This is especially directed at my fellow old codgers, but anyone can join in.
I've been watching reruns of Highway Patrol with Broderick Crawford for the past few months.
I really like them. Some parts are more realistic than average, and others are less realistic. For example, they're almost never in a hurry, even when a baby can't breathe.
But one thing gets me. The police cars are all full-size (since that's almost all that existed in the 50's. But they are all 2-door.
Did any police have 2-door cars?
When they arrest someone, they put him in the back seat, usually with his hands cuffed behind him, but not always iirc. Sometimes maybe they put him in the front seat. I forget.
I recall two door police cars back then. When I lived in Philly years ago, the called for the Paddy Wagon to take the prisoners.
I know that our grade school janitor bought an old Ford (maybe late 40's) police car and it was two doors, maybe even a coupe. Hard to recall details from 50+ years ago.
I wonder how the practice of transporting prisoners in patrol cars developed. Into the 1960s, Baltimore's Cruising Patrols were trucks. A cop could sit in back to watch any prisoners, and the driver was isolated from them.
I've read that BC was such an alcoholic by the time HP came along that they had to lean him against cars, trees and walls to keep him from falling down. If you look for it, the "propping up" is pretty easy to spot. At least he didn't go the bad SciFi movie route like Joan Crawford in Trog and so many other A-list actors that fell on hard times. No one fell quite so hard as Bela Lugosi into "Plan 9 from Outer Space."
OMG, that was so painful!! Never much liked JC. Thought she was kinda homely. Finally saw her in Mildred Pierce. WOW!! She deserved that Oscar.
(anyone but me notice the mouth/lips of Jessica Rabbit are the dead-nuts copy of a young Ann Blyth?)
Yes, but he was immortalized in the movie Ed Wood by Martin Landau, who deservedly won an academy award for his portrayal of Lugosi. You can still see all those old Lugosi movies on 2fer/$5 bargain DVDs and Netflix. The fact he became a caricature of himself is no one's fault. As an actor, he was strictly vaudeville, a throwback to the silent era, long dead.
Paul, it's one thing to have unrealistic direction and a different thing to have an unrealistic major prop, the cop car, so I decided to ask on the home repair newsgroup, where it's off topic but the sort of thing that interests a lot of the people here.
These are great pictures. A lot of two-door cars, more than half maybe.
On the tv show, I don't remember the siren or lights on top. On the show last night, they definitely weren't there, so I'll have to watch more closely. I'm a little surprised they didn't put them in, just for "excitement". Sirens were sometimes under the hood, but flashing blue lights behind the grill I thought didn't exist until after the time of this show. Of course I'd never been west of Indianapolis when I was 10 years old. Or even 16. They have a black cop in Tampa in 1958. That's pretty good.
One picture says that 2-way radios were rare at the time. In the late
50's? I didn't' think so. But one thing about the show is that in many episodes they will not start the car until they've finished talking on the radio, while the bad guys are getting away. They were actually in sight, so 30 or 60 seconds on the radio is going to give them a lot of time to hide. In a few episodes they will talk on the radio while driving, but I think maybe they thought it was dangerous.
The l955 CHP Buick looks just like a common cop car on the tv show.
That works out fine since the name of the show was Highway Patrol. :)
The closest I came to seeing this sort of thing was when we moved to suburban Indianapolis and the sheriff came to say hello. The sheriffs's office was the only police in Washington Township outside the city. He had a shotgun clipped to the dashboard.
When I lived until age 10 in a town of 58,000 in western Pa. I don't remember ever seeing a cop. Although I know they existed. They gave the mayor enough traffic tickets that his license was suspended, and he rented a buggy -- from an Amish man I think -- and drove the buggy to work every day until he got his license back.
That might be it, but because a show that dealt only with traffic tickets wouldn't' be very interesting, they have a much higher rate of serious criminals. Even among the violent criminals, the vast majority, more than half of them wear suits and ties, and they usually have a pretty girlfriend, some of whom are nastier than the men.
My mother bought a '58 Ford Fairlane 500 with what the salesman called an Interceptor Engine, which he said was used on police cars. It might have even said Interceptor right on the engine. It was a demonstrator (do they still have those?) and had maybe 1 or 2000 miles on it, and it was the end of the year, so she got a good price. It makes sense that they would use a car with their biggest engine as a demonstrator It did have a big v-8 and a 4-barrel carburetor and was probably one of the fastest cars on the street then, though my mother never tried to find out. She did like, however, that it had so much pep.
