For the week of December 12 - 18, 2001

Lt. Pat Pidgeon retires from Sheriff’s Department

Fellow officers recall 31 years of service

---

"Pat was the best back-up in any kind of call. You never had to question that he’d be right there with you. That speaks a lot for him."

Dennis Haynes, former Blaine County Sheriff and Ketchum Police Chief

---

By JEFF CORDES
Express Staff Writer

Americans have developed a better appreciation of the work done by policemen and firemen in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

There is no finer definition of public service than the men and women who keep the peace, fight the fires, clean up the messes and generally stay on alert, 24 hours a day.

Barbara and Pat Pidgeon relax, shortly after Pat’s retirement party in September. Express photo by Willy Cook

Quietly and effectively, they make sure our lives run smoothly. Many work two jobs to make ends meet. Their reward is the satisfaction that comes with a job well done.

For 31 years, former Hailey resident Pat Pidgeon patrolled the roads and alleys and canyons of Ketchum and Blaine County as a police officer and trusted member of the Blaine County Sheriff’s Department.

You didn’t hear much about Pidgeon, who retired in September and moved with his wife Barbara to Buhl. Like most police officers, he stayed in the background, steered clear of politics and went out and did his job.

Colleagues appreciated him the most. If you were going into a tough spot, you wanted Pidgeon nearby.

Former Blaine County Sheriff and Ketchum Police Chief Dennis Haynes said, "Pat was the best back-up in any kind of call. You never had to question that he’d be right there with you. That speaks a lot for him."

Fellow officers spoke a lot and joked a lot about Pidgeon back on Sept. 15, four days after the terrorist attacks, when they staged a retirement party for Pidgeon at Deane Johnson’s house south of Ketchum.

The mood was somber, since this country had just been attacked. But the social get-together served as a bonding occasion for the many law enforcement officials who came to salute Lt. Pidgeon on his retirement.

After dinner, Sheriff Walt Femling acted as the master of ceremonies and started the roast. The mood loosened up quickly. One by one, colleagues strode to the microphone and opened up with identical disclaimers:

They would confess that they had plenty of stories about Pidgeon, but none they could tell out loud. Such introductions prompted laughter all around, and speculation that Pidgeon had gotten to the speakers earlier.

Then they went ahead and told the stories anyhow. Ninety-nine percent of the content had to do with Pidgeon’s penchant for driving fast. As Pidgeon always says, he’s never had a car that didn’t have a powerful engine.

Forthrightness has always been a Pidgeon quality, along with his full speed ahead personality.

One speaker, former prosecutor Gary Starkey, told about when he was just starting out and was matched with Pidgeon interviewing a suspect.

Young and idealistic, Starkey said he tended to give the suspect the benefit of the doubt—feeling his pain, so to speak. Pidgeon, inclined otherwise, circled the suspect warily while Starkey did his sympathizing thing.

His patience exhausted, Pidgeon finally bore down, doing everything but taking the suspect by the shirt and shaking the truth out of him. The suspect, suddenly, was very accommodating with the information.

Startled by the success of sheer intimidation, Starkey tried to regain some of the higher ground by saying that, yes, the police would now go out and retrieve the stolen property. "Hell, no," Pidgeon said. "He can go get it himself and bring it in here."

Being a police officer is all about personal responsibility.

After he first came to Ketchum for a weekend from Portland, Ore. in January 1960, Pidgeon spent seven years as a ski lift mechanic for Sun Valley and worked part-time for Ketchum’s one-man law, Les Jankow.

Pidgeon said, "I asked Les when I first got on the job, how do I know if something is against the law? Les said, well, you know the Ten Commandments, don’t you? Pretty much, I said. And he said, if it’s against the Ten Commandments, more than likely it’s against the law."

At Pidgeon’s retirement party, Sheriff Femling was a little dismayed that Haynes had to leave the roast early for another obligation.

