I have been a model law-abiding citizen my entire life, skirting the law only when clearly undetectable, so the few encounters I have had with law enforcement were to me all awkward.

I believe the first situation occurred when I was a 21 year old senior in college. My circle of friends (both of them) and I started hanging out at O’Toole’s, a favorite bar of the college crowd. The law required bars to close at 1 a.m. One night, however, after leaving O’Toole’s we decided to extend the evening (technically the morning) entertainment by patronizing Jimmy Egan’s, a legendary Scranton drinking establishment that was beloved for its willingness to defy the restrictive Lackawanna County drinking laws by welcoming folks well beyond the prohibitive hour. All that was required for entry was to knock on the back door of what otherwise was a dark and closed bar. We arrived shortly before 2 and there were about a dozen males there, all without masks and none socially distanced. A glass of beer, by the way, was 25 cents. Around 3 a.m. there was another knock on the back door and in came two Scranton police officers, one of whom, to my horror, was my Uncle Jimmy Noone. I was told that policemen routinely came to Jimmy Egan’s after hours just to be certain everything was cool, and if time permitted on any particular early morning when criminal activity was absent or low, to also have a draft or two. Before Uncle Jimmy could see me I darted into the men’s room and stayed there about 15 minutes until he left. I was of legal drinking age, but I did not want him reporting to my father and my aunt that “hey, last Thursday I saw Bobby at Jimmy Egan’s in the middle of the night”. Since Uncle Jimmy was a relative I would describe this incident as an encounter with law enforcement of the very close kind.

My next encounters with law enforcement happened when I was a resident law student on the Catholic University of America campus. On the night of the riots following the assassination of Martin Luther King I and three other law students answered a volunteer call from the Superior Court of the District of Columbia to assist the court in the arraignment of looters and rioters arrested that evening. We were escorted downtown to the court in a police van and were instructed that our task was to represent one inmate in the arraignment process where a plea of guilty or not guilty would be entered. It required that we seek out our “client” and inform him of the nature of the arraignment process which took place all night long into the early morning. I went down to the basement of the court building where a number of holding cells were located, all with the arrested packed like sardines. I found my client and asked him how he wished to plea, and I guess correctly that his plea was “not guilty”. I then went up to the courtroom and waited for his case to be called, which occurred around 4 a.m. All of what I just related, of course, was not a law enforcement encounter involving me, but rather was a one of a kind experience in personally witnessing massive law enforcement in action against so many angry men. You might call it a close encounter of mankind.

Here comes the awkward encounter part of the DC riots story: When we arrived back on campus that morning one of us suggested that we go over to the 14th Street riot area and observe the happenings. We generally agreed “sure, why not? We’ve never seen looting up close and personal before”. As I was the only one with a car we proceeded to the scene in my yellow Cougar convertible, with the top down of course, it being a lovely Spring day. For some godforsaken reason (other than perhaps we were giddy from being up all night) none of us 24 year olds thought to ask “wait a minute, is this a good idea for four white males to openly cruise an ongoing crime scene?”. We got within a couple of blocks of the main rioting area when several police officers halted our excursion and ordered us in no uncertain terms to “get the hell out of here (other expletives deleted)”. Maybe they didn’t know that we had just finished performing duties as de facto officers of the court and thus were on the right side of law enforcement.

Throughout my three years of residence on the Catholic University campus I had continuous encounters with the campus police. Yes, campus police. While they are often belittled or scorned they are there to enforce campus law, and we should give them their due and thank them for their service to our country. My issues with them concerned their insistence on giving me parking tickets. I was fortunate to receive a full tuition, room and board scholarship to Catholic University Law School, and I remember being told at the outset that my only expense would be to purchase law books. I am willing to swear on a stack of King James that it was never explained to me by the admission folks that I would need to also annually buy a parking permit sticker. The campus police considered that parking without a permit was an offensive violation of campus propriety and security. I held no grudge against them; they were just doing their job. But it was upsetting to find a parking ticket under my windshield wiper every few days. I had an outside antenna on my car and I kept stacking the tickets on the antenna. hat worked well enough until it rained, making the tickets soggy and requiring me to start over again. My ticket-decorated car was probably not the talk of the whole campus, but it was revered by my fellow residents at Gibson Hall. Finally, as the time for my graduation approached, I was notified that my J.D. degree would be withheld unless I paid all outstanding tickets. A classmate who also had amassed an admirable number of parking tickets was also threatened with the withholding of his degree. He decided to research the matter and found a case in Michigan, I believe, where the court ruled that an academic institution cannot withhold earned degrees based solely on campus infractions. We argued that with the powers to be at Catholic University and were successful. I got my degree and I never paid those parking tickets. In return, of course, I promised to annually contribute to Catholic University for the rest of my life. In retrospect I consider my opposition to the actions of the campus police to be a close encounter of the fun kind.

