About a Cop
by
John G. Hubbell
Late on a September evening in 1955 Patrick Thomas Hartigan, 25, a veteran of the Korean War, was saying goodnight to his girlfriend at her front door in Edina, Minnesota, a suburb of Minneapolis, when he was felled by an aneurysm that burst in his brain. He was rushed to an emergency room and his family, his mother and four siblings, were summoned. They were instructed to prepare for the worst, that Pat had virtually no chance of surviving, that 98% of the victims of such a cerebral catastrophe died; that in the unlikely event that he was among the 2% who survived he would certainly remain a vegetable.
Pat died in his sleep one night in January, 2006. He was 75 years old. A half century had passed since the blowout in his brain and he had never resembled a vegetable. He had retired ten years earlier as a highly decorated Detective Lieutenant on the Minneapolis Police Force. In the lore of the city’s meanest streets Pat Hartigan was legend. He was a tough, competent cop; at the same time the then Chief of Police, Anthony Bouza, characterized him as “an urban saint”.
I don’t know that Pat is a saint. It’s said that God works in His own ways. He was my wife’s brother, my brother-in-law, a friend, so I know something of how God worked with him.
How else to explain this miracle of a man than to say that God had important business in mind for him, that he had important things to do before he moved on? No one, certainly none of his doctors, ever understood how it was that he not only survived but that he lived the life he lived.
He grew up in poverty and without any worthwhile fatherly guidance. He was 11 years old when his father, the spoiled rotten son of a wealthy St. Paul executive, skipped out on the family, leaving his wife and their five kids with nothing.
Pat’s mother’s name was Wilhelmina; everyone called her Billy. She was desperate to keep what was left of her family together but it wasn’t possible. She was 39 years old, had never worked a day in her life and had had no income and no skills. But she was outgoing and loving, had many friends and her friends embraced her. One enrolled her four youngest children in a Catholic boarding school, Our Lady of the Angels Academy, just north of Little Falls, Minnesota, about 70 miles north of the Twin Cities. But the school only had eight grades, so Billy’s oldest child, Mary Louise, who was already in high school, had to stay with her. Billy found a sales job in a book store. It didn’t pay much but they managed.
It was a tough, lonely time for Billy. At every opportunity she took a bus to Little Falls to visit with her kids. The upside was that the school was run by a band of Franciscan nuns from Ireland who seemed to love the kids as much as their mother did. Billy’s finances did not improve in the summertime, so the kids stayed at the school, helped in small ways with the school’s farm and played, along with the few other kids who stayed all summer.
The Hartigan kids spent three years at Our Lady of the Angels. Billy scrapped and scrambled, got a sales job in a department store and finally was able to bring her kids home. One of her sisters had become a Home Economist for a major appliance manufacturer. On her advice and with more help from friends, Billy opened the first Laundromat in the Upper Midwest. Her two sons, Pat, now 15 and Bruce, a year or two younger, looked after the place, kept it clean and Pat somehow knew how to fix most things that went wrong with any of the machines.
With fatherly guidance missing, Pat and Bruce both considered high school a waste of a lot of “fun” time and spent much of those years skipping classes, chasing around, “hanging out”, even smoking cigarettes. Eventually, Bruce was expelled and never earned a diploma*. Pat somehow remained a member of the student body but was so unknown to the school’s management that his diploma was inscribed to “Patricia” Hartigan.
When the Korean War erupted both boys were drafted into the Army. One result was that Billy had to close the laundromat; she simply couldn’t take care of it alone. She got herself hired as the Chief of Housekeeping at a major Minneapolis hospital, a well paying position that she held until she retired, many years later.
The Army trained Pat to be a Military Policeman, an MP, probably because he was large, sturdy and looked able to handle himself in tough situations. MPs were not the favorite people of many who served in the Army. It was taken for granted by many GIs that MPs worked for those who made all of the stupid rules that governed behavior, that their primary purpose was to ensure that no one had a good time or stayed out late.
Pat had not been a stereotype MP. He seemed able to identify with GI malefactors. His method was to talk to them, try to befriend them, reason with them, teach them to avoid trouble. Often, he went out of his way to help them avoid it. More than once he carried the limp body of a lad who had filled himself with too much alcohol to a safe place, sobered him up and explained to him that such idiocy could ruin his life. He found it satisfying to work this way; he liked the feeling that came of helping people who needed help.
He also found it satisfying to deal strongly with blatant, challenging, recurring misconduct. He had arrested his share of miscreants, testified against them and done all he could to aid effective prosecutions.
Discharged from the Army, he enrolled in the University of Minnesota, thinking to study architecture. He dated young ladies. Then the thing in his brain exploded.
