going on in his community — from reckless driving, to fences that
need fixing, to crank houses ready to be shut down and marijuana
plants prime for destruction.
Pat Taylor’s business card tells you that he is Deputy No. 3 for the Kingman County Sheriff’s Office.
His regular newspaper columns in the Kingman Leader-Courier prove he is more: part cop, part social worker, part storyteller, part philosopher, part preacher.
And for many in this south central Kansas county with a population of 8,500, Taylor is their community connection.
“We read Pat’s column to find out what’s going on in the county that we don’t hear about,” says longtime county resident RoseMary Freund, who farms with husband Richard south of Cunningham, population 514 in far western Kingman County. “Heck, he’s entertaining. He makes us laugh. It doesn’t matter what it is that happens. You’ll read about it next week.”
That seems to be the way many people in the county view Taylor’s columns, which ran weekly in the Leader-Courier until he retired last year. Now, the column runs every other week. He works part time for the county. Taylor fs ’77 started his column in 1988, when he was police chief in Argonia, a community of just over 500 in nearby Sumner County. His column ran in the newspaper in Conway Springs, which covers Argonia. “His columns are funny,” says Mike Cline, whose family owns the paper. “He makes the mundane humorous. At one time, we had people subscribing to the paper just for his column.” Even though Taylor hasn’t lived in Sumner County for years, the Conway Springs newspaper still runs his columns once a month.
Taylor’s column also runs in the Cunningham Clipper and in The News in Norwich, both in Kingman County. The Cherryvale newspaper in southeast Kansas also prints his day-by-day crime reports. Shayleen Casteel, publisher of newspapers in Belle Plaine and Oxford in adjoining Sumner County, has been considering publishing Taylor’s column.
“Some people might be surprised by the sheer variety of happenings in Kingman County,” Casteel says. “These situations Taylor runs into … sometimes it’s making a cow go back to its yard, or it’s dealing with some cranked-out truck driver imagining that a man and woman are trying to hijack his truck, while he’s still driving it. I guess you have to be a jack-of-all-trades type of cop. Some of his stuff’s been sad, though. It wasn’t too long ago they had to remove a 7-month-old from a crank house.”
Bob McQuin, longtime owner of the Kingman newspaper, says Taylor offered to write his column for the paper when he took the deputy position in Kingman County. “Pat offered his weekly column at no charge, and I gladly accepted,” McQuin says. “One of the best moves I ever made.”
The Kingman sheriff was skeptical about his new deputy’s newspaper column, Taylor says. Three weeks later, however, the sheriff’s wife subscribed so their children could read Taylor’s reports. And when the priest at one of Kingman’s churches commented one Sunday morning from the pulpit about Taylor’s column, it caught on quickly.
Taylor’s move to Kingman was prompted in part by an incident at Argonia High School involving one of his sons. Someone put poison in the boy’s bowl of soup in the cafeteria. The son, then 16, recovered, but the incident frightened the Taylors.
At the time, Kingman County was trying to hire a deputy sheriff. Taylor took a pay cut to move to Kingman. He says it was a good move for other reasons. For one, it gives him more opportunities to check on his parents in nearby Cheney. Both Taylor and his wife Mary Lou have roots in Kingman County. Mary Lou (Norrish) Taylor grew up at Calista, west of Kingman. Taylor’s father, a former law enforcement professional himself, and Taylor’s mother taught school in several small Kansas communities.
The Taylor family name continues in law enforcement. Son Robert is a senior special agent with the Drug Enforcement Agency stationed in Kansas City, Mo. So far, though, he isn’t writing a newspaper column about his work. The closest any of Taylor’s children come to that talent is son George, a photojournalist for a Wichita television station. Kingman newspaper publisher McQuin says Taylor’s columns are not full of police jargon, but written in “comfortable, first person.” Taylor says he never thought of himself as being a columnist.
“I never thought I was smart enough to be a writer,” he explains. “I remember a police captain trying to write a book. It was very detailed and very dull. It was, in essence, a police report. A good writer has a knack to communicate ideas, or otherwise express his thoughts to the enjoyment of the reader.”
One of the elements about police work that Taylor noticed in working with people was, he says, “the funny way they approach a problem and the funny things that happen to them while they are trying to solve their problems. I always resented not being able to put the funny solutions in a police report in the way to make the reader laugh. In the news article, I could relate the funny things that people did, and it would make the news article funny to the reader.”
Taylor says his column delivers a message to certain people and may educate others. When he started writing the column in Argonia, he was receiving complaints about high school students smoking marijuana and experimenting with cocaine. He mentioned in his newspaper column that he would pay $300 for evidence leading to the arrest of anyone dealing any drugs or marijuana in the school district.
