By MARK MEDLYN, guest columnist
Now that I have three columns and several letters to the editor under my belt, I thought it is time to let you know about my background.
I was born 65 years ago at the Michigan State Hospital for the mentally ill in Ypsilanti, Michigan. My birth certificate does not reflect being born in Ypsilanti, but rather Ann Arbor. For reasons known only to my father, he wanted my birth certificate to reflect that I was born at the home of the University of Michigan. My father was working on his Ph.D and my mother was a psychiatric social worker at the hospital. I lived on the hospital grounds for the next 18 months until my middle brother was born.
My family moved to Bloomington in 1961. My father joined the faculty at IU, and my mother, until 1965, was a stay-at-home mother, as my two younger brothers and I lived in student housing at IU. In 1965, my mother became a school counselor at Bloomington High School South.
When I talk about the “intelligentsia,” it is not from scorn, but rather an acceptance of who they are and what they represent. When you’re 12 years old and deans and university provosts are coming over to your house for dinner, you learn about the academic world.
After graduation from IU in 1977, I became a Champaign, Illinois police officer in the patrol division. I retired in 2007 after serving for 29 years as a patrol officer. In conjunction with my time at CPD, I was part of the department’s special weapons team that was rated as one of the best in the country. Many of the tactics used today, along with tactical emergency medical management, came as a result of what my team developed.
In 1981, in the campus town area of Champaign, I made a vehicle stop that would alter my life forever. A small Fiat was driving without headlights. I made the vehicle stop, wrote a warning ticket, and then promptly forgot about the stop.
Three months later, a friend suggested that I meet her friend for dinner. At the dinner I met a most charming woman who was attending the U of I working on her master’s. Halfway through the dinner, she remarked, “We have met.” I assured her that I would have remembered a beautiful woman such as herself and we had not. A few minutes later, she looked at me and said: “We have. You’re a Champaign police officer and you’re a jerk.”
At this time, dinner took an awkward silence. I wanted to meet her again. She was adamant that would not happen. In fact, she assured me that unless the entire male species was down to one, she still would not go out with me.
In 1984, we married. I told her at the time that I would give her three things: three children, a loving home, and that I would always take care of her car.
She accepted the life as a spouse of a police officer. For the next 16 years, we never had the same days off, and I worked 3 to 11 p.m. so that we would have a parent home at all times when our children were younger. She never was angry that we could only go out on Tuesdays or Wednesdays, and that her husband would have to work on his days off to go on a SWAT call-out.
Dinner was between 5:30 and 6 p.m. It had to be served on time or else I had to go back to work. Champaign PD is always 45 minutes to an hour behind in calls for service. Our life was not the June and Ward Cleaver meals in which long discussions were had about the day’s events. Each child had only few minutes to discuss what was going on in school.
One of the more lasting memories I have is my children coming into my bedroom at 7 a.m. At first, I was perplexed as to why they were there. They told me that they did so to make sure that I had made it home safely from my shift. There was more than one occasion that their mother would have to meet me at the hospital after I was injured in the line of duty. My children never talked about their fear that I would be killed in the line; it was just part of the acceptance that they had about their life.
In addition to working full time at CPD, I began to work at a community college teaching between three and six hours a semester. I did that for 19 years, during which time I wrote a textbook on the Illinois vehicle code. One of the joys that I have is to see so many of my former students in law enforcement today.
Upon my retirement in 2007 from full-time police work, I began life as a substitute teacher. I did that full-time until this spring, when I decided that I simply had no more interest in it. I could not do the remote learning, as I am technology challenged, according to my children. I still carry a flip phone and an analog watch. Directions are measured by the free map that the state gives me, not by GPS.
In 2015, my wife wondered if I would be interested in buying a home in Brown County. After staring at her in amazement, wondering exactly who she was since that was not a discussion that we had before, and a few weeks of looking at properties and finances, we settled on a property. As I looked at it on Zillow, I realized that I had seen it before: In 1966, when rather than doing math, I sketched out my dream house, including the elevations and the interior design. This is remarkable since I have zero drawing skills. We have enjoyed our bi-state residences. I have logged nearly 200,000 miles on the Champaign-to-Indianapolis-to-Bloomington route in the past 42 years.
As I continue as a guest columnist, I can give you one tried and true reality: I bleed tan and green (my CPD uniform colors). I have been to funerals for those who died in the line of duty and have attended, just this week, a funeral of a colleague who lived 110 days past retirement. This past summer, when CPD was damaged by protesters, I made sure that when they returned for round two that I would be there to prevent it. I did and it wasn’t damaged. I have been to funerals for officers killed in the line of duty. I can tell you that for the men and women that I served with, they did so with honor.
My last thought every day when I went out the back door to my squad was the same: “I wonder what the person who is going to shoot me today is doing, and will I survive the encounter?” Try thinking that every day that you go to work, that you measure your life expectancy in five-minute intervals. In some cases, I was down to 15 seconds.
Mark C. Medlyn of Brown County is a new, occasional community columnist. He and his wife, a retired university instructor, have been Brown County property owners since 2015.
