The last couple of weeks, I told stories of off duty jobs that escalated into police action situations. Then there was the time I was directing traffic in a busy intersection and got hit by a car cutting the corner, resulting in an injury that still acts up occasionally.
A new McDonald’s had opened in Plano in the early 1980s just a block from the police station. Traffic in and out of the place was snarling traffic on 15th Street, a major thoroughfare, so McDonald’s hired off-duty Plano Police Department officers to direct traffic during the lunch hour to help relieve the bottleneck.
I had signed up for a shift and was in uniform at one of the nearby intersections. I had just stopped east-west traffic on 15th and signaled for traffic on the cross street to begin rolling. The third or fourth car in line was some heavy battleship of a car from two decades earlier. As the old car approached the intersection, I could see that the driver was a diminutive old man, well past retirement age, straining to peer over the dashboard through the top curve of the steering wheel.
As the old codger passed the curb line, he accelerated. Without signaling, he cut to the left through the center of the intersection where I stood blocking traffic. Before I could jump back out of the way the left corner of his heavy chrome front bumper clipped my left kneecap and sent me sprawling onto the pavement. I looked at him as I was falling and he rolled on by, with the realization dawning on me that he had never seen me at all, much less that he knew he had just hit me. Laying prostrate on the pavement, I never even got a look at his license plate.
The rest of the drivers on all sides had seen what happened and nobody started to move until I had stood and resumed directing traffic. I could barely walk on my left leg, but continued until my shift on that assignment was over. I went home and iced the knee, but did not deem it necessary to get it X-rayed.
Now, forty years later, when I’m alert and full of energy I walk normally. But when I’m fatigued, I find that knee still giving me grief and making me limp. Going up or down stairs, I mostly just use my right leg to do all the work.
Today, I expect most cops would fill out an injury report and go for a medical assessment. But back in those macho days, you just got up and kept on keeping on. Nobody sought medical attention for something as wimpy as a sore knee.
For my last few years with the Fort Worth Police Department, even though I was a civilian in the crime lab up until retirement two years ago, I volunteered as an actor in staged scenarios at FWPD Academy. I was always amazed at how much better prepared the cadets are when they graduate from Academy today than we were fifty years ago when we got thrown out onto the streets cold turkey. I’m quite sure any of our new officers today would handle a lot of things better than I did when I was their age.