A day or so after the newspaper came out, he was driving on Main Street in Argonia when an approaching pickup flagged him down. The driver told him who he was, and then assured the police chief that he was now out of the drug-dealing business. “I never heard anymore out of him except for him speaking respectfully to me at a community function,” Taylor says.
Shortly after Taylor’s offer to pay for drug activity evidence, he was contacted by a couple of old farmers, both widowers. “They caught me for coffee,” Taylor says. “They commented that they did not know much about law enforcement, but they thought the column was the best thing that had happened in the community, and they asked me where I was going to get $300 if I needed to pay off a reward. I told them that I would have to hit the savings account. They both told me that all I had to say was I needed money, and they would provide it.”
One regular task on any rural law enforcement officer’s shift is to check on people in need, particularly if they are elderly or poor — or both. Some welfare recipients lived just out of Argonia in some old mobile homes. Most of the time, Taylor says, they did not have reliable transportation.
When the weather was bad, he would stop at the grocery store and pick up a 10-pound sack of potatoes, a loaf of bread, a jar of peanut butter and a gallon of milk, and then drop it off at the trailers. The two farmers found out about Taylor’s philanthropy and purchased more than $100 worth of groceries to have on hand if needed during the winter. “I considered it great community support,” Taylor says.
Deputies in Kingman and other rural Kansas counties cover a good deal of territory during a shift, as much as 150 miles a night. U.S. Highway 54 cuts through the center of the county, east to Wichita and west to Pratt. Smaller highways go north to Hutchinson, and south toward Oklahoma. Cheney Lake touches the northeastern corner of the county, and the state lake is near Calista in the center.
Like his fellow deputies, Taylor covers not only the 20-some communities in the county and major highways, but also all the back roads. Kingman County is 24 miles wide and 35 miles long. On a busy night, Taylor estimates, he has driven as much as 280 miles just answering calls.
A ride with Taylor provides him an opportunity to relate county history and all the tidbits about the good and bad elements of the populace — where the last murders in the county occurred, the sign at the state lake that appeared online with a still-unidentified naked woman standing in front of it and the cow lots where marijuana harvesters spend much of their time.
Occasionally, Taylor writes of cold cases in the county. Recently, someone handed him a note with names of four people who were supposed to be witnesses to a homicide that occurred in April 1973 on the night of the high school prom. Kingman Police Capt. Larry Beery was murdered with his own pistol. Taylor says a convicted burglar from Wichita was charged with the murder, but was not convicted in the captain’s death. He was convicted, however, of burglarizing the John Deere dealership on the night of the murder.
“The person handing me the note was not even born at the time that this occurred,” Taylor says. “He was passing the information on from another source that was afraid to be identified as having the knowledge.”
Taylor confides he’d like to solve that murder case before he quits law enforcement work. Larry Hatteberg, a well-known Wichita broadcaster, describes Taylor’s humor as “dry” in a piece on Taylor in one of his books on Kansas personalities, Larry Hatteberg’s Kansas People. In that article, published in 1991 when Taylor was police chief in Argonia, he is described as “a real cop reporter who hands out warning tickets in his newspaper column.”
Back then Taylor wrote, “A lot of little towns expect their police to make their pay by writing tickets. Argonia isn’t like that. I write very few tickets. If I write about cattle or horses being out, pretty soon a farmer will be out fixing fences. Farm kids get their drivers’ licenses when they are 14, and they drive in town to school. It’s my job to see that they obey all the rules. If I write about a kid goofing off around town in a red Mustang, pretty soon you may see that kid riding the school bus for a week. It means his dad read the column, checked into it, and the kid is being punished.”
In another column cited in the Hatteberg book, Taylor reflects on the costly damage caused by squirrels chewing on utility lines. “An Argonia squirrel climbed a pole behind Eldon’s Automotive, and managed to shut down the electricity for the city for a few minutes. Fortunately, one squirrel does not last long when transmitting 3,400 volts. The electricity came back on when it ran out of squirrel to ground out.”
Taylor says his oldest daughter told him that his column isn’t as funny as it used to be. Others have accused him of being too preachy in the column. Actually, Taylor, like his dad before him, has filled in for preachers who are called away for the weekend or are on vacation.
Taylor admits he does some preaching in his columns, but he makes it personal. “When you see something taking place in a community that isn’t good, and you get too preachy, people will ignore you,” he explains.
Taylor has had people from other states stop by the law enforcement center to have him autograph a copy of the newspaper to take back to friends. “I was surprised how much the paper is forwarded to others or the column is clipped and forwarded,” he says, adding that he has e-mailed his column to people interested in his law-
enforcement stories to as far afield as Germany, Australia and South America.
“A deputy does not chase pigs and cows on television cop shows,” Taylor says. “Big-city officers find this to be something to laugh about, but it is just part of the job here.”
