Saluting Jack Tinsley, our city’s first police chief

It was in a small farmhouse near Dallas that our future city marshal and Huntington Beach’s first chief of police, Jack Tinsley, was born.

Yes, Jack was his true first name, not John or Jonathan. That is the way Texans name their children.

There was a time in Tinsley’s early life that he found himself walking with his parents along Akard Street in Dallas and thinking that all these huge buildings along the street were not the place he wanted to grow up in. But a young lad just doesn’t have a say where his parents want to live.

Jack remembered that image of tall buildings, and when he was old enough he left Dallas and headed for the open spaces of Colorado to take up farming. He arrived in Rocky Ford, Colo., and became a man of the soil.

A story he used to tell was that one day, while he was delivering cantaloupes in town, a town official approached him and asked him if he would like to become the town’s fire chief.

It may sound like a step up from a farmer, but in those days the chief was also the night-desk sergeant, bellboy and the one who had to pull the hose cart to a fire.

But even with all these duties, Jack took the job, and in a short while had bought a new chemical hose cart for the town, and the town council was even thinking about giving him an assistant.

Jack tells of how he became the town’s police chief when one day, in 1907, a field hand got drunk and created a disturbance.

The town’s two-man police force went to the man’s house to arrest him and as they entered the house, they were both shot dead and the man barricaded himself inside.

About 12 hours into the siege, someone suggested that they get the city fire department (Tinsley) so he could be ready to put out the fire that the men were planning to make of the house.

When Tinsley arrived at the scene, the mayor suggested that Jack go inside and bring the man out.

Jack was willing, and creeping beneath a window he was able to reach the front door.

He smashed in the door and covered the man with his pistol.

With a lynch mob outside, Jack sneaked the man out of the back door and into a waiting automobile to be taken to jail before the mob knew it.

With the town now without a police force, the mayor suggested Tinsley be appointed temporary police chief. Later, he would be made permanent police chief by the town council late in 1907.

Jack would remain police chief of Rocky Ford for the next six years until he received an offer to become city marshal from a small beach town in California.

As the bitter snows covered Rocky Ford in December of 1913, Jack accepted the offer and left for sunny California. After a few weeks of sightseeing our state, he landed in Huntington Beach, where he became our town’s fourth city marshal on Feb. 4, 1914 with a salary of $75 a month.

Jack asked the Board of Trustees (City Council) for an assistant, and on April 9, 1914, his request was granted and J.W. Walker became his deputy marshal.

We were a sleepy little beach community up until the oil boom of 1920 and there was little crime for the two to contend with.

In January 1919, Tinsley was made street superintendent along with his duties of city marshal.

But politics reared its ugly head and entered the quiet life of Jack Tinsley when Board of Trustee President E. E. French and seven others filed for the position of city marshal. Of course, the other board members chose its own E.E. French as city marshal.

Jack left Huntington Beach that year to farm the Owens River Valley for the next two years.

But his former town of Huntington Beach didn’t forget their former marshal and in 1921 called Jack to come back to become, on April 1, 1921, its city marshal for a second time.

In June 1921, the title of city marshal was changed to that of police chief.

By 1924, Tinsley had developed his office into a model police force, and you might have read in earlier columns how Tinsley captured two burglars by using a little Sherlock Holmes deductive reasoning and how he regained his stolen police car that same year.

In 1927, politics again entered into the picture when Tinsley requested that his officers have one day off per week.

The Board of Trustees refused his request and sought instead Tinsley’s resignation and received it along with several other police officers.

Jack Tinsley was rehired as a Huntington Beach police officer in 1931. When Police Chief Charles Stewart resigned on Dec. 14, 1931, the job was offered to Jack, but fearing that another city council would again want to change police chiefs, he declined the offer and instead remained as a police officer.

Jack would remain on our police force until his retirement as desk sergeant in 1945.

With time to do what he wanted, he and his wife Belle would continue living at their home at 309 10th Street until his passing in the mid-1950s.

Jack Tinsley lived to witness his town’s police force develop from a one-man operation into one of the greatest police departments in our state, and he played a very important part in making it so.