AADL Talks To: Peter Stipe

Mon, 02/19/2024 - 4:17pm

When: November 11, 2022

Author and former Ann Arbor policeman Peter Stipe recounts his journey from being a wayward youth growing up in countercultural Ann Arbor to becoming the most decorated member of the Ann Arbor Police Department. Peter shares memories of his time with the AAPD, including harrowing encounters on emergency calls and the many people and events that helped shape his career. Peter also shares his love of local history and discusses the changes he's seen in the city over the years.

Peter's story is detailed in his 2021 memoir, Badge 112. 

You can read and view historical photos about Peter Stipe and the Ann Arbor Police Department, or read other histories of the Ann Arbor Police Department.

Transcript

• [00:00:08] AMY CANTU: [MUSIC] Hi, this is Amy.
• [00:00:09] DARLA WELSHONS: This is Darla and in this episode AADL talks to Peter Stipe. Peter spent 18 years with the Ann Arbor Police Department and retired in 2004 as its most highly decorated officer. Born and raised here in Ann Arbor, he's a big fan of local history as well as a gifted storyteller. Last year he published a memoir about his journey into a career with the police department. Peter's number 1 priority is his family and friends, which always seems to include a dog. He is also known to enjoy old movies, a bottle of wine and Detroit Lions football. Welcome Peter, and thanks for coming to talk to with us. [LAUGHTER]
• [00:00:46] PETER STIPE: Thanks, Darla.
• [00:00:48] DARLA WELSHONS: We're recording this on Veterans Day, which seems appropriate because your parents met while they were serving overseas. Would you like to start with that in France, 1945?
• [00:01:00] PETER STIPE: In France in 1945, my dad had been shipped over in November of '44 to support the Battle of the Bulge engagement and my mom had been a combat nurse since 1943. Somehow they met through a doctor friend the first week of July in '45, and they dated intensively. They went to see a Gregory Peck movie and then they got married on July 28, that same month, because they thought they were going to be shipped to the Pacific Theater. The bomb had not been dropped yet and so two weeks later then that issue was settled, so my mom went home. My dad stuck around to muster things up, and then he returned home. They reunited on Veterans Day 1945. They went to a Chicago Bears Detroit Lions football game at Soldier Field in Chicago and they came out to find that all their best clothes had been stolen out of their car. An irony of two soldiers returning home, going to Soldier Field on Veterans Day, but the Lions won.
• [00:02:14] AMY CANTU: That was a special day. [LAUGHTER] Your memoir is very personal, very open. Can you talk a little bit about how your family history played into the person you became, both as a young man and eventually joining the police force.
• [00:02:39] PETER STIPE: My parents were politically diametrically opposed to one another. My dad was raised in Ohio. He was ultra conservative. My mom was born in Memphis, raised in Atlanta. She was the president of the National Honor Society at Fulton County High School, which had 1,400 seniors. It was the biggest high school in Atlanta and she was super smart. He was business savvy, but she was a dominating influence on me politically and she was an admirer of Martin Luther King and been a civil rights advocate and so there was some intense discussions in the house. I was given a full throttle both viewpoints growing up. I don't know how I wound up in civil service. I think a firefighter friend had recommended I apply to the city, so I ended up working for the building department. But I find that I'm a lot more like my mom in applying the law to things, that there's a victim and an aggressor, and I'm usually siding with the victim. Not that my dad wouldn't do that. Even though my mom died five years before my dad, I take a lot more after her I think.
• [00:04:15] AMY CANTU: You've described yourself too as a long-haired aimless person early on in your career and you had some people help guide you from the City Inspection Department to police force. Can you talk a little bit about that transition in your life?
• [00:04:33] PETER STIPE: I couldn't believe the city [LAUGHTER] hired me in the first place. It was a set of position, a comprehensive employment training act, which in '79 was a Jimmy Carter initiative, I think. The government would train you for one year at a minimum wage, $9,999 and then the municipality that you were working for had the option of picking you up full-time. I applied to the building department, there were 50 applicants. I had shoulder-length hair, I was a super stoner [LAUGHTER] and I had this interview with Eileen Burnley who was the executive secretary and she said, if Arby's erected a sign that was too big for the ordinance, what would you do? I said, well, I'd go out there and tell them to take it down and that was the thrust of the interview and then she called me back and offered me the job, and I couldn't imagine what the other applicants [LAUGHTER] could have possibly said in response to that, but I was super gung ho once I got the job. I was all over town, all over every business, making sure that there was uniform enforcement so that nobody had to comply with something no one else did and pretty soon the merchants were knarking out their business neighbors saying, hey, this guy's got a hot air balloon. This guy's got a spotlight. This person has a got a banner. [LAUGHTER] You were here last weekend so even on my weekend days, I'd go out on West Stadium and I'd stop and make Apollo Lincoln Mercury turn off their spotlight or deflate a hot air balloon because we weren't going to have any of that. I was really invested in my ordinance enforcement inspection job.
