Captain Wilfred O. Jyrkas

In this excerpt of an oral history interview retired Captain Jyrkas shares stories of being a new recruit in 1949, early community policing, a challenging assignment, and how faith can contribute to being an officer.

Interviewed November 18, 2005 by Kate Cavett of HAND in HAND Productions

Wilfred O. Jyrkas

• Appointed patrolman July 29, 1949
• Promoted to Sergeant August 11, 1960
• Lieutenant December 14, 1965
• Captain November 29, 1971
• Retired August 28, 1986

The Interview

1949 Recruit becomes expert traffic officer

My name is Wilfred Jyrkas I went on the Saint Paul Police Department July 27, 1949, and retired in 1986, thirty-seven years and held most ranks in the Department, worked primarily in uniform and I was a senior captain at the time I retired. Before joining the department I was working as a cement laborer. It was the old fashioned way of mixed cement by hand and the cement blocks were seventy-five pounds a piece and I worked for block layer and while it made me in good shape, I didn’t necessarily think I was in a lifetime job.

A neighbor suggested I take the police test and I kind of said, “Who, me?” because I kind of thought of myself and a couple of my buddies as being a little bit on the wild side in our neighborhood and I didn’t really see myself as being a law enforcer. Although, I have to back up and say, if we played cops and robbers, I always wanted to be the cop. Going back even younger, all of my little heroes were cops, so, maybe that was destined to be.

After World War II there was a spurt—of course, all the veterans came home that survived the war and had to get their jobs back, and I didn’t seem to ever have any problem getting work. I got work all the time, but it was at the laborer level or beginning factory help. One day I left the house and had three jobs during the course of the day. That was how hard it was, you could walk out of one plant and walk right into another one and offer yourself. But the strange thing was if I got the job they told me, “Show me your hands,” and they ran their hands over your hands, if you had calluses you got hired. Calluses on the hand, not on the brain. So, I was a little tired of this moving around, so when Harrington[1], it was a Harrington, Charlie Harrington, who was a patrolman, offered me a chance, he said, “Why don’t you take the test.” That’s the first I really thought about it and I did, I took the test and passed it and went on the Department.

As a recruit in 1949, I was probably one of the younger officers that went on, but I was a veteran. At that time I was a veteran of World War II, I had veteran status. I had been in the Naval Air Corps briefly, I enlisted in V5, which was a pilot program and then I had gone to, what they call a V12 portion, which was a college, Muhlenberg College [Allentown PA] out east.

From my military experience, a number of things served me well. I was in the Naval Air for about six months and then World War II came to an end, they didn’t need anymore pilots, so then I went out. Then I enlisted in the Army in the fall. Then I did a tour of duty in Japan in the occupation. That was an infantry outfit, so it was infantry training over and over again. When I came home from there, I was joining the police department. I was on the Department about a year. Well, October of 1950 I got recalled as an infantryman to Korea. I put thirteen months of combat in over there and then came back to the Department again. I hadn’t been on the Department all that long before I got that combat experience, too.

As a Saint Paul recruit we had two weeks of training. It was primarily lectures, probably the only really strong classes we had were taught by the FBI. We had an old G-man, I mean a G-man, not an FBI agent, who taught us. The difference between a G-man and the current agents are the G-man carried fifty dollars, which was a lot of money in those days, in their wallet. And their instructions were, if you see a wanted person, you stay with them until you can contact us, and that means follow them onto a train, a plane, a bus, whatever.

I remember some of his lectures very clearly. The primary one, which became kind of a, well, I think, a real motivation, is try not to hurt anybody, but remember it’s better you go on trial for their murder than they go on trial for yours. It’s just a job. So, that was one thing you kind of filed away and put in the back of your head. We had two FBI agents and the other guy’s name was Anderson, I believe, and he taught me a lot about cars and auto theft and robberies. But old Sam Hardy, he was full of stories, he knew a million stories and, of course, they were all from the old bootleg days and gangster days, a very interesting man, but philosophically a great cop, just wanted the things to be right.

He had the drive to take and make the community better, I think. It’s hard to put into words, but, you know, you constantly zero in on how you control these 10, 15% of the public that won’t obey the laws and will take advantage of every other human being they come in contact with. He left a mark on them. In that two weeks, we also had a little time in the gymnasium and practice come-alongs holds and things of that nature and take downs. What else did we have?

We did work with a veteran officer for about a week or maybe two. I remember stopping the first fellow for going through a red light and my partner says, “You might as well get your feet wet, go on up there and write him a tag for going through the red light.” I was shaking so bad, I didn’t know if I could do it.

By the end of my career I probably wrote more tags than anybody else on this Department, because that was my specialty, traffic, but the first one was tough. Keep yourself composed, 90% of the people that I came in contact with after the enforcement event, said thank you. The only thing they could really thank me for was trying to treat them like a human being, because I tried to follow that once I got over this first hump.