In the Spring of 1970 my apartment roommate and I attended a reunion at Catholic University where we met up with a number of classmates that we hadn’t seen since graduation the previous year. My roommate (Al Lubiejewski) was dating a student at Catholic University and he brought her as his date to the reunion. I think he felt sorry for me and so he asked his cousin to be my date. After the reunion function a group of us were invited to the home of a law professor where we continued to party until the wee hours of the morning. We left there in my car around 5 a.m. We dropped off Al’s date at her campus dorm and proceeded to drive to my apartment. Al was in the back seat and fell asleep. My date was in the front passenger seat and fell asleep. I was driving and was the last to fall asleep. I drove in my slumber about two blocks before a tree hit my car. We all woke up. Al got out of the car and disappeared. I learned later that he apparently was in shock but otherwise was unhurt, and eventually made his way on foot back to the apartment. My date suffered a broken noise. I had facial lacerations that required an ambulance ride to Sibley Hospital. While lying in a room waiting to be stitched up I noticed a uniformed police officer in the corner of the room. The nurse told me he was there to take me to the police station after my stitching was completed. He then drove me to the nearest precinct and I was issued a ticket for “Failure to pay full-time attention” while driving a motor vehicle. I could hardly object, so I paid the fine and called a friend to drive me home. But while the officer was standing in the room waiting for me I feared I was going to be arrested.

In the Fall of 1971 I started dating a girl who lived in Silver Spring. I was living in an apartment in southwest DC at that time. My trips to Silver Spring to be with my girl friend resulted on two occasions with law enforcement encounters. One was on a late Sunday morning when I was driving to her house and I was pulled over by a policeman on 15th Street for no apparent reason. He told me that I was to follow him to the New York Avenue precinct station because my car was identified with 14 unpaid parking tickets. Obviously I obeyed and I learned at the police station that the tickets dated back to three months in 1970 when I was assigned to the Cincinnati office of Arthur Andersen. While I was there I asked a former law school classmate to watch over my car and I allowed him to drive it if he needed transportation. So in gratitude for that he drove around and parked my car all over town, and never told me about it. As I recall the total owed was about $350 and the police officers told me that it had to be paid before I could leave the station. I only had $30 or $40 on me, and back in those days the police was not accepting credit cards for parking violations. I called my friend, Dan Vitiello, who lived in an apartment complex in Greenbelt and informed him of my predicament. He and his wife had just a few bucks on hand so they went from door to door (or so they said they did) on that Sunday morning to ask neighbors to chip in for my freedom. They collected enough to pay my fine and arrived at the police station with the money around 1:30 that afternoon. I was in a back room with several police officers watching the Reds…. (oops, the Washington Football Team) game. I asked if they could wait until halftime. That did not go well. Naturally, I eventually reimbursed Dan and his neighbors and that ended a close encounter of a costly kind.

The other law enforcement encounter incident caused by my long distance courtship of the Silver Spring girlfriend took place at the other end of a visit with her and her family. There were many nights when I would be at her house rather late, watching Johnny Carson. It was a 25 minute drive from her house to my apartment in southwest DC. When I arrived in my parking lot around 1:30 a.m. on one such late night three DC police vehicles surrounded my car. I was commanded to get out of the car and lean against it with my hands on the roof. As an aside I always regretted that I didn’t have the top down at that time. One cop stood by me while the other two officers took my registration card and went back to one of the police vehicles. After about ten minutes, which seemed like ten years, they came back to me and apologized for the inconvenience, explaining that my car was erroneously reported as stolen. A satisfactory ending to that story to be sure, but until then I thought it was going to be my George Floyd moment with law enforcement, a close encounter of the worst kind.

There you have it – save for a couple of speeding tickets in my wild youth, my entire history of awkward encounters with law enforcement. Nothing to write home about, right?