I love interviews

At 6:30PM the three candidates for Sheriff of McHenry County gathered in the conference room of the Elgin office of the Daily Herald. More details tomorrow; it's late.

It was more lively than last week, and hopefully further interviews and maybe even debates will take place before November 2. Keith Nygren and Mike Mahon duked it out over issues, and I just sat back, for the most part, and watched them go at each other.

Keith said he was the only man in the room who had ever been a cop, so I had to jump in there. He knew that was untrue; I don't know why he would lie.

I was a police officer in 1963-64. Where was Keith then? Still in high school? Sure, it was part-time. Sure, it was a small town. Sure, it was in Iowa (the state to the left). But I had a badge and a gun and handcuffs and a ticket book, and I knew right where the night officer hid the keys to the police car between shifts.

Keith and Mike rattled off their extensive backgrounds, so I had to challenge them with all the cop shops where I had not gotten jobs:

U.S. Border Patrol (even though I scored 99 on the written test);
Littleton (Colo.) P.D., where I was #3 on the written test (they wouldn't process my application further, because they thought I made too much money selling life insurance and wouldn't be happy on a cop's pay):
Colorado State Police, where I was 1/4" short of the 5'9" minimum height and wore glasses;
Lakewood (Colo.) P.D., where at my age of 48 I wasn't as fast as the younger applicants on the P.E. test.

As I said Monday night, it's a good thing no one hired me. On the first day I would have been telling them everything that was wrong in the department, and then I would have been washing squad cars, not driving them!