• [00:06:20] DARLA WELSHONS: Did you ever actually deal with RBs? [LAUGHTER]
• [00:06:24] PETER STIPE: No, I don't think because their sign was already up and so it was beyond, it was grandfathered in. That building is still there empty now. I see I've been by it for like five years. Then on a walk to the bank one day, the police chief, just caught up with me and we weren't going to the same bank, but he just said, have you ever thought of joining the police department? I said, well, no. He said, well, will you apply? I said, well, probably not because I was just thinking, shoot, I got all these tickets, I just about got kicked out of military academy for a marijuana infraction. I didn't think I wanted to stand up to the scrutiny of a background investigation and then be denied and be humiliated because I didn't qualify, so I didn't want to expose myself to that. But he was pretty insistent that I apply, so I said okay. Then I'd see him in the lobby of City Hall. He'd say, did you turn your application in? For weeks, I'm working on it. I had this dog-eared application folded up in my pocket that I filled out, but I was afraid to turn in and then the day it was due, he was waiting for me in the lobby. He said, you promised you'd put that application in.
• [00:07:44] AMY CANTU: What year was this?
• [00:07:47] PETER STIPE: This was September of '85.
• [00:07:52] PETER STIPE: Then the next thing I know, I got called in and we went to a packet meeting. There was like 500 of us in the city hall council chambers and they hired four of us out of that group of people. Then I found out later that he called down to the training section at least twice a week to find out what my status was. I didn't have a college degree, they were only hiring college graduates so I was like a little test case for the chief. I don't know how he got my name in the first place because it certainly didn't look the part. I still looked-
• [00:08:27] DARLA WELSHONS: He must have seen something in you.
• [00:08:29] PETER STIPE: I generated a lot of enforcement. I wrote a lot of code violations and I was doing housing inspections full-time and sign enforcement full-time. I was pretty, pre passionate about it because, I felt I was the spokesperson for people that couldn't stand up to their own property owners. I had the authority to follow through. Somebody dropped a dime on me and the chief saw me through and the next thing I knew I was driving around in a patrol car.
• [00:09:04] AMY CANTU: Wow, that's an interesting story. I know you're interested in Ann Arbor history, but also just, do you think that at that period of time in '85 you said, do you think Ann Arbor's history with the counterculture and everything, do you think that that helped? There had been this history recently in the late '60s or early '70s that set the stage for a transition to a different type of police officer.
• [00:09:37] PETER STIPE: I wonder I was ultra candid in my background packet because I didn't want something disclosed that I had withheld. I was really surprised that they hired me anyway. I imagined that my candor was part of why they hired me because I admitted to being a big party or doing bong a thons and all that, that sort of a thing [LAUGHTER] and they must have thought that if he's this honest about this, he must be basically an honest guy and that's what they were looking for. I'd been popped all sorts of times. I've been pulled over dozens of times. I had a GTO and a Z28 and a bunch of muscle car. I had a lot of encounters with the police department and they cut me slack when I probably didn't have it coming. I got tickets when I certainly did. To your question, I think that they were looking for somebody who was from the community who understood what was like to grow up in the community and they thought would enforce the law, use discretion accordingly.
• [00:10:58] DARLA WELSHONS: When you got into that role, did you think what am I doing here as a police officer?
