In 2007, 95-year-old Verna Oller sat in her favorite chair and talked about her plans for the future — including her dream for her secret accumulation of millions that she hoped to give to the City of Long Beach for a swimming pool “for all ages.”

When they pass me (and often several other cars, too) barreling along Sandridge Road or the Pacific Highway — both two lane roads, neither with much shoulder and often with a deep ditch where a pullout would be far more convenient — I always wonder where the cops are. Always. After all these years.

Nine times out of 10, it seems to me, the vehicle roaring by me is a big, shiny-new truck which might have once been driven by a testosterone-hyped young man but now… not so much. I see young people, grey heads, women and men in equal numbers as they flash by. I don’t know when I gave up wishing that a sheriff or a city cop would come out of a side street and nail the sucker.

I white-knuckle it, try not to flip them off when I find myself directly behind them at the stoplight on the Highway and attempt to think good thoughts. Not for them, you understand. For my own peace of mind. Mostly, I go into some self-protective mode, blocking out the here and now of “constitutional sheriffs” and cops carrying automatic weapons and other alarming realities.

And then I think of when we played Cops and Robbers back in the 1940s and ‘50s — right up there in popularity with Cowboys and Indians and probably equally non-PC these days. I wasn’t crazy about Cops and Robbers, but that’s because I was several generations too early to have a babysitter like Verna Oller. (You may remember Verna who left the $4.5 million to the City of Long Beach for a swimming pool. But that was all a long time later and another story, entirely.)

Babysitter extraordinaire

I first met Verna at the insistence of Carolyn Glenn who asked me to interview Mrs. Oller for my “North Beach Girls of the Teens and Twenties” series that ran in this newspaper in 2007. Verna, Carolyn told me, was one of a kind. At 95, she still split and stacked her own wood, did her own gardening and housework, and took a daily ration of food to the two horses boarding in the field beyond her yard. She lived in the house that she and her husband had built in 1934 for a total of $750. But those aren’t the virtues that prompted me to ask Verna for an interview. It was Carolyn’s story of their first interaction back when the Carolyn and Guy Sr.’s kids were primary-school age.

“I needed a babysitter and my usual woman was out of town,” Carolyn told me. “A friend recommended Verna and her sister, a recently retired nurse, who lived nearby. I went to see them and the arrangement was made. Imagine my shock when I went to pick up the kids and found all the windows and doors of the house wide open with ladders leaning up to several of those windows. And on one of those ladders was Verna! Climbing fast!”

It turned out that they were all playing Cops and Robbers, chasing each other up and down stairs through open doorways and on ladders, hiding under beds and in closets and having so much fun that it took Caroline some coaxing to get the kids to come home! Now that’s a game I could have gotten behind when I was young and spry. (And never mind that Verna was then in her seventies! Age was never a factor with Verna.)

And now? Cops and Robbers is probably ancient history and I’m not quite sure how a modern equivalent would go. Here in Pacific County, we seem to have elected a sheriff that has had no training in either the law or its enforcement. Hard to believe that a year ago, most of us had not heard the term “Constitutional Sheriff” and were blissfully unaware of how loosey-goosey our election-for-sheriff standards are.

Wake-up call

Certainly, I was one of the uninformed. When the controversies and headlines in the local papers began, I looked up “Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association” for starters. (And let me say right here that our Sheriff, Daniel Garcia, has maintained that he does not belong to this organization…) This is what I learned on Wikipedia:

The Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association (CSPOA) is a political organization of local police officials in the United States who contend that federal and state government authorities are subordinate to the local authority of county sheriffs and police. Self-described constitutional sheriffs assert that they are the supreme legal authority with the power and duty to defy or disregard laws they regard as unconstitutional. As a result, they may sometimes be referred to as sovereign sheriffs…. The CSPOA has claimed a membership of 400.

In an interview with the Willapa Harbor Herald last March Garcia said, “The Sheriff’s Office is here to serve and protect the people. We are the only peace officers directly accountable to the people. This is unique in that in its simplest form we are to keep the peace and arrest those that break it. Serving the needs of the people is challenging these days but still needs to be done.”

Perhaps speeding on our rural roads doesn’t count as breaking the peace to our untrained sheriff. But were I the one to give him his first lesson in law enforcement, I’d remind him about visibility, setting an example, and instilling confidence in us normal, law-abiding citizens. And perhaps I’d privately lament that he didn’t have a babysitter like Verna Oller.