But the first time, I think it was at the end of two weeks, Joe Renteria[2] and I got assigned to a car. He was a brother rookie, we came on the same time, and we went out and we got our first accident call. We never investigated an accident before, so we had to go all the way through. It was kind of funny because we were asking each other, well, what do you think we should do next, and ta, da, da, da. But the elements of an investigation are the same whether it’s an accident or burglary, robbery or even homicide, basically they’re the same.

A little practice out on the street, which kind of caught my attention, I saw it as a good tool to control a lot of situations and I preached it all through my years when I was an instructor and I can use it today. I can shut a room down so it’s absolutely silence in a matter of minute if I use a police whistle. And, sometimes just projecting my voice and I’ve got control, they don’t have control.

I did everything in traffic you can do. During the course of my years, I investigated 500 death cases. I ended up running the Traffic Division, I kind of took over running it as a sergeant, I made the stripes as big as I could make them. Then I was a lieutenant and was in there, and then I was a captain. When I became captain, I really started to try to do the things I wanted to do right along. I had a very good bunch of officers working for me. It was kind of strange because I used to kid them at the staff meetings and that, I’m like the Statue of Liberty, give me your weak, and all your people that are destitute and everything, and I’ll put them to work. And, I did. I made investigators out of them and gave them jobs that they could handle.

You get all kinds of information through traffic. Not only that, a good mechanic’s got a big tool box, or a carpenter, and he don’t use half of these tools half the time. Well, the law is a little bit that way, too, in community behavior. I knew that traffic code, which was inches thick, I knew it like the back of my hand. I knew every little in and out of it.

I knew the criminal code pretty well, too, but you don’t deal with a criminal case every day, you do deal with traffic cases. And, when you investigate a serious hit and run traffic death, you put as much work and time into that as you do a homicide. Well, it is, it’s the killing of another human being, no matter how you look at it. There was some really bad ones.

I remember a young lady who came roaring down Larpenteur Avenue around 90 miles an hour and hit this car and just smeared it all over the place. We did a lot of work trying to duplicate skid marks on it. I had a real tough lawyer, that’s when we first started doing reconstruction really. This lawyer gave me kind of a bad time in the court room after we had charged her with criminal negligence. He says, “Well, how do you know that, let me see, now, you said that you got called out of your home to come down to this case and you said you used the windshield wipers ‘cause it was dewy out and there was raindrops or dewdrops or something on your windshield. And, then now you’re saying that the road was dry. How could the road be dry, how are you so sure that it wasn’t wet out here and that would have accounted for the long skid marks?” I said, “Because counselor, I went out there and felt with my hand on the pavement and it was dry and gritty, and that’s why I used the dry in the formula.” And, that became a case that’s in the Supreme Court Annals now. And we convicted that woman and sent her away. But the important thing about that case was that all the formula for doing reconstruction, for the first time got recognized in Minnesota. We had been chastised before because we weren’t sure of some of these conditions. I always look back at that one with some pride.

A lot of terrible, terrible accidents, and they go on, but one of the things I’m very proud of is that at the beginning of my time in the traffic division, we typically had fifty deaths a year, in Saint Paul. When I left there we were down to twenty-four. I always figured it was kind of my report card, we did 10,000 to 12,000 cases a year. I looked at each and every one of them. When you start counting it up, that’s a lot of accidents. But it did give me the advantage over some others, in that, if I said this is what it was, pretty well the courts accepted it. I didn’t have a hard time proving my cases as a rule. But I had to bring all of these elements in each time, if I couldn’t, I couldn’t prove the case. And, the other side of traffic is, it gets pretty personal sometimes. Sometimes you’re dealing—a few occasions, with other officers and they’ve got skid marks and you have to say they were speeding or whatever it was, and sometimes it’s friends.

Traffic is awful inclusive, it’s got the whole world, and you do one of two things. You either fluctuate for friends or you take the line and you go down it, straight forward and honest. That don’t mean you have to throw everybody in jail.

I know one pedestrian was killed and with the same skid mark evidence, and it was a Black man that was driving that day, that’s not important except that some people think you zero in on these people. I got this pedestrian dead and this man was really worried, the driver of the car, he was probably fifty years old and I’m sure he had had scenarios where he ended up on the wrong side of the thinking. We did all the information and got all the measurements and I could just tell that he thought he was really in the soup. We got all done and I proved he was going the speed he said he was going. I told him, “Well, you can go home, do you want me to have somebody with you? Can you drive yet?” Because his car was still drivable, he had just popped this pedestrian and knocked him down. They hit their head when they went down, and that was the end of the scene. He was awful relieved, I remember. It was a slow accident, I think the car, if I remember right, was going like 20 or 22 miles an hour, or something like that. So it happened. But we’ve seen some terrible ones.