• [00:11:03] PETER STIPE: Yeah, I could. I'm looking here I got a patrol car and a shotgun. I'm saying what am I going to do in my first armed encounter because you're at the academy and you're shooting at targets and you're going through all this. I wrestled a lot with a friend of mine in high school, but I hadn't been in a large number of fights. The next thing I know I'm rolling around the ground with somebody who's desperate to escape, who's armed and having to disarm him. It was really a change from being a stoner to be like this road warrior who's trying to look out for the week and all that stuff. Because I was weak myself. I was pretty puny. I was only like 160 pounds. Sometimes it would be a matter of letting a big guy throw me around until he was exhausted. Then you jump on his back and you hope back up came quickly. I was compulsive about being the first one there in the in house academy. We had this report writing lieutenant who was in the book, I describe him as the Colonel Flagg type from MASH, seemingly self-important but he was literate and he knew how to write a report. There was a break in there and he said, your stock with your fellow veteran officers will rise dramatically if you back them up on traffic stops. Even if you don't say anything, just a second car there where the motorists can see it will discourage them from trying to ambush the officer. It'll put a thought in their head that maybe not now. He said, that'll go a long way. As soon as I was out there, I was just like, behind always on every traffic stop. A veteran officer took me aside in the report writing room. He goes, who told you to follow me around? He was the Union Vice President. He thought I was assigned to follow monitoring activities. He said, why are you there all the time? I said, in case you need help. He goes really? I said yeah. He goes you want to ride together so it helped ingratiate me with the veterans because we had a productivity system where you were scored against the other officers. The idea was, as an incentive to keep busy and I was forgoing that to try to back up other officers which was most important to me. I got counseled a lot because I didn't write enough tickets. I was counsel my entire life for various things from sister Joseph Edward to the commandant of cadets at Culver. I was accustomed to being counsel, but I thought the well-being of the officers was the paramount thing because I knew that there'd be times when I was out on a limb and they'd be there for me. That was a reciprocal arrangement because you just never know what call you're on and who you're on, who you're dealing with. I was lucky that I never had to use deadly force, but I was in hundreds of armed encounters. You wouldn't think so by looking at my Facebook post now, but I had an intensity in those encounters where I would dominate the space, close the distance, close the gap. Be super loud and clear in my orders and overwhelmed my adversary. I never had to fire my gun because they thought I was crazy.
• [00:15:07] AMY CANTU: That's crazy. Never once, never fired your gun?
• [00:15:11] PETER STIPE: I had to shoot a deer that had been hit by a car on the on the way home.
• [00:15:16] AMY CANTU: Wow.
• [00:15:18] PETER STIPE: I was the point man for the SWAT team for 15 years. I was the lead element in there and encountered a number of armed people, but I'd be blowing Matt out of the studio there if I used the voice. But I would say, you're down a lot, police officer down. As a police officer, I always wanted to be in uniform. I had to work a couple of plainclothes details and I never wanted there to be any doubt about who I was, what my purpose was there. I was never inclined to work undercover to watch football game with a drug dealer and then turn the tables on him. I just couldn't see myself pretending to be anything other than I am because I'm not a very good actor.
• [00:16:19] DARLA WELSHONS: It's that honesty that you mentioned earlier.
• [00:16:23] PETER STIPE: Well, the former city attorney read my book. He saw it. There was a review in the Detroit Legal News and he subscribes to that so he sent me a lengthy email about that. He liked the book but he said, why would you admit to doing all this, hitting a prisoner? He said, I think it lends credibility to the other things, the other stories in there. If you're going to be upfront about your own personal life, then when you're portraying someone else then people are going to be more inclined to believe your version of that story.
• [00:17:04] AMY CANTU: It is very counter to the stereotype that we're used to. Your vulnerability, your honesty, you being really open in the book is definitely not something people might expect from a memoir of a police officer. I was wondering, clearly that's who you really are, but were you hoping when you wrote this to really challenge that stereotype? Were you conscious of wanting to do that?
• [00:17:33] PETER STIPE: I was trying to humanize police officers because we have preconceived notions of everyone, of Republicans, of Democrats and especially of police officers, because what we hear is that we don't hear a lot about the things they quietly do for the community out of the press. But if there's an incident and there's plenty of them then that's the impression we get. I wanted to give people an idea of what all goes into being that person that's in that moment, in that incident, that you bring a lifetime worth of experiences of a liberal mother and a conservative dad. From parochial school to military academy, to private school, to public school, to being a stoner, to being a reckless driver. All that stuff, all that hits home in one fleeting moment in those encounters and I thought people would understand police officers better, the humanity behind them. Because you don't think about the humanity, you're saying God, what was this guy doing? Of