The law is the law | Napa Valley Register

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The law is the law

Tuesday, November 20, 2007

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Parker's Pen

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At a recent gathering of friends, John Bailey of old Napa town came over to say hello and swap a couple of cop stories about old times and old friends.

John is a retired Napa Police lieutenant, and was the former chief of both the King City and Tiburon police departments about the same time I was carving out a career in the New York Police Department. Our stories spanned the years and miles, to the places and times in which we wore the shield.

Our conversations always center on law enforcement, and I reminded John of the marvelous story he once told me about a “Looney Law” and sensitive ordinance that had been dumped on Napa PD. That ordinance happened to touch upon the delicate matter of ladies wearing hats in Napa movie houses.

In those days, ladies’ hats were fashionable, but someone sitting in the theater behind a lady wearing her latest designer hat might just be brave enough to say, “Lady, would you please remove your feathered hat so I can see the movie on the screen?”

If the gal in the hat said, “Oh I’m sorry, of course I will” the condition was corrected.

But a curt “Not on your life!” brought trouble to River City worse than the trouble Errol Flynn or Tyrone Power was experiencing on the Fox or Uptown screens.

By local law an usher or theater manager was relieved of the duty of settling the dispute, and guess who got the job of enforcing the “Ladies Hat Rule?” If you guessed a cop, you got that right.

I asked John Bailey how Napa PD handled that sticky wicket. “Gingerly and with kid gloves,” John laughed.

Then John asked me to run that New York City airplane ordinance by him once more. I was glad to oblige. That law, assigned to NYPD, of course, was a relic from the days when Charlie Lindbergh, “Lucky Lindy,” and young pilots just like him flew their planes east and west with the mail, navigating by use of railroad tracks that covered the land.

I told John that the law was still on the books and in NYPD’s thick Rules & Procedures (the cops’ Bible) throughout my days on the job from the 1950s to 1990s, and I presumed it was still there. I always thought the procedure was left in the book for comic effect in an otherwise somber manual.

If a pilot landed his plane anywhere on New York City’s 319 square miles of property, be it Central Park, the Bronx Zoo, Yankee Stadium or a Staten Island potato field, the cop on the beat or in a car patrolling the area had certain duties to perform.

After ascertaining that the pilot and any passengers were not injured, the officer or officers would advise the pilot that he had 10 hours to report in-person to the desk lieutenant of the precinct where the plane landed, to make a full report of the reason for his landing on New York City property. Failing to do so, said pilot would be guilty of the grievous misdemeanor crime of trespassing. Why 10 hours to report the landing I never knew, nor did my fellow officers.

Later that day I thought about my conversation with John Bailey and recalled other ordinances NYPD was charged with enforcing. For instance, breaking up stickball games because of a noise complaint. Every cop that ever had to respond to that call had played stickball himself once upon a time, and oh how we hated that run. We also were ordered to turn off fire hydrants that someone opened to give poor kids a cool spraying on a July day with the temperature reaching 100 degrees. We’d get booed by the neighbors, and who could blame them?

We never knew why the Fire Department of New York, with more than 11,000 firemen, were never assigned those hydrant runs, but with Mayor Fiorello La Guardia — a firefighting buff — running the town, we had a pretty good idea why the NYPD got the short end of the stick.

The subject of ordinances and enforcers reminded me always of Gilbert & Sullivan’s light comic operas and those oh-so-true lyrics “A policeman’s lot is not a happy one.”

But, Napa and New York City weren’t the only jurisdictions where enforcement of any and every statute, no matter how odd, was handed to the boys in blue.

My dear friend and former neighbor, Terry Yacona, also my research bureau of one, recently sent me some slim books written years ago by her friend and former publishing house associate, the late Dick Hyman. Terry said that Dick would be laughing in heaven if someone mentioned his work.

One of the books was titled “Of All Fool Things” and the ordinances noted within the pages made old Napa town and New York City little leaguers in terms of the crackpot statutes.

A Kentucky law stated that every person must take a bath at least twice a year, and a Colorado law prohibited women from wearing dresses that stopped more than 18 inches from the floor. The first job would be no problem. We’d dump the adamant non-bather into a bubble bath, clothes and all. But if we started measuring ladies hems, the American Civil Liberties Union would be out in force.

In Sausalito, it was quite incorrect to get drunk without permission from the board of supervisors, who I assume drank at the same bar. In Sanford, people could not call a cop to interfere with children jumping over water puddles. That ordinance I like!

Let’s not forget Carmel’s ordinance that once upon a time forbade kids from eating ice cream cones on the streets of that town. “Dirty Harry” ran for mayor on a one-issue platform — let the kids eat ice cream anywhere they want. Eastwood won and justice triumphed!

In Hyman’s book of foolish laws I learned that in Yonkers, New York, a man could get arrested for tying his shoelace in the middle of a sidewalk. In Detroit, it was taboo to sit in the middle of a street reading a newspaper.

I could go on, but you get the picture. The law is the law and if we don’t like it we can do something about it at the polls, or like Clint Eastwood, throw our hats into the ring and work for better tomorrows!

Ev Parker can be reached at evjenpar@mailbug.com or 224-9956.

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