This show was maybe the first and only cop show set in rural areas (not counting the Andy Griffith show, and I guess that was not rural but small-town - they stayed mostly in Mayberry.) So it routinely takes 20 minutes for another car to get to where they are**.
This same notion has led them to leave a dead body alone in a field (or a wounded victim alone in his home iirc) while they go check out any lead they have, even just the closest store or gas station. I tend to think this is unrealistic, even then.
Do you folks think they would really leave a dead body alone? Was chain of custody was no big deal then? That is, no defense attorney would claim the body was tampered with while the police were gone?
Also, and probably most important, the show was only 30 minutes long (the way I like them) and they only show transporting when it comes in the middle of the show. When they catch the guy, the show usually ends within 30 seconds. The shortness of the show must have many consequences on the script, though I'll admit it doesn't seem to lead to weird things on Sea Hunt or the Patty Duke show.
**They never say what state they are in and when they show a map, often with 100 miles showing and many towns and/or cities, I've never been able to identify the location. In addition, once they were only
10 miles from Mexico, but another time they were on the route from Oregon to Chicago, and they've been other moderately identifiable locations too, maybe even Indiana, but never east of the Appalachian mountains, maybe not even east of the Mississippi, and never where people had a Southern accent.
I don't know about that. I've been watching for months and rarely see a new episode anymore. He may have drunk off the set, but everything he does in the show seems appropriate to the setting. If there's a scene where he's lying on the ground to avoid getting shot, there's usually another scene just before that where he's walking in the woods, on a hill, looking quite stable. And I'll bet both scenes are shot in the same session.
There are 4 more shows this week. If I remember, I'll pay closer attention to this.
The only two-doors I have seen lately are the stealth Cameros that some troopers were driving a few years ago.
A lot of the local sheriff departments are using two-door or extended cab pickups in our area. You put a dark blue pickup with gray insignia just about anywhere along side the road and most people don't even see it until its too late. One law truck in our area is also a Duramax.
they have press cars. i have one, a 94 vette that was one of the press fleet in 93 so one of the first off the line. they sell them about in mid-year through the dealer chain. it was in a couple magazines of that year. my wife used to write for Vette so we'd get a new vette on loan for a week or so for 'testing' so she could write an article on it.
4 door cars are certainly more commonly spec'd by police departments, but I have seen a few 2 door models used by various departments, years ago.
As for the full size cars, that can be somewhat misleading too. Did you know for instance that a 1970s vintage Chevy Nova, then called a "compact" was longer, wider, and heavier than a 1955 Chevy Bel Air?
These come from Detroit, so there woudln't be as many of those. The demonstators like my mother got spent several months at the dealer, being driven by customers with the salesman sitting next to them, or maybe by customers alone, so each dealer, at least those who used demonstrators (all of them?) needed one of each major model.
But in neither of these cases was the body alone in a field, after the cops got there and then left again, and before the coroner arrived, right?
Besides legal issues, I sort of thought that no one would do this because of respect for a dead body. OTOH, in a rural county wehre it takes 20 or 30 minutes for the cororner to get there, even after he starts the car, it would be a shame for the murderer to get away while the only cop nearby keeps watch on the body.
Thanks. I think we might have the bigger one, the 352ci with 300hp. But my mother wasn't going to try for max speed and when I started driving at 16, neither was I. :-)
With a handcuffed suspect and another officer, they both go in the back seat, suspect on the passenger side.
With a handcuffed suspect and a single officer, suspect goes in the front seat, usually shackled to the floor.
The ONLY time you get in a REALLY BIG HURRY is to protect or assist another officer. This call is put out, depending on the jurisdiction, as "Officer needs assistance," or something similar. In our department, "Officer needs assistance" means a catastrophic situation has developed in which the officer's life is in imminent danger. If this call is accompanied by "shots fired," the situation is even MORE severe. Going on, if the call is accompanied by the phrase "officer down," cops from surrounding couties will respond!
Many calls will resolve themselves with time. One experienced officer told me "You never run red lights and siren to an "assault" call. You want the fighting to be over by the time you get there. Likewise most domestic disputes."
HomeOwnersHub website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here.
All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.