course, I think the same thing. You read about certain incidents, and we had to train. I was on the SWAT team for 15 years, the special tactics team. I was the point man and the gas man. I was the chemical agent instructor, and we were assigned to carry tasers with us when they first came out and we were all shot with tasers and that seemed like a tool that I was not inclined to use. I was ordered to take it on the road, I put it in the trunk along with the collapsible baton. They gave us these tungsten collapsible baton. I didn't like the look of pulling those out and deploying it. Almost like an old car radio antenna has a telescoping wand, I just didn't think that that projected the right image, the right look, and I didn't like the thought of tasing somebody, sending electric shock through them because they weren't complying. The object was it you get them under control by whatever. You have to use some means. If you have to wait until help arrives to get them under control, then do that. I always had a wooden baton and I always had that in my ring and without drawing it out, it looked battered and beaten, and it was, I had to break windows, to rescue dogs and do all sorts of things. It was pretty dog eared, but it projected an image of itself like, wow, this guy's old school. You build up this image that doesn't necessarily represent who you are, but it gives you a curtain of immunity to certain threats. Because people said, I'm not going to mess with that guy, I'll take on this guy. I worked with this Dennis Siggery who was a veteran officer. He started in 1970 and we were working in the south side with a brand new kid who was just right out of the academy. We were assisting Community Mental Health. It was around Veterans Day of a Marine veteran who'd had a personal meltdown and they wanted to take him to the hospital, but he wasn't inclined to go, so they called us to come help. He's in his bed in this day room and he looks at Dennis and he says you could kill somebody, he looked at me and he said you could kill somebody and he looked at this Ron Ross, I called him Norm because he looked like a kid out of a Norman Rockwell paint. It's super well clean shaven and scrubbed and so he said, I'll go with you guys. He pointed at Dennis and I, I'll ride up there with you. I wanted to look like someone that you wouldn't want to mess with without necessarily being all that that I project because it does give you a cloak of, not invincibility, but less vulnerable because you don't want people to take you on. In the dirty dozen when Lee Marvin and Charles Bronson have infiltrated this chalet, and Charles Bronson is supposed to be the guy who can speak German. He said, I don't understand what the guy said. Lee Marvin says, well, just look mean and grunt a lot.
• [00:22:33] AMY CANTU: That's what he does. [LAUGHTER]
• [00:22:33] PETER STIPE: You can see that look right now, it's hard for me to hold it because it makes me laugh to do it now, but I thought it was important so when I showed up on a call that I could get business done, I wouldn't have to broke a heal, show my credentials at all. I never wore award ribbons or anything like that. I wanted a clean spare look like I was just an ordinary Joe. The only thing that told how long I'd been there was this dog eared baton of mine.
• [00:23:15] DARLA WELSHONS: How did your colleagues react when they read your book? Did they appreciate your openness and your honesty?
• [00:23:22] PETER STIPE: Most of them did and some of them, a lot of them profiled in there. One of my longtime partners, Pat Codia, whose character is Buck Revere in the book, he had knee surgery on Monday, and I called him the night before last to see how he was doing. He goes by the way, I read your book when I was in the hospital, he goes I really appreciate the profile and I heard from a lot of people that were profiled in there that had no idea how fond I was of him or that people looked at them in this way and that was really the catalyst for the book in the first place, is to give people credit that they wouldn't otherwise receive because there's so many unsung actions in your life. You have all these interlude with people and they come and go and they don't realize that they've had this lasting impact on you, that they literally changed your life in some ways so I wanted to recognize those people in the book.
• [00:24:24] AMY CANTU: Yeah, you've said friends both when you were an inspector and in the force, it was everything to you. The comradeship, your friendships, and your loyalty to them was a really big part of your life. Can you talk a little bit more about that?
• [00:24:41] PETER STIPE: Well, I grew up in Burns Park on Granger, and we had six of us that grew up on the same block. We grew up on the same block as the Euphers. The Eupher family lived there, and the Devine family and Mrs. Devine was the first cousin of President Kennedy. While the Kennedys were in the White House, it was a heady that we were Catholic, they were Catholic. We went to Easter brunch together so it was cool being in that neighborhood. All the guys were two years older than I was, and they would often be ditch type and they'd take off and Jim Banghart would always tail slowly behind, almost like he'd be leaving bread crumbs for me to find. He would always be visible so I wouldn't get ditched. So when you're a kid, that's traumatic. But as you get older and two years doesn't mean too much when you're 50 years old and I grew to really like and respect those guys. I do attach a lot to loyalty and dependability and I'm still bombarded with messages and phone calls and texts from people seeking advice on police related matter or something like that. But in police work, you're out there alone a lot against some insurmountable odds so you really are dependent on the dispatcher, on the operator, on your radio and on somebody coming.