I remember one, well, one kid using marijuana from Cretin. He hit a big tree there and he hit the tree so hard it broke the car in two and that one was a pretty bad accident. And, of course, it was all probably because marijuana, the one thing marijuana does to you, if you use a little or a lot, your space and time don’t fit anymore and that’s what you need to drive successfully.

Then I remember one—the vision of it I will never forget. That was on Highway 61, just south of Burns. A car went off the road and it hit trees on the embankment as it was going down and there was three kids in the front seat, teenagers, and they went through the windshield and their roof collapsed when they hit the tree and they were like toothpaste half out of a tube, so all three bodies were stuck out and caught by their legs and they were all dead, of course, all mangled up. Some really, really terrible ones, but the most terrible are always the kid calls.

A few times I had to notify the families. I remember going to notify one person that their son was killed in an accident on Mississippi River Drive. That’s a hard place to speed, takes practice to speed there, I don’t recommend it. He had hit a tree, the trees, they run up and get you all the time, you know, you’ve got to look out for them trees. [Chuckle] Anyhow, he hit a tree and he got killed and I really sweat going up to parents to notify them. I hated those calls with an absolute passion. Get up and ring the bell, it’s the middle of the night, of course, you finally get somebody up and it’s his mother and dad. And, I’ll never forget his dad, his dad must have asked me, well, his mother was almost as bad, must have asked me — first it was anguish of the death for a minute or two. And then he said, “It was a brand new car, he wrecked a brand new car.” He must have said that half a dozen times to me. Well, I kind of kept that in my craw for a long time, I wonder what kind of strange life that must have been to live with those people, they were more interested in a vehicle than they are in their son’s death. Yes, there were a lot of strange ones and tough ones.

I learned, you don’t see everything all the time. And, I’ll illustrate that real quick. When I worked a traffic car, which was an unmarked car, and my purpose was to be out there as a support vehicle and that, but I had a habit of I’d run the length of the streets, see if I could pick up a traffic violator. If I didn’t, I’d pull off and I’d usually pull off like where there was a strip mall or a little bit of businesses, check the businesses, see if I could see any break-ins or anything. If I didn’t, I’d pick a street that had a stop and go light come back on, somebody went through the red, I got an easy tag.

So, I did this one night and I ran out Hudson Road and got off at Sunray, we’d had a couple of postal burglaries and there was a post office there, so, I went around the back and checked, the doors looked good and fine. I thought to myself, well, a lot of times the postal burglars go through the roof, a flat roof building. And, I looked at the pole, and I think it was my laziness that prevented me from crawling up there, but I thought, it’s a little tough, I don’t see any real sign, there’s no vehicles back here, I think everything’s okay — so, I turned away.

About two weeks later we caught these people, and I remember one of the detectives coming up to me and saying, “Was that you that was behind Sunray such and such a time?” I said, “Well, it could be,” I said, “that’s kind of my pattern, I do that all the time.” And, he said, “What kind of car did you have?” I told him, “Well, I had the blue Ford.” And, he said, “Yeah, I think that was you.” He said, “I want to tell you, you had a close squeak, you didn’t even know it.” He said, “There was a man with a rifle and a scope up on water tower,” and, he said, “They burgled the place that night and if you’d have climbed up on the roof, I think you’d have been shot.” Never knew about it. I don’t know if I was there or not, but that’s what he said.

Police work takes a special faith

When I was on the job two months an officer was killed [Allan Lee was fatally injured by gunfire]. I think I was too young and too dumb to really know that that put me in great jeopardy. That’s kind of a foolish thing to say, but I really don’t think it had the impact. That’s almost the kind of attitude that I think I carried into combat when I went into regular combat in Korea, too. That I’m going to follow my training to the “T”. I’m going to try to do what they tell me to do, to survive this stuff and maybe I will, and the Good Lord watch over me, I’ve always been a Christian, considered myself one, anyway, I don’t know if the Lord does, but some things you’ve got to do on faith. And, I think the police job is one of them.

I never shot anybody, but I pulled my weapon quite a few times. I didn’t point it at people necessarily. I kept it behind my leg. Sometimes it was a club that I had there, sometimes it was my gun. If I found that whoever I was dealing with was completely innocent of whatever I thought happened, usually I said something like this, “We just had a stick-up in the neighborhood or we were just chasing a person we believe to be a felon, you matched the overall description of him, so I stopped you, I’m sorry if I frightened you, but that’s why I drew my weapon. I didn’t draw it to intimidate you.”

Early community policing

There were some other places that were hard. We had an island on the west side, The Flats. They used to call them, The Flats or State Street, Filmore and some of the streets south of downtown. There was an island that went out in the Mississippi that isn’t there anymore. There was no law on that island, literally.

