he got into a nasty fight. I was working that day and had gone to the cafeteria for lunch. Halfway there, I got paged to go back to the emergency room. There was David, bleeding, his clothes torn off.

“He had gotten into a motorcycle chase and a fight and as a result was accused of police brutality. It was all over the TV that night and in the newspapers. It was awful. And I thought, ‘Is this what I'm in for?'

“But David was having a hard time too. His sergeant came to the emergency room, walked in, and without saying a word to me, asked David what happened. He wasn't the least bit sympathetic. Just seemed worried about how it was going to look for the patrol.”

Now married seven years, this wife says she has no regrets about her decision and has come to appreciate the highway patrol and the service it provides.

“It's getting to be a good career,” she said. “But I think it takes a special breed of man to be a highway patrolman and a special breed of woman to be married to one. I don't mind being put in that category.”

Not everyone shares her view.

“The highway patrol almost wrecked my life,” maintains a thirty-year-old trooper wife.

She met her husband at a college dance in 1978. By the time they were seriously dating, he was considering the highway patrol as a career.

“I was hoping he'd go for a nine-to-five job,” she recalls, “and I really didn't think anything would come of this patrol business.” When it did, she was already emotionally involved in the relationship and says it was “too late” to back out. They were married after he graduated from patrol school and sent to a small town in the western part of the state.

She disliked both the people and the area.

“I had a degree in nursing, but the place didn't have a hospital or a doctor's office, so I had to drive an hour to and from work in order to keep a job.”

Her husband often patrolled the region's back roads alone, with little or no help if trouble arose.

“During that time, I had a lot of nightmares about him coming into the hospital on a stretcher.”

On the few occasions when their schedules allowed them time together, there was nowhere to go and little to do in the isolated town. Restaurants and theatres were sixty miles away. So were most of their family and friends.

Then he was transferred to a large city and things improved. She moved up in her career field and he found troopers who welcomed him into their circle. They bought a house and settled down.

Two years later they had a child, and new problems emerged.

“After the baby was born, I realized that if something happened to my husband, I'd be a single parent. So the possibility of his getting hurt became even more frightening. But the worst part was the hours. The highway patrol doesn't budge on the hours a trooper works, so the wife has to accommodate to his schedule. That means when I was working opposite shifts from him, or his hours changed suddenly, I had to find someone to keep our little girl. And it caused a lot of problems.”

In a fit of anger, she insisted her husband do something about it.

“I told him he would have to speak to his sergeant and explain to him that I can't always be the one to call work and ask them to change my hours, or excuse me from the job because of child care. After all, I went to school and was trying to build a career too. The highway patrol doesn't seem to understand that. So it got to the point where we argued a lot about who was going to keep her and who was going to get up early and take her to the sitter, etc. I felt like he was leaving too much of that responsibility to me.”

She also resented his staying out past his regular shift—especially when it involved no overtime pay.

“If he wasn't home when he was supposed to be, I couldn't sleep, wondering if he was hurt or where he was. Then I'd have to get up at 5:00
A.M. 
and go to work.”

To trade off baby-sitting chores, this couple worked opposite shifts
for more than a year, seldom seeing each other except in passing. Not surprisingly, they grew further and further apart.

“You lose a sense of communication and that's when the family breaks down,” said her husband. “If you don't see each other long enough to even talk about your problems, it's hard to work them out.”

They were on the verge of a separation when she was offered a job that gave her better, more stable hours, alleviating some of the pressure. Today, she still isn't crazy about the highway patrol, but she realizes her husband wouldn't be happy doing anything else.

“I would never ask him to quit because he loves it so much. And even if my marriage doesn't work out in the future, I wouldn't trade these years for anything.”

Every trooper wife, young or old, must live with the possibility that she could suddenly become a widow. Some women have resigned themselves to the fact their husbands face special risks on the job and refuse to dwell on it. Others take a philosophical attitude and decide that whatever happens will happen, and there isn't much they can do about it. Then there are women who never get over the worry.

Edna was one of those wives.

“If he's an hour or two late, you walk the floor and wring your hands because you know something's wrong. Even after I was a trooper wife for many years, I didn't get to the place where I accepted it. I knew he was out there working with criminal elements and that something could happen anytime.”

She would be proven all too right.

Dean and Edna Arledge had been married ten years when Dean became a trooper. A former hosiery mill employee, he had always admired the highway patrol and would, while driving, remark to his family, “If I was a trooper, I'd pull that guy over.” At age thirty-one, he joined the organization. If he'd waited another year, he was told, he'd have been too old to qualify.

Edna had mixed reactions to her husband's newfound career. During an interview as part of Dean's acceptance into the patrol, she was questioned by a sergeant who asked if she agreed to her husband becoming a trooper.

“No, not really. I wish he wouldn't,” she said.

“Well, at least you're honest,” he replied.

“At that time [1951], the troopers weren't paid for going to school,” she recalled, “so it was financially tough. We had two school-age children and I had to work to help support us. I only saw him once during the entire summer he was in training. He did okay in school, but it was harder than he thought. Two nights before graduation he called and said they had sent two boys home.

“‘I don't know if I'm going to make it or not,' he said. ‘Maybe I'll just catch the next bus out of here.'

“I knew he was worried and tired, but that if he gave up, I wouldn't be able to live with him.

“‘Honey,' I said, ‘if you get on that bus, don't get off here in Tryon. Just keep going.'

“He was all right after that and finished the course. We went down for graduation and I remember seeing him in his uniform for the first time. It was a disappointment. They couldn't afford to issue new outfits, so everybody had to wear old uniforms that had been turned in. None of them fit right and they had slick spots on the knees.

“Then we learned where we were being assigned. When they announced, ‘Ronda, North Carolina, in Wilkes County,' I looked at Dean and he was shaking his head. I didn't know where Ronda, North Carolina, was, but I had a sneaking idea it was somewhere we didn't want to be.”