• [00:26:21] PETER STIPE: In the spirit of what I said before about backing officers up, I determined that I was going to be the first one to every call I was assigned. I would always beat my back up there, and if I was the backup, I would beat the primary unit there so they didn't have to wait for me. Invariably I got this reputation as a call jumper because I was always the first one at the call. But it was so, nobody had to wait for help because that's an anxious time when you're not sure because it can be your last call. If you're there the first one on every call, you have to handle the call whenever chaos is going. So you have to intervene. You have to take some action when somebody is in peril and [LAUGHTER] I saw a lot of action, but that camaraderie does mean a great deal to me. Now, perhaps I'm politically at odds with some of the veteran officers. I have a different outlook on how the country should be run, but none of that is in the book. I don't think the book reflects any political philosophy at all. It's all about this call, this person, how they behave. Now, I scorched a handful of characters in the book. Some of them command rank, but those are my legitimate perspectives on personal firsthand experience. The book started out. It was 250,000 words, and the editor said, you have to cut this in half. I looked at how I was going to cut it and what I did, is I cut all the negativity out of it, and that was like 80,000 words. Then I got [LAUGHTER] because I had of used it to vent, to seemingly settle old scores. The book was hard to write because it was hard to revisit a lot of those cases. It helped writing it because it helped deal with those. [OVERLAPPING] It helped reconcile. So that was a big part of writing it. I stalled for about four years after I retired because some of the calls, especially where victims were lost and I was there, it's hard to think about those incidents.
• [00:28:59] AMY CANTU: You had said that your memories ambush you. I'm assuming that I had read that you had said that this book was a way to also reckon with them, like you're saying now. Are you comfortable talking about one or two stories that really impacted you?
• [00:29:20] PETER STIPE: Well, I was on this incredible role of being at the right place at the right time. I was at a couple of structure fires where people were saved. I had attended a lot. I was the first one to a number of ambulance requests where I employed CPR and everybody seemed to live whenever I was on a call and then I had a civilian ride along with me, a girl that worked in data processing that the chief was interested in having become a full-time officer and we were sent to a car, had plunged in the pond on Argon, and we were on David Court near Barton Drive, so we were super close. We got there and there was still bubbles coming up and there was two girls that had been in the following car and the girl that had jumped out of the back seat of that car, and they said, "Our friends are in there. You've got to get them out." The irony is that they were leaving after toilet paper in our old house at 3985 Waldenwood and the girls in the lead car were alone and then their friends followed them. They thought they were being followed from the toilet papering incident, so she was a novice driver, just 16 years old, she started speeding through the neighborhood and then went off the road and into this pond. Leaping into that pond, the fire department pulled up a few minutes later and they had a rope and I tied there. I just come from Swat school. I was just two weeks out of Swat school, so I tied a bowling knot around my waist and gave it to my normal partner to hold onto and then I dove in the water but it was a retention pond for silt and runoff and it was all stirred up from this car in there, so you couldn't really see anything and it was only 15 feet deep and conical in shape. The car had gone nose down and I couldn't even find the car in there. We got a raft and a pole and we still couldn't find the car until the divers came. Two have been there while those girls were alive and just trying to imagine them waiting for us to come through and not being able to come through. That was devastating to me. I got a double-year infection because it was this time of year. It was like the first week of November and it was super cold out, and that really haunted me for a long time. It still bothers me, but writing the book about it explaining the sequence of events. We were second-guessed. I felt I was personally second-guessed because the owner of the record company had said, had he been there, he would've been able to get them out in time. The divers took the winch down there and hooked it up. It's not like him or his record driver. Then the shift commander who was a qualified scuba diver also said that he thought that maybe they had been bailed out. They would have been bailed out had he been there. He was the report-writing guy. Those comments really sting because you second-guess yourself enough.
• [00:33:06] AMY CANTU: Without somebody helping you out.
• [00:33:08] PETER STIPE: Right. There was a number of times where I was able to revive infants that lived and it's not something that was in the paper or anything, but where you can hand a breathing baby back to its mother. That goes a long way to offsetting those losses. Then I found Christine Galbraith who was the victim of the anniversarial rapist, and that was grim because we'd gone, been sent to her house to get photographs to pass out to the midnight shift. Pictures of her who she was overdue from shopping in the afternoon and the apartment was full of well-meaning family members and friends, and you could see the husband was just pacing back and forth. I said, "Wouldn't she like to be doing something? He said, "Yeah." I said, "Well, let's go look for her." We went to look for her and we found her on the path between Boulevard Plaza and their apartments behind the post office. It was the first week of May, it was unseasonably cold, a drizzling rain, and I'm out there with her for an hour waiting for a detective call out. I had a stack of her Polaroids that I was looking through and that's something I'll never forget. She was counting on somebody being there. Of course, she was gone before we were assigned to that call, but you're always thinking, what if this and what if that? The book was a way to vent all that so that people could see home. There's a lot going through. When I did snap and I punched a handcuff prisoner in the back of the car, I did that because I'm human. I snapped, I was having some personal issues, battered his wife, thrown his baby on the floor, he'd punched my partner out, and was uttering racial epithet over and over to him. I slammed on the brakes on North State Street and opened his door, and when he started to get out, I punched him. Then he tried to get out again, I punched him a second time [LAUGHTER] and he said, "What is this?" My partner said, "I think it's your beating. You better get get used to it." The car that was following us was occupied by a future police chief and a deputy chief, and the future deputy chief pointed across the street and said, "There are some pedestrians over there." I said, Well, they're going to have to wait their frigging turn if they want a piece of this guy." Because I was that incensed. [OVERLAPPING] Then it dawned on me that this is way over the top. You can't hit. Regardless of provocation, you can't hit a handcuffed prisoner. We're on North State just a couple of blocks away from the station and I'm really panicked. I said, "My career is over." I called the dispatcher and said, "Can you have a supervisor meet us in the sally port because we have a disruptive prisoner here?" I said, "You can call us names all you want but please don't mess with our sergeant." He said, "F your sergeant." We pull in the sally port, the sergeant opens the back door and the prisoner says, "Is this him?" I said, "Yeah." He spat in the sergeant's face.