Haynes, now a resource officer for the Blaine County School District doing security at Wood River High School, has known Pidgeon longer than anyone else and presumably has access to most of the Pidgeon stories.

I tracked down Haynes at the high school, on a mission to dig out some of the Pidgeon stories. Haynes confessed he had plenty of stories about Pidgeon, none he could tell out loud.

Then, behind closed doors, he proceeded to tell them. Probing to test the reach of the general domain, every so often Haynes would begin a tale of yesteryear with the question, "You haven’t heard this one, have you?"

And there was a lot of laughter that day in Haynes’ cozy little office—the kind of laughter that gets cops through memories of the bad accidents, misfortune, law breaking and unfairness of the world they face.

Of course, none of those stories can be told here. But enough of the basic stuff remains to fill out a picture of Pat Pidgeon and hold him up as an example of dedicated people who tirelessly do the work of the public.

"It was a good, rewarding job, and you’ll never find one with better job security," said Pidgeon. "I was never bored. There was always something to do and every day was different.

"There were a lot of satisfying days. I was proud I made it through."

 

The early days

Born in New York City, Pidgeon moved with his mother to Portland, Ore. at a young age and graduated from Lincoln High School.

He entered the U.S. Air Force in 1954 and served "three years, five months and 19 days."

In Jan. 1960 Pidgeon and his friend Darrell McClure came to Ketchum for a weekend and essentially Pat never left. His future bride worked for Sun Valley Company. Pat and Barbara married in April 1962 and had the first of their three daughters in 1965.

Pidgeon worked fixing ski lifts on Baldy. "He was strong, with forearms like Popeye from turning wrenches on the mountain," Haynes said.

With two kids and a Hailey house he bought in 1967, Pidgeon supplemented his income working part-time on special holidays for Ketchum’s only police officer, Les Jankow. When small-town politics cost Jankow his job in 1969, Pidgeon briefly became Ketchum’s only cop.

Most of the police work was done at night, in the bars, back then.

"I’d get off the mountain at 4:30 and go to work in the police job until the bars closed," said Pidgeon.

He would drive the city’s police car, a 1960 Plymouth, back home to Hailey and return it the next morning—parking it in a prominent place to serve as a daytime traffic control device, although nobody was in it.

"Ben Jewell, the police commissioner, would move the car so it wouldn’t stay in one place," Pidgeon said.

Local police work had its own unique demands.

Pidgeon said, "It was difficult in Blaine County. Police officers in other jurisdictions dealt with the same people so you knew who the bad guys were. Here, every season, there was a whole new group and you had to learn who the bad guys were."

With Jankow out of job, Ketchum went looking for someone to head up what was then called the Ketchum Marshal’s office. The city came up with a package deal in Haynes and sidekick Jerry Engelbert.

"Ted Werry hired us to come up to do the job," said Haynes. "I was a deputy in the sheriff’s office in Twin Falls, and Jerry was in the Twin Falls police department. We lifted weights together. We arrived in a pickup with the bare essentials Dec. 7, 1969."

Pidgeon greeted them at the door. "Pat was the first one who met us," Haynes recalled. "I was wondering if we hadn’t gone back 50-60 years, going from Twin to Ketchum."

Haynes added, "I remember he got out of that old two-wheel-drive Plymouth, which just had the one light on top and a 15-watt radio. He was wearing an old, holey pair of Levis, a down jacket, a single-action 44 or 45 in a shoulder holster and a pair of boots that had never seen polish.

"I was making $650 a month and Jerry $550. We talked Pidgeon into going to work for us. He’d work our days off, and we paid him a ridiculously low hourly wage."

Haynes changed the name of the agency to the Ketchum Police Department and the force grew. From two officers and one relief man, it grew in a couple of years to a five-man force—Pidgeon moving into a full-time position as night sergeant.

"It was a tumultuous time," said Haynes. "The town was more liberal than Twin Falls. The hippies didn’t like us and Ketchum was growing."

Pidgeon did the job effectively, in his own way. Haynes said, "You didn’t really tell Pat what to do. He had his own way of doing it. You just guided him in the right direction.