I don’t think anybody had a phone, it was all squatters, lots of dogs, and there was one guy who called himself Scotty and he tried to kind of be the cop, he’d call us every once in awhile and we’d go down. And, when you got out of the car, you got out of the car with a nightstick in your hand, because you usually had to whack a stray dog or two to get to find out what was going on.

There was a lot of weird things happen. One day they caught Scotty and tied him to a fencepost with barbed wire. We got the call and went down there and freed him up. But it was his pals. They were all alcoholics and kind of that day’s homeless people, except they had these shacks and hovels and they would exist by taking this spoiled and damaged fruit and vegetables out of the rail cars and that kind of thing.

Squad 318 was assigned to The Flats. It was kind of an interesting neighborhood in a lot of ways. Those people were very poor, most of them. These old houses looked pretty tacky, some had literally sunk right into the mother earth and the doors didn’t open good half the time and I don’t think you could lock them very good, it was pretty bad. But it was pretty well crime free during the week, we didn’t have much activity then. But payday night, Friday night, Saturday night, we had a tavern called the Buck of the Blood, we had some pretty good fights in there and it was pretty wild sometimes.

The neighborhood itself had a mix of people in it, later on it became predominantly Mexican and then after that Latinos of different kinds. At the time that I was down there, we had Lebanese people and we had quite a few Jewish people mixed in, really that’s not a nationality, I think most of them were from Russia, a few Blacks, a few Indians.

To police The Flats you started out with one or two people that seemed to trust you. We’d go by and, for instance, if the day was nice the Lebanese people were probably out with a grill, which nobody else grilled in those days, but they were out making this flat bread that they make and barbequing a little piece of lamb. We’d stop and they’d invite us up, we’d come up and have a little lamb with them and bread. We had more time then. You’ve got to have more time to get with the people, you can’t establish anything driving by holding a steering wheel and looking straight ahead, or even just stopping and asking somebody how is everything, everybody says fine or don’t say anything to you. You have to have time to develop a little friendship between them.

And when you get to know one or two, then you start to know their children. Then you don’t have to run to the station with everything, you can say, “Hey Joe, I saw your boy, Dave, down here, I don’t know, he’s hanging with some pretty rough characters, you maybe better keep a closer eye on him.” And, all of a sudden you were one less person on that street gang. I don’t know what went on and we didn’t want to ask. But I think that’s the core to it, you’ve got to establish some kind of friendship.

Now, some of the things were harder to make any in-roads in, the merchants, of course, we tried to go into almost every merchant once during your tour. Not to pester, the trick was don’t stay in there and be something that spoils his business, but stop in and let the neighborhood know you’re friends with him. You can stop in several merchants every day even if you’re a patrol car, walk in and say, “How is things going? You got any problems? Anybody pestering you?” And, first they won’t say much of anything, pretty soon, about the second or third time you stop and do that, they’ve got something to say -- better watch this guy, that so and so, he’s been hanging around, I don’t like the way he acts at all. “Oh,” so you got a little tip there, so you know a little bit about him before he committed crimes, many times, you knew where he lived, you knew things, so that helped considerably. And, I’ve always been proud, it seems to me in Saint Paul, when a crime happens, not every time, but if this person is a local, we got him picked up within forty-eight hours. Other cities, don’t all do that.

Challenging circumstances

I remember another incident as a commanding officer or supervising officer in the mid 1970s somewhere. One point I went out to pick up a policeman. I remember they said, well this guy is crazy. He ended up getting fired off the Department. The chief was saying, bring him into me. So I thought, well, I’m going to put on the bulletproof vest today, I didn’t wear it most of the time because it was uncomfortable, once in awhile if I really thought it was bad, I’d slip it from the locker and put it on.

I thought, well, the Good Lord protected me every other time, he’s going to protect me this time, too. Which may be foolish, but on the other hand you either go at one extreme or the other. I went and got him, I brought him in and I told him, “You’ve got to go to the chief’s office, come on in. I want your gun.” When I said it I was ready to play Quick Draw McGraw if I had to.

There’s a factor in military combat and in police work, that you better have this commitment, I’m not going to fool with you, if you don’t do something, I’m going to shoot you and I’m not shooting you in the hand, I’m going to shoot you to kill you. You’ve got to have that set into your mind, because if you start trying to play around, I’m going to shoot you in the leg, I’m going to shoot you in the hand, the opportunity isn’t going to be there. It’s only there in the movies, Buck Jones, Tom Mixer, whoever the current, Gene Autry could fire and achieve something with that. You better make sure you’re ready to go on that prospect.

Then a little faith goes a long way from then on, the Lord helps those who help themselves, too, you’ve got to remember that.

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[1] Charles A. Harrington was appointed reserve patrolman April 29, 1941; military leave January 15, 1942 to November 23, 1945; and retired August 31, 1976.

[2] Joseph A. Renteria was appointed patrolman July 25, 1949; and retired July 24, 1979.