• [00:37:20] AMY CANTU: Oh my God.
• [00:37:23] PETER STIPE: That sent a sequence of control. We took him in the cell where we had this ring. It's a fixed ring on the wall and you handcuff somebody to the ring so they can't hurt themselves or anyone out.
• [00:37:39] PETER STIPE: My little outrage was forgotten in the midst of this sequentive event because this guy was so mean. There were about seven officers lined up in the cell, all of varying ethnic origins and he had a specific insult for all of us and he was just that bent. He pled guilty at trial to assaulting his wife. He never made a complaint, so somehow I skated on this civil rights violation of punching somebody. The former city attorney said, why would you admit to that? I said, well, because it happened, and it happened because I was totally stressed out. I'd reached the end of my rope at a pivotal time and it happens all over America all the time and that's how it happens. You're dealing with human beings charged with a very difficult job and under great pressure and great scrutiny and you have to be perfect every time and we're not perfect. You'd have to hire cyborgs to have perfect officers. They're selected from a field of humanity. There's a bunch that shouldn't be in the profession, but there's a lot of seemingly nice guys like me who do the job and sometimes make grievous errors.
• [00:39:12] DARLA WELSHONS: Did you ever find yourself thinking, I just can't do this anymore, I want out?
• [00:39:19] PETER STIPE: My 25 years was coming. I started the same day as my partner who I was riding with at the end. She started the same day at the transportation department and I was in the building department and then we both had 25 years on the same day and it just seemed like that was the time to go, that anniversary because you were dealing with, a lot of times, the same people over and over again. Although I worked out all the time, I was 47 years old, I wasn't able to leap tall buildings at a single bound anymore. I trained hard, but you're giving up. The people you're chasing are anywhere between 15 and 25 and it's hard to catch them at a certain age and I didn't want to get hurt, I didn't want to hurt somebody trying to compensate in some way. Instead of just chasing somebody down, relying on some shortcut that could get myself hurt or get them hurt. I knew when it was time to go. Then they had a succession of chiefs. The administration got a little tougher to deal with. I retired under Dan Oates who'd come from the city of New York. He'd been a deputy chief there. He ironically came to the Ann Arbor Police Department on August 30th of 2001 and then less than two weeks later 9/11 happened and a lot of his friends were lost and I think he had some survivors guilt missing out because he was somebody who really liked the limelight, even more than I do. [LAUGHTER] He lost his chance to be heroic on that day because anyone who didn't expire was a hero, civilian and public service. He had a singular way about him, that it was more about him. You see that in public life where it's more about a certain person than the people they're serving and I felt that he was that way. Now, he saw my marketing value, so he did drag me around to the Kiwanis in the downtown, the State Street Merchants Association, and then pawn me off as a show dog because I had a string of successes that were marketable, but he wasn't really genuine in his enthusiasm and he totally dissed my partner. She couldn't stand him because he was just so full of himself that she had a hard time being around him. But we'd had such a great succession of chiefs before that and some great inspired deputy chiefs and then after I left, a couple of guys I trained became police chief and I'm sure that they were good to work with and I felt gratified that I had some part in training them. In teaching them how to break the ice by talking to people like exhausting every avenue of diplomacy before you resort to any force whatsoever to give everybody every chance they could to give up before you put your hands on, and people remember that. When you're dealing with the same people over and over again, that they're inclined to comply with what you ask them to do because they know you're going to treat them fairly. You could be a bull in a China shop, but it won't work for very long because you'll come across that person that's a match for you and then you've left yourself nowhere to go. You've drawn a line and you can't withdraw from it. Both those chiefs were known for being tough, but super soft-spoken.
