It was late afternoon on Friday and I was headed into town to begin my weekend cruising. At nineteen years old, cruising in a small Indiana town was just the thing to do. I came to a stop sign on Blue Creek road and kind of slowed my way through it like I had done a hundred times before. About a half mile down the road, I noticed blue flashing lights behind me. The lights were in the grill of a green car. In all of my three years of driving experience, I had never seen flashing lights in the grill of a car. I thought that Police and emergency vehicles only had lights on the top. To me, this was either a joke or someone was trying to rob me.
My teenage wisdom and instinct told me not to stop. I just kept driving the speed limit and the green car kept getting closer. I chuckled to myself,”jees is this like the tree police or what”? The green car driver soon began honking his horn and turning his headlights on and off. I was now, only about a mile from town so I just kept driving and the green car just kept honking! As both cars were going over the Whitewater River bridge, I could hear the green car driver screaming obscenities which made me more determined to keep going. I knew that the Franklin County jail house was only a quarter mile further and that was my determined destination.
While going up the hill, just before the jail house, I looked in my rear view mirror and saw that the man’s arm and head were out the window and his face was extremely red with anger. I braked and whipped into the jail house parking lot, without using my turn signal and the green car squealed to a halt behind me. Lucky for me, Deputy Lee Davidson was in the lot watching an inmate wash his car. I had known Lee for years and I nicknamed him Barney while he in turn called me Goober. As the green car guy got out in his green uniform, he was screaming more obscenities and Deputy Davidson stopped him just before he reached me.
Deputy Davidson told Mr. Green Guy,” calm down now, just calm down and tell me what is wrong.” It turned out, the guy was a Game Warden. The Game Warden loudly told the Deputy that I had ran a stop sign and refused to pull over. Between the blubbering of more obscenities, I think there was about ten more offences. When Deputy Davidson got him calmed down, he looked at me and said “well Goober, what is your story”? I nervously told them that I had no idea that he was any kind of law because I thought all cops had lights on the tops of their cars. I went on and told them that I just drove to the jail house where it would be safe.
Deputy Davidson walked the Game Warden to behind his green car that still had the lights flashing and talked to him for quite a while. The Deputy came walking back with a grin on his face while the Game Warden got in his car, still mumbling obscenities and drove away. Deputy Lee Davidson put his hand on my shoulder and said ” Goober, under the circumstances you did the right thing by coming here but you surely have to understand why that guy was so mad.” He went on saying,” that guy followed you for three miles, past the grocery store, past the feed mill, past the gas station and past the car dealership and you could have stopped at any one of those”. I kind of hung my head and said ” he looked and yelled like he wanted to kill me so I just drove here.” Deputy Davidson chuckled out “he did want to kill you”. My lesson of the day was to stop at stop signs and if you’re not sure about who is pulling you over, just go to the nearest populated place.