A LOOK BACK:

“A policeman’s lot is not a happy one.”

You may recall this line comes from Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic opera “Pirates of Penzance.”

This week we’re going to look at some of the interesting incidents our policemen took part in and how some turned into something more unexpected.

The oil boom was in full swing in our town by 1922 as Police Chief Jack Tinsley was trying to uphold law and order with his small force of policemen.

Tinsley spotted Alex Fraziero on May 3, 1922, roaming aimlessly on the beach near 23rd Street (Goldenwest) looking more like an animal than a human with his long, unkempt hair and shaggy beard. As Tinsley approached Fraziero it was obvious this fellow had not bathed for some time.

He was arrested on a vagrancy charge for his own good and not in malice.

Tinsley later returned to the area around 23rd Street and found Fraziero had built a shelter of sticks and weeds on the beach. At night Fraziero would crawl inside and sleep to the sounds of the sea.

Fraziero was brought before Judge Charles Warner and received a sentence of a shave, haircut, bath and 30 days in jail. As for his shelter on the beach, the chief had it burned down.

In 1933 our police chief was LaVerne Keller and his force included six officers, two motorcycles and a single automobile.

Mr. M.E. Brown may have planned a Sunday at the beach, but on Aug. 20, 1933, the Los Angeles resident was driving along Ocean Avenue (now Pacific Coast Highway) near the bluffs in his Overland car when he hit a car driven by Nelson Mathias of Glendale.

When Officer Howard Robidoux arrived at the scene, Brown fled toward the beach on foot.

Robidoux spotted Brown as he was taking off his coat in preparation for a plunge into the ocean, but Robidoux had other plans for this hit-and-run driver and gave chase that led the two into the blue Pacific where Brown was apprehended.

Robidoux returned to the station with his prisoner where his fellow officers could hear the sounds of Robidoux’ seawater-soaked shoes and wet feet as he approached the desk.

After Brown was taken care of, the other officers had a good laugh about Robidoux’ wet feet that day.

On Nov. 14, 1933, two other officers spotted Frank Smith of Long Beach running shirtless and shoeless down Fifth Street at 2:30 a.m., and gave chase. After some difficulty, the out-of-breath officers caught up with Smith and he was taken to jail.

Police didn’t buy Smith’s story that he was “training for a marathon,” and he was fined $25 for being intoxicated.

In mid-1940 Huntington Beach Police Chief H.L. “Les” Grant was called to settle a neighborly argument. Residents on Alabama Street complained that roosters being raised by two neighbors on a small plot of land that neither owned was disturbing their slumber with their early morning crowing.

Grant’s task was to pacify the neighbors without ruffling the feathers of the two disgruntled citizens who each wanted the plot of land to themselves.

The owners of these fowls balked at getting rid of their roosters because it was not against any city ordinance to raise chickens in residential districts.

Grant saw that the noise stopped, and today, not a rooster’s crowing can be heard on Alabama.

The life of a policeman does have its lighter side, especially at the time when D.W. “Boxie” Huston called the station Sept. 15, 1940, to report that a dog had got itself stuck in an old sump hole near 10th Street.

When officers arrived they found the dog was really a cat, and after rescuing the feline from its plight, gave it a rudimentary cleaning up with the cat completing the job.

In the early 1940s Officer Alfred Parker was called to the beach because some kids were misbehaving.

Parker quickly caught up to the kids in his patrol car on the beach road and while he was arresting them, he watched as his patrol car rolled off the raised road and landed halfway in the sand because he forgot to apply the emergency brake. It would take two tow trucks to pull the front wheels out of the sand and back onto the road.

Al Greer called police on the Saturday afternoon of March 17, 1945, to complain that several boys were tearing around in their cars on the old Army campgrounds on Lake Street, wasting rubber and gasoline.

Assistant Police Chief Gene Belshe drove over to the scene by a devious route to surprise the young hot rodders.

But it was Belshe who was more surprised when his patrol car got stuck in a mud hole on 13th Street, several hundred feet from his objective.

The teen drivers stopped spinning their wheels and watched a red-faced Belshe as he was pulled from the mud by a tow truck.

In 1951 Chief Ben Dulaney began to reorganize the police department and on Sept. 28, 1951, a tropical storm rumbled into town with rain, thunder and lightning.

Officer Jack Hillis was on patrol around 1 a.m. when he received a radio message to go to his home at 1102 Pine St.

When he arrived home he found that a lightning bolt had struck his home, traveled down his telephone line and burnt out his telephone.

In November 1951 a group of boys had been out partying at our beach and on the way home began chasing some girls standing on the sidewalk talking in front of Lt. John Seltzer’s home on 7th Street.

When Seltzer went to the door, a Cypress boy hurled a kid’s tricycle at him and also struck him in the face, knocking Seltzer to the ground.

But Seltzer had the last laugh when he got their license number and traced the car to the youth’s home, where their parents delivered the boys to police. They were charged with assault, battery, intoxication and disorderly conduct.

In November 1996 a mother and her little son returned to their Mora Kai apartment to hear snoring coming from a spare bedroom.

At first they didn’t see anyone but finally found that a 38-year-old burglar was sleeping like a baby under the bed.

Police were called and roused the intruder. After a search they found he had taken a $1 hair barrette from a cabinet in the apartment. Police found that the burglar had been “drinking a lot” and had broken into the apartment and laid down and went to sleep.

Police arrested the snoring burglar for residential burglary.

JERRY PERSON is the city’s historian and longtime Huntington Beach resident. If you have ideas for future columns, write him at P.O. Box 7182, Huntington Beach, CA 92615.