• [00:44:04] AMY CANTU: That's a good legacy to have?
• [00:44:06] PETER STIPE: It is.
• [00:44:07] AMY CANTU: In addition to your memoir, you had written a history of the Ann Arbor Police Department. You've had a fascination with local history. When did that start? Was it real early on or was it mostly the police department history?
• [00:44:26] PETER STIPE: History and English were always the two classes I could pass. [LAUGHTER] In elementary and junior high school if I got a history book, I would read it from front to back before there was any assignment. History has always fascinated me. What somebody would have thought in the same place, in the same block 100 years ago, you'd see the New York City brownstones where the Rockefellers and all the Carnegies or all those big families and you see the sidewalk in front of there and what it'd be like to walk down that sidewalk when there were no cars and there were no horses. I was born in '56. My dad was a tire dealer, so I was immersed in car culture from the get-go because we had cars coming and going in our businesses. In 1958, which I'd be about two years old, the first time I can remember seeing things, the cars on the street, a 10-year-old car was a 1948 car. People were using hand singles to turn.
• [00:45:39] AMY CANTU: Yeah, that's crazy.
• [00:45:39] PETER STIPE: You think now you'll see a 72 Malibu, that's a 50-year-old car now. Imagine in 1958 seeing a 50-year-old car. There weren't many of those around, but it wasn't much of a step to be immersed in the old times. When I started with the police department, there were still call boxes. When I left, there was a computer-aided dispatch thing where everything was done on a module in your car. There were no police radios not long before I started. An officer had to go to a call box to call in every hour. If they didn't call in, then they'd send somebody looking for him because you were out there alone. That history has always fascinated me. We were talking about the Beal House being here with a library. This block alone, my dad was an avid basketball player. He played at the Y every weekday for years and years. He would park in the Muligs parking lot. He knew them. He had an arrangement that he could park and walk over there. I took all my swimming classes from Guppy and Minnow to Flying Fish and Shark at the Y. My brother-in-law was the athletic director there, so I worked there setting up classes for a free membership for years and I was a patron of the district library here. I was down there in the shelves, usually getting history books or books about film because I was fascinated about film. Never imagining that I'd have a book on those shelves one day. Just in this tiny block, I've spent a good deal of my life. Now the Beal House is long gone, but the Y is not even there now. My dad's long gone, but Muligs is still there. He parks in there a lot one day and then they're handling his service the next day. I'm a little dismayed at the way the cityscape has changed, the high rises. Our old tire company has been bulldozed and the yard is down there. It's almost like a gleaming valley of buildings down there as you get down to Maine and Madison. I know it's important to find a place for people to live in the city and I'm not a big fan of urban or suburban sprawl, that sort of thing but it just seems like there's enough vacant places that we should try to occupy the vacant places before we build.
• [00:48:34] PETER STIPE: Giant high rises to try to draw people to live downtown. I'm a bank courier now. I spend nine hours a day. I must drive by the library here a dozen times a day. I start my morning at the post office over there, and traffic is really bad in Arbor now. There's a single lane everywhere. I know it's important to protect pedestrians and bike traffic, but there is so much traffic, it takes so long. At certain hours, I go to a bank branch at on Airport Boulevard South of 94 and on Fridays after 4:00 the 94 is backed up all the way. I love history because I long for the days when traffic wasn't like it was and when it seemed like it was safe for kids to go downtown. Like on Saturdays, we had this route of shops that we'd hit. Our nip night was our clover leaf dairy milkman. Our back door was always unlocked. He'd come he'd put bottles of milk in our milk box. Back there and Clegg's grocery, Packard and Dewey. They'd bring the groceries and put the bags on the kitchen table. Your back door was unlocked all night long. I really long for those days. When I'm posting things I try to hearken into those memories of a more innocent time, especially when your folks were still around, because that's when you have that feeling of security that you can go home and you'll be fed and the house will be warm and that thing. Because it didn't last very long for me. By the time I was 17 my folks were gone. But those are super important memories. The things I post for the most part fall in that area. We were talking about the Masonic Temple earlier. It's hard to imagine that this magnificent Masonic Temple building [OVERLAPPING] on Fourth Avenue is gone. I'm in the post office every morning, and it's an efficient place to.
• [00:51:12] AMY CANTU: It's not lovely though.
