One of my most embarrassing moments came when I was the ID Officer for Kerrville Police Department in the late 1970s. On the day in question, I was driving east on Water Street toward the intersection where it joined Highway 27 toward Center Point. I was driving a 1973 Ford Gran Torino, white over bright red, that was one of several unmarked cars we used in CID and for Crime Scene response. As I drew close to the intersection, I observed a traffic accident that had just occurred in the intersection when a car headed east on Broadway had attempted a left turn onto Travis Street. All drivers and passengers were out walking around so I inferred nobody was seriously injured.
I radioed the dispatcher about the accident and asked her to send a marked unit with a uniformed officer to work the accident. I also advised I would be standing by until he arrived. I pulled into the middle of the intersection.
I left the keys in the ignition with the engine running as I shifted the transmission into park. As I started out the driver’s door, from force of habit I hit the lock button to lock the car. Then I exited and slammed the car door behind me. At the last second, I realized I had hit the lock but had left the keys in the ignition. I tried to reach back and stop the door from slamming, but I was too late and the momentum closed the car door, the finality of the loud click alerting me to the fact I had just locked myself out of my car in the middle of the intersection.
I was wearing a lime green double-knit leisure suit, very fashionable at the time. I had a coordinated shirt with the shirt collar folded over on the outside of the leisure suit jacket, and my long sleeve cuffs rolled back over the cuffs of the suit jacket.
The problem was that as I had reached back to try and catch the door, I had managed to get my right middle finger on the edge of the door. My finger got slammed in the closing car door with the middle section of my finger wedged into the crack between the door and the frame. The crack was just wide enough that it hadn’t broken my finger. But it was clamped firmly on the section between the two knuckles. I couldn’t extract my finger because my knuckle was too big to pull out of the crack.
So there I stood, resplendent in my lime green leisure suit, firmly attached by a locked car door to a shiny white over red Gran Torino with its engine still running, while I waved happily at passing motorists with my left hand.
A few minutes later, the patrol vehicle arrived and the uniformed officer waved at me as he got out of his squad car. I waved back and just stood there like an idiot. He began his job of investigating the accident, interviewing the drivers and witnesses, calling for wreckers, etc., all the while wondering why I was just standing next to a running vehicle in the middle of the intersection.
When he finally came over to talk to me, I asked him sheepishly to please radio the dispatcher and have another officer bring me the spare set of keys to the Gran Torino so I could extract myself from my predicament.
You might say that’s the stuff legends are made of. It took a long time to live that little incident down.