Rather than accept the doctors’ gloomy judgment of Pat’s prospects, his family got busy praying; Heaven was taken under siege. There was a great deal of talk of St. Jude, who reputedly had been a close friend and relative of Jesus. Pleas to him for his intercession reputedly made marvelous things happen; indeed, Jude is known as the “Saint of the Impossible.” A seemingly endless string of novenas were now made to him on Pat’s behalf, and to many other saints as well, and lots of rosaries were being said many times daily to the Blessed Virgin Mary.
Not all of Pat’s friends were blessed with such faith. Some, with other ideas, tied rabbit’s feet to his hospital bed frame.
He lay comatose for weeks; to his doctors’ amazement, he continued to survive. Emboldened, neurosurgeons went into his brain and installed clips around the site of the burst aneurysm. Still, the physicians insisted, there was little reason to hope.
The praying continued. Fresh sets of rabbit’s feet showed up.
Then one day he awakened. Hopes soared. Clearly, St. Jude and those other saints had been busy! But the doctors remained more than cautious, and everyone called down. The praying continued.
All this time, I was courting Pat’s younger sister, Katherine, whom everyone called “Punkin”—that’s what someone called her the day she was born and it stuck. In fact, I was engaged in an intensive full court press. I would drive her to the University, where she was studying to become a Registered Nurse and would take her out to dinner and to movies and was doing all I could to break through her preoccupation with her brother’s sad condition. Then, I had to go to the east coast, then the west coast. I was gone for several weeks.
When I returned to Minneapolis, I rushed to see Punkin and met Pat. He was home, on his feet, walking and talking. He didn’t look like a vegetable. He was husky, broad shouldered, crew cut, wore a nice smile and had a quiet, pleasant manner. His doctors, who examined him frequently, remained cautious but were increasingly optimistic. After a while, none were able to find any reason to think he would not continue to survive, or to think he could not live some version of a normal life.
It struck me that St. Jude and all his cronies were good folks with whom to place one’s bets.
Pat spent most of two years recovering and thinking about how best to spend what time was left to him. His family insisted that he was definitely not the same person he had been before; the idea of architecture now bored him; and the accident in his brain had destroyed in interest in what most young men his age considered a good time—making lots of money, dating, drinking, “hanging out”. He was thinking more and more about his work as an Army MP. He had liked being a cop, liked being able to help people, saw it as a chance to contribute to making the world a better place. He decided that he wanted to be a policeman.
Everyone, me included, thought he must be a little bit crazy, that his cerebral catastrophe had knocked him slightly off kilter. How could anyone who had been through the ordeal he had suffered even consider trying to deal with the often dangerous rough and tumble of police work? He was insistent. He applied for employment with the Police Force. There was a great deal of consultation, medical testing, discussions and arguments with doctors and harumphing bureaucrats and then, almost suddenly, he was a cop.
In the years that followed, he demonstrated how wrong we all had been. His first beat was as a foot patrolman in one of the city’s nasty areas. It was called “Indian Country” because the population was overwhelmingly native American and a large proportion of it was “down and out”—unemployed, alcoholic, drug addicted, sick. The attendant misbehavior was rampant and many in the neighborhood were well acquainted with the city’s jail, the county’s workhouse and the state’s penitentiaries for crimes ranging from petty theft to robbery, burglary, assault and murder. Pat found himself engaged in lots of action, making many arrests and finding many opportunities to be helpful.
He made it his business to get to know the people on the beat. He talked to the, learned their names, the names of their spouses, children, the names of their friends and where they all lived, what they did and what they hoped to do with their lives. Most importantly, he made them understand that he thought of them as worthy human beings.
Many who lived on the beat had menial jobs and no idea how to handle their earnings; they were horrified at the notion of putting money in a bank, giving it to people they didn’t know; who would do who knew what with it. They literally hid it under their mattresses or in sugar bowls or carried it around in their pockets, practices that often resulted in burglaries or muggings. Pat took them inside banks, introduced them to bankers who taught them what banks did, helped them open accounts. Pat taught them how to budget themselves, taught them to rein in their appetites for non-essential things. In effect, many of them became clients; they pleaded with Pat to hold their checkbooks and keep track of their accounts. He did so.
They would keep enough cash for necessities but come to him seeking his advice when they wanted to buy something they thought important. Often, when someone needed a small loan, Pat would take it out of his own pocket; often it was never returned. He didn’t seem to care.
Years passed. Pat’s clientele in “Indian Country” kept growing. And he kept advancing in the police force. He became a detective, a Detective Sergeant, then a Detective Lieutenant. Now, he was in the Robbery-Homicide Division and worked all over the city, wherever robbery or homicide occurred. But he never really left the Franklin Avenue people; he stayed in touch, remained their mentor, their counselor.
The world of the detective was more eventful. One day he dropped by to tell me of an incident that had occurred in a distant part of the city. A “gang of idiots” had decided to rob a fur store. They drove to the store in to old vans and parked them in an alley behind the store. As they entered the store, their leader ordered the owner and his wife be taken to a back room and bound. Then, twirling his gun like a movie cowboy, he shot off his own index finger. Using a number of clothes to staunch the blood flow, he directed the transfer of several thousands of dollars worth of fur coats into a van in the alley. That done, they all piled into the other van and departed without the furs.