• [00:51:13] PETER STIPE: It's not. It's not lovely. A number of buildings and houses, homes. There's a difference between a house and a home. There's a picture of a house that was slated for demolition behind whatever the building was there, the EBU Ball building on it. It would have been on Fifth Avenue, just south of Liberty, and there's a dog on the porch. It's in your archives, and there's the dog laying on the front porch of this home. That's part of the extended building or the parking lot. Now it's hard to reconcile the seizing of property of homes to build something for the greater good. Because I don't think there's anything better than your own home, especially a home with a dog.
• [00:52:12] AMY CANTU: [LAUGHTER] Then we're back to the dogs.
• [00:52:16] PETER STIPE: Yes. It always come back to the dogs? If I was going to get remarried, I would definitely have dogs [LAUGHTER] in my ceremony. [LAUGHTER]
• [00:52:35] AMY CANTU: What are you most proud of?
• [00:52:38] PETER STIPE: My kids I think.
• [00:52:40] DARLA WELSHONS: I knew you would say that.
• [00:52:40] PETER STIPE: Because they're all smarter than I am. I wasn't a marginal student. I was a terrible student. I don't know if it's something that wasn't diagnosed when I was a kid. I just couldn't sit still and pay attention long enough. I have no aptitude for math or science. I just can't picture how you're supposed to get to the end. I'm not interested in getting to the end. I don't care [LAUGHTER] about that I work in a bank where the legion of accountants sit there for hours all day long. No music. No sound. They are just crunching numbers. I could never do that. But I love to read and my kids were all great readers. My daughter Darby, has an environmental degree. She works for Americorp and she's a writer for Mother Earth magazine. She's pursuing her environmental dream and Riley is immersed in the Japanese program and Asian culture at Michigan. Growing up around the Michigan campus, I didn't go to college. I went to community college for a while, but I didn't finish. I'm so proud of the kids for going to such a great university. I rely on them as much as they rely on me, if not more, especially for technology questions, that thing. They still ask my advice about this and if they have something, they don't ask me to help them write things anymore, but they have me read what they write to see what I think. But I am really proud of my kids. My youngest Brodie is 15, he's still in high school and trying to figure it out, but he's a scholar athlete. I made the honor role one time in three years [LAUGHTER] at greenhouse. That's why really I'm most proud of my kids. But I think I'm really happy I got the book done and out. I have a lot of friends who are just going toes up like every couple of weeks. Two of those six friends on Granger have died in the last couple of years. It seems like you just don't know if you have a finite amount of time or if you're going to be around for a long time. But the book will always reflect who I really am, what I am, and that's a big relief having that done. I'm grateful for that. I'm really honored to be part of the Bicentennial Archive here. Two hundred years goes by quickly, but when you think about, let's say your five longest lasting friendships, people you've known ever since you were a little kid. Those years add up. If you add those friendships together, you're getting close to a Bicentennial. For somebody my age, since I've known a lot guys since the '50s, those numbers add up quickly. If you think about it that way, which may be a stoner's way of [LAUGHTER] looking at.
• [00:56:25] AMY CANTU: That's great view again. [LAUGHTER]
• [00:56:28] PETER STIPE: At things, but it didn't take too long to get back there. My son is 15 and my dad was born in 1915. In just two generations, my son's gone back 100 years. Sometimes in the newspaper, you'll see your five generations in the same photograph.
• [00:56:52] AMY CANTU: Yeah.
• [00:56:53] PETER STIPE: To get five generations in my year, you'd have to go back to 1832 to get five generations together. We're a historical family in that way because we go back. I think it's because the dad's had their last child. I was 50 when Brodie was born and my dad was in his 40s when I was born. It doesn't take many steps back to be back immersed in history. But you learned so much from history. We lived through a historic week again, this week.
• [00:57:42] AMY CANTU: Didn't we?
• [00:57:42] DARLA WELSHONS: We did.
• [00:57:42] AMY CANTU: Yes, we did
• [00:57:44] PETER STIPE: I'm super encouraged by the lines I saw on the news.
• [00:57:50] AMY CANTU: I know.
• [00:57:50] PETER STIPE: The lines of kids on campus.
• [00:57:52] AMY CANTU: Voting.
• [00:57:53] PETER STIPE: Voting. How great is that? I mean, it shouldn't take a monumental issue to draw people out, but when they are drawn out, but that is really promising and encouraging for all of us, and my kids are part of that generation, so I'm super proud of them.
• [00:58:15] AMY CANTU: Thank you, Peter.
• [00:58:16] DARLA WELSHONS: Thank you so much.
• [00:58:16] PETER STIPE: Thank you very much. I really appreciate the time. [MUSIC]
• [00:58:24] AMY CANTU: AADL Talks To is a production of the Ann Arbor District Library. [MUSIC]