The Good Ol’ Days Continue…

Both of my sisters married Arkansas country boys, and I ended up with two of the finest brothers-in-law that I could have asked for. I don’t know if I could have done a better job of picking husbands for the two of them. One of the two became a highway patrolman. Billy Chadwick grew up at Witt Springs, Arkansas in the high mountains just to the north of the Buffalo River headwaters, some of the Ozarks prettiest country.

Just a couple of years or so younger than me, he began his work for the Missouri Highway Patrol in the Springfield area, and I lived in north Arkansas at the time. We fished and hunted together in both states, when he had days off. Back in the early days, we hunted wild turkeys when there weren’t nearly as many of them, and learned how to hunt them together in our early twenties.

He was always someone quick to laugh, to enjoy the humor of situations involving hunting and fishing. I played a lot of jokes on him back then. We were hunting in Texas County probably 25 years ago, and he killed a nice gobbler that had practically run from ridge to another. It was the most anxious gobbler I can remember. But it wasn’t killed; apparently it was just stunned. We were walking back to the pick-up with that gobbler across his shoulder and his yellow tag around it’s leg when it came alive, and started spurring him. Billy dropped the gobbler and it took off running as if it weren’t even hurt. Thankfully he still had a shell in his gun and he shot it running hard at 35 yards. I can still see that yellow tag flashing on that leg, and often wondered what some hunter might have thought if he called up that gobbler on some other day and found someone’s tag on it’s leg.

Of course I took the opportunity to really act angry, throwing my hat down and kicking a nearby stump. Billy was puzzled by why was I so upset? “If you would have let him go,” I said, “I could have called him back again!”

Once when he was a young trooper, I saw him along the side of highway 65 south of Ozark Missouri, with a violator sitting in his car. I pulled in behind him and walked up to his window, and he told me in a serious tone to just get in the back seat and wait for a minute. I climbed in and proceeded to tell him I had been speeding that morning and wanted to turn myself in. Still attentive to writing a warning ticket for that young man in the front seat, Billy never cracked a smile; he just told me he would take care of me when he finished. That kid in the front seat gave me a sideways glance that assured me he thought I was crazy. These many years later, I am sure he is still telling that story.

My dad recalls the time when Billy was a young patrolman and he came home to hunt ducks on the Big Piney. He and dad floated the river behind a blind on the old johnboat, jump-shooting ducks. A lone mallard came flying up the river at perfect range, and Billy shot twice and missed. As the mallard passed by, dad picked up his shotgun and fired twice, also failing to pull a feather. Dad recalls how Billy reloaded his shotgun, declaring in a very serious tone, “If that duck would have had a gun, he would have got both of us!”

I was looking back through all my photos recently to find pictures of Billy when he hunted and fished with me all over the Midwest. His hair was thick and brown then, but white now, perhaps because of the strain of a difficult job. Billy became a highway patrol Captain about ten or fifteen years ago for troop G, with headquarters in Willow Springs. During that time, four highway patrolmen were killed in his troop, and anyone could see what a toll that took on him.

This past week, he retired, and hopefully the hunting and fishing we did in our younger years can continue now that the awesome responsibility of that job has ended. We had some times…. and hopefully there are many more to come, and some more great photos. You’ll read about some of them in this column in years to come. Now it won’t hurt his reputation if folks learn that he married into that Dablemont bunch.

Billy Chadwick was an inspiration to me because of his ability to always stay calm and collected, and to think rationally in situations where I always was prone to lose my cool and let emotions and a quick temper cause me to do the wrong thing more often than not. While I was trying to teach him how to hunt and fish, I think I might have been the one who learned the most.

In Law Enforcement, as in any other field of professional people, there are some bad apples. In the Ozarks, it is difficult to find a police force or a sheriff’s department, where there aren’t people who shouldn’t be there. Corruption is easy to see around us, sometimes it is harder to see the men who are doing things right, because they have a low profile.

The reason that corruption in law enforcement is not a bigger problem than it is, is because of honest men who have the integrity to do what I right. Long before Billy, I knew men in highway patrol who were like that. He was another one like those, and there are more like him because of the influence he had. Thank God for men like that, who risk their life to help and protect innocent people, making the things we believe in work. Thank God for any man who says, “I will do what is right, regardless of the consequences”. Doing what is right is seldom doing what is easiest.

I mention that because this past month, the Missouri Department of Conservation paid out about a million dollars of our taxpayer money to a conservation agent who did the right thing, and reported another agent who was breaking the law. He was fired for doing it, and he sued the Department. His name was Kyle Carroll. The agent he reported, Roger Wolken had conducted and illegal search in an attempt to implicate someone and he is still working for the MDC, now promoted to a supervisor. What right is there in that?

Carroll could have been reinstated as a result of winning the lawsuit, but he chose to keep the present position he has as a state highway patrolman. Because of the MDC power, I doubt if one word of this will be seen on TV. or found in the pages of the large city newspapers. Is it newsworthy, nearly a million dollars we all paid because of several corrupt MDC employees?

I will write more about this next week, and try to give some facts you will not see anywhere else. I’ll give the exact figures, and the names of some of the other employees involved, three of whom have resigned.

My website is www.larrydablemontoutdoors.blogspot.com and my e-mail address is lightninridge@windstream.com. Write to me at Box 22, Bolivar, Mo. 65613