Before my father’s death, I sat with him and asked questions about his time in the Pennsylvania State Police, specifically where he had been posted and how long he had spent in each Barracks.
He graduated from training in April of 1938 from an old Albright College campus in Myerstown. The building is still there. It is now the home of an evangelical seminary. The graduation ceremony took place in Harrisburg. So many troopers were coming onto the job that the Hershey campus could not accommodate the numbers and other sites were designated for training.
His first posting was in Ephrata. At every point, he reeled off the names of those he met there: Tony Discavage, Cpl. Hatter, John White (another Irishman, he said), Herman Reese. After 60 years, he had no problem remembering these names.
In 1939, he was transferred to Elverson, a few miles from my home. The barracks is now a private residence. It sits to the left of the old gas station. He patrolled the part of the County that has been my home for over 40 years.
He summoned the names with ease: Bob Wilt, Joe Dunleavey, Edward Egan, George “two-gun” Kurteson (he laughs every time he mentions him, this wild man. This is the only photo I could find of him. First row, far right. He is a big man). He and Kurteson graduated together in the same 1938 class in Myerstown.
He was sent to Hamburg in 1940: Cpl. Rothermel, Ed Strickland, John Beemer, Bill Hall, Walter Dean, and George Kurteson, again, who Dad said, “walked like a plow jockey, bow-legged with a swagger.”
Then Pottsville for 6 months. Then Pine Grove (Tulpehocken Street, looking South) in 1941 where he arrested Coal Police goons who had shot strikers at a strip mine in Donaldson. And Pine Grove where he fell under the command of a Cpl. who he described as a “son-of-a bitch”, a “thick-headed Dutchman”, who said no to everything: “Car for church? No.” The names of his fellow Troopers: Mel Clouser, Stanley Bydock, Joe Dunleavey, Nick Zolick, Earl Klinger, and George Kurteson, who we never met. His stories of our father would have been beyond value for us.
On December 7, 1941, Dad was on patrol in the late afternoon of a cloudy day and stopped at a store in Good Spring, Schuylkill County, nothing more than a crossroads in mining country. The red flag had been raised indicating an alert for the PSP Trooper in the area (their cars did not have radios then). This is how he found out about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
The next day he tried to enlist in the Coast Guard and was turned down. The PSP Commissioner refused to allow Troopers to enlist because the PSP could not get enough men to keep it effective as a police force.
In 1942, he was assigned to Indiantown Gap: the names appeared. There was never a hesitation. They came back to him without effort: Kurteson, who stayed with him for years of his early career, Adam Budjako, Carl Jeffries, Aladdin DeAngelo, Pete Salus, John Lanker.
The years of 1943 and 1944 were filled with piece work: in between transfers he was part of a security contingent at the Harrisburg Farm Show, at both Democratic and Republican Presidential Nominating Conventions where he served as a driver and security for politicians, on a War Bond Tour of the State with Paulette Goddard.
He served at Graterford Prison for 6 weeks outside the walls. He patrolled the grounds and ate and slept at the prison. At some point he also became a part of a PSP ‘Flying Squad’ whose job it would have been to meet Nazi Paratroopers with shotguns and hunting rifles.
In 1945 he went back to Hamburg and in 1946 to Lebanon where on a blind date he met my mother. They went dancing. Someone tell me that chance doesn’t govern much of our lives.
In Lebanon: Francis Bunch, Bill Wert, Claude Hartman, Jacob Oberholtzer, Bill Anselme, Adam Budjako, Carl Jeffries, Sgt. Henry Habig … and George Kurteson, who may have known our father better than anyone.
In 1948 he was transferred back to Hamburg in time for a blizzard that “threw up drifts as high as the cross arms of the telephone poles. They brought in equipment from Erie to plow old Route 22.”
The names. The names that he never forgot, this other family where he spent much of his waking hours: Ed Delco, Tom Eksko, Al Smutzler.
Something happened. The transfers stopped. I don’t know why. From 1950 to 1968, he was assigned to the Reading Barracks where he continued to patrol and also was in charge of Driver’s License examinations (where once a blind woman came for her examination and brought her friend with her saying that she would be her eyes for the test). His friends there: Wayne Ebert (who died directing traffic at the Reading Air Show), Jim Erisman, Arthur Macnally, Stanley Kramer.
From 1968 to 1972 he was in charge of the Hamburg Station, a job he loved: He took Benny Brooks, a young black Trooper and former 82nd Airborne Paratrooper, from the Reading Barracks with him. Their friendship lasted until my father’s death.
He retired in 1973 after who knows how many silent heart attacks and an open-heart surgery at Penn. Feeling queasy, he walked 2 blocks to his doctor’s office on Penn Avenue. At that point he was having a heart attack.
He died in 2004 at 90 soon after mowing the lawn at my sister and brother in law’s home.
His father died when he was 15 in an accident. He dropped out of school and went to work. He looked after his mother, brothers and sisters as best he could while he was a Trooper. He sent home over 50% of his paycheck each month and requested a transfer to the Philadelphia Barracks so that he could be close by.
He was a shy man who made friends easily and who inspired loyalty in his fellow Troopers. His children were lucky. We all wish we knew more of his stories.
Dad, on the far left, with Paulette Goddard.