"We called him Silver Tongue, because he didn’t use much finesse with the public," said Haynes with a laugh. "He was an excellent cop, but I guess you could say that Pat had a difficult time with public relations.

"He might not have been politically correct, but he was good. He had a way of pissing people off, just the things he would say or do. But those people he pissed off probably had it coming.

"Behind that gruff exterior, though, Pat had a real compassion and love for the community. Even though I had to go around apologizing for him a lot, he was dedicated to his work, loyal to me and had a heart as big as all Ketchum."

In Oct. 1976 Pidgeon took a job for Tom Campion in the Blaine County Prosecutor’s Office and became the first police investigator in the state of Idaho. For the next 25 years he worked for Blaine County.

After five years in plain clothes, Pidgeon went to work as an investigator for the sheriff’s office after Haynes was elected Blaine County Sheriff in 1981. For a dozen years Pidgeon did his share of indispensable behind-the-scenes police work.

He drove a lot of people to prison. He assisted other government agencies and served civil papers and summonses for the U.S. Marshal’s Service of the Department of Justice. He arrested 250 people for DUI.

"I used to take drunk drivers home," said Pidgeon. "Then I went to a wreck where a drunk killed two kids—and I started arresting them. But the worst thing that bothered me was kids committing suicide."

For the last seven years Pidgeon worked in the Blaine County Jail, running the day-to-day operations and finishing up his 31-year career as a lieutenant Sept. 30. Once, he saved a prisoner’s life in jail. Those are the things you remember in police work.

To earn extra money, Pidgeon for nearly 20 years has weathered bad weather and impossible hours to drive the Idaho Mountain Express negatives to Burley, where the weekly newspaper is printed each Tuesday night. He drives the truck, helps load and drives back in the dead of night.

"I enjoy doing it," said Pidgeon, who still does what Femling calls
"Pat’s paper route," even after his recent retirement. "I like toys. The job paid for my motor home and I didn’t steal too much from my family."

Not surprisingly, Pidgeon drove a hard bargain this summer when the developer of the new Albertson’s parcel wanted to complete the puzzle and acquire the Pidgeon home of 34 years, which is located at the corner of Empty Saddle Trail and S.H. 75.

Pidgeon got his price. He gave his snowblower and shovel to his 34-year-old middle daughter, Leslie, who lives in Bellevue and works for Redfish Technologies. Without much hesitation, Pat and Barbara bought a two-and-a-half acre parcel with 2,600 square-foot house just north of Buhl.

Barbara Pidgeon worked a slew of different jobs for Sun Valley Company, ending up in personnel, before ending her nearly 40-year stint with the company in 1999. Now, she’s a little closer to her grandchildren.

Oldest daughter Dana, 36, married to Brooks Aberg of Boise, has a one-year-old named Mitchell. Dana was one of the best athletes in the early years of girls’ sports at Wood River High School—and you can bet her father made his opinion known at her basketball games in the early 1980s.

Pam, 31, got married Sept. 9 to Chad Nelson of Beaverton, Ore.

Both Pat, who turned 65 in October, and Barbara acknowledge that they are going to miss Blaine County.

Even though a plaque they gave him at the retirement party read, "Lt. Pat Pidgeon: May life never restrain you from living your retirement dreams," it’s going to take a while to get police work out of Pat’s blood.

Until he learned of the age restriction, he toyed with the idea of becoming an air marshal, in the wake of Sept. 11. One day, while tinkering in the expansive garage at his new house, he saw some police cars responding to a call and was tempted to go to their assistance, for back-up.

"I thought about it," Pidgeon said. "Then I realized that I didn’t have to be there, so I went back to what I was doing. It was sort of a nice feeling."

 

The Idaho Mountain Express is distributed free to residents and guests throughout the Sun Valley, Idaho resort area community. Subscribers to the Idaho Mountain Express will read these stories and others in this week's issue.