All were quickly apprehended and soon all were in a state prison, each having ratted out all the others. Now, they were all writing Pat letters, pleading with him to speak to the authorities about setting them free, pointing out that they had testified on the state’s behalf and had helped the state put the others away. Several also pointed out that the state prison was not a comfortable place for “snitches”.
Sometimes the work was hair-raising. A group of young native American men had taken 55 people hostage in a supermarket in a suburb just south of Minneapolis and only a couple of miles from Pat’s house. The store was surrounded with SWAT teams and snipers. No one had been hurt yet but things were tense. Attempts to negotiate had been futile; the robbers said they would talk only to Pat Hartigan.
Minutes later, Pat walked into the supermarket and waved the would be robbers up to the front of the store. The leader was 29, the others teenagers. “I didn’t know them,” Pat recalled later. But they knew him and his reputation. Pat judged them to be “scared, frightened to death. They didn’t want to hurt anyone. They weren’t vicious. What they really wanted was to know how to get out of this mess.”
Pat persuaded them to lay down their weapons and walk out of the store with their hands over their heads. They got into squad cars that took them to the county jail.
News people clamored around Pat. “Don’t call me a hero,” he instructed, “and don’t make me an expert.”
But that’s what he was called. He was much more than that: He was a safe harbor for the distressed. At two o’clock one winter morning he was awakened by a pounding on the door of his home in southwest Minneapolis, which he shared with his mother and brother. He crawled from his bed on the second floor, rubbed his eyes open, pulled on a robe, went downstairs, opened the front door and found a woman, screaming and crying. “Pat,” she pleaded “Help me. Please, help me!”
She held out her arms to him, as though she wanted to hug him. He stepped back, not wanting a hug. She was drunk, her face was badly bruised and tendrils of dried blood laced her face. She was covered in her own vomit and she stank. She said her longtime boyfriend had beaten her—for no reason, he was just drunk and it happened all the time but he had never beaten her this badly before and now he had thrown her out and warned her that if she came back, he would kill her and he had never done that before. She was suddenly alone, homeless, hurting, frightened, desperate, she needed help; her first thought had been that she needed Pat. Pat thought that she must have found his address in a phone book and had walked several very cold miles to get to him. He took her by the hand, led her to the kitchen, seated her and set about cleaning her face with warm cloths. He spoke gently to her, kept trying to calm her.
The tumult had awakened his mother, Billy. She spoke angrily from the kitchen door: “Pat you can’t put up with this! She has no business bothering you at this hour. Get rid of her. You have to go to work in the morning.”
Pat continued cleaning his visitor, murmuring to her. His mother kept urging him to eject the woman. He silenced her with a question; “How do I know this isn’t Christ, knocking on my door?”
He dressed, put the woman in his car, got her installed in a motel, assured her that he would see her in the morning and that they would figure out what to do.
I don’t know what he did the next day but I have no doubt that he “figured out” what to do.
Pat’s life was full of such stories. Laughingly, he once told his sister, my wife, that he had “made a mistake” he didn’t know how to rectify. A “nice Indian family”, a father, mother and five kids, did not have a decent place to live. Pat’s own mortgage had long been paid off, so he had taken out a new mortgage on his house to buy a house for the homeless family. He had neglected to keep enough money for himself to pay his taxes, which were due.
Within hours, his telephone rang: The McKnight Foundation had named him its “Humanitarian of the Year”, an award which included an honorarium of $5000.00
Sometimes God’s ways aren’t all that mysterious.
Pat retired from the police force in 1995.
A heavy cigarette smoker for many years, he developed a cough that wouldn’t go away and he began to have trouble breathing. He thought he had developed asthma. He quit smoking. It didn’t help. He consulted with a physician who advised him that he emphysema: his lungs had begun to stop working. For several years, he seemed to function well enough but increasingly the slightest effort required more energy than he had and after a while there simply was no more energy. As time passed he found it difficult to do anything. He could no longer walk more than a few yards without stopping to rest; he had to gather all the strength he could find to brush his teeth. Then one day he learned he had lung cancer and three small tumors in his brain. He took a dose of chemotherapy. That night, Punkin called him to ask how he felt and if there was anything we could do for him. He told her that the chemotherapy had “knocked me for a loop”.
The next morning she brought him a pot of chicken soup. He found the strength to call her and tell her that the soup was great. The next day, we were to take him for another visit to his doctor but there was no next day in this world for Pat. He was summoned that night to the glory he had earned.
Fifty years had passed since his family had been warned that if he survived he would certainly be a vegetable.
Some vegetable!
Chief Bouza had called him “an urban saint”. That works for me.