Back in the late 1970’s I got my first full-time job, a dispatcher for a small suburban police department. I had graduated high school just a week before. I spent 2 weeks training on Day shift and then was relegated to “Relief Shift”, basically working 2 nights of Midnights, 2 of Afternoons and 2 of Days each week. (We worked an 8-day rotation schedule). It was the garbage assignment, but I was the new guy, so I was stuck with it until they hired someone else. Luckily one of our other dispatchers quit a few months later and when her replacement was trained, he got the garbage shift, and I was “promoted” to straight midnights.
When bored you had to amuse yourself. While most of the time between calls I studied for the college classes I was taking I did have time to have some fun or be pranked myself. I have written various tales in the past, here are a couple more from my time as a dispatcher:
Be careful running the dispatcher’s plate:
I was working Midnights in relief of the regular dispatcher one summer night. We had 4 beat officers, one sergeant and me, an 18-year-old dispatcher midway thru my first month of solo dispatching. By 2:00 AM the town was safely tucked away for the night and the only things moving were police cars, the occasional drunk that wandered in off the highway (our town was dry…) and a few deer and racoons.
Around 3:30 AM on night one of the guys ran a license plate on the radio (no car computers back in the 1970’s). He reported he was SB on Cumberland Ave from Touhy. Most of the guys would report the location and direction of travel when they ran a plate, otherwise we presumed it was parked. I thought the plate sounded familiar and I ran it thru the Teletype. This was one of those old-fashioned Teletypes that you typed the inquiry with a specific format, (“LZW5.LIC/JP5588/LIS/IL..”, wow, I still remember how to do that almost 50 years later!).
The inquiry was then punched into a yellow tape; each character was a specific pattern of holes. You could tell how busy a night was by how many yellow dots were collected in the bin behind the tape punch, there was usually a bunch on the floor as well as that bin only caught most of the yellow dots. Be careful emptying it or you will be vacuuming them for days. I sneezed once after a really busy shift while emptying the bin and the dots went everywhere.
But I digress (again). I ran the plate and it came back to me; I had just bought the car a short time before and just got my plates after a couple weeks with a temporary tag. Of course, the beat cop knew that; what he didn’t know was that we just got a new security camera in the PD parking lot and that I could see my car in the parking lot right where it was supposed to be and his squad car parked right next to it.
So, I followed the “10-99” hit procedure. I hit the “Beep” button 4 times and woke everyone up from their hiding places. I also pressed the station intercom at the same time as the transmit button so I could be sure the sergeant and anyone else hiding in the police station would hear it. I then announced “873 from Park Ridge, SB Cumberland from Touhy, 10-99 Vehicle: Gray 1979 Ford Fairmont, IL Plate John Paul 5588, that’s J-John P-Paul 5 5 8 8, Unknown Driver. All Units be advised. 880 from Park Ridge, are you 10-4?” (880 was the sergeant, he was not known for a sense of humor and not fond of being bothered when on midnights after 2:00).
Other units started to respond on the air they were heading that way, The sergeant sleepily said he was enroute. There were some radios covering each other, this was an unusual occurrence in this sleepy little town for sure. Then 873, the original unit, finally got a chance to get on the air and called everyone off saying he read the plate wrong.
An hour later he came into the radio room with donuts and a Coke (he knew that I did not drink coffee, 45 years in police, fire and EMS and I still don’t. Donuts, however, are a different story.) He said that I certainly won that one. He was the main practical joker of the department, but I was too new to know that at the time. He never tried to prank me again, but I did give him some hints he could use on others down the road. I debated whether to tell him about the new security camera in the parking lot, but I decided to hold that one back for now. He (and the rest of the guys) would figure it out soon enough.
Ruthie:
Ruthie was our main Midnight Shift dispatcher when I started. She was a really nice, older lady, which is why she kept her job. She was smart, but not “cop smart”. Just before I started, they replaced our phones with “those new-fangled push-button” Touch-Tone models, she was not happy, she knew how to work a rotary phone and had a hard time with the new ones.
Within the same years after I started, we replaced our old Teletype machine with the “Big Orange”, a newer CRT-based Teletype terminal that had a monochrome (green) display and integrated keyboard. It had several premade formats for tasks like running inquiries, entering warrants or stolen items and more. There also was a “Freeform” screen for those of us who still liked things the old way. Instead of creating a yellow tape and running it thru a reader you could just type it exactly the same way on the screen and send the inquiry or entry. It was a lot faster if you knew the formatting.
One night as the end of my Afternoon shift was approaching I was bored so I typed into the Freeform screen the main inquiry screen. I knew that when she ran her first plate, she would get a beep and then an error message and the screen would go blank with a flashing cursor. I assumed that she would then know to just type in the command to get the Inquiry screen back (LFR.LINQ) but no. The computer was down for the night; any inquiries would have to be run by the department we shared the channel with.
I happened to be doubling back for Day Shift in the morning and when I came in there was a note on Big Orange telling me to call the State Police computer room after 9:00 AM and heave them fix whatever was broken and to run inquiries thru Rosemont until then. Before she left, I took off the note and tossed it in the trash. I then ran the Format request command, and all was well with the world. Ruthie finally figured out I had pranked her, but bless her heart, she didn’t say anything. I suspected that I would not be on her Christmas Card list that year though.
Bells, Bells and more Bells:
When we had that old Teletype machine with the tape reader, we realized we could have some fun. We shared our dispatch channel with the town just to our southwest and even had an intercom between our two radio rooms. Us dispatchers all became friends and would meet up after work for pizza and beer, once we reached drinking age anyway. We also liked to prank each other once in a while. One fun gag was “sending bells”. These old Teletypes were loud, so many towns bought or made enclosures to deaden the noise. This worked well except for bells. Sending a “CRTL-G” command in a message would sound the bell on the receiving Teletype. These were obnoxious by design and seemed to be amplified by whatever enclosure covered the machine.
My friend and coworker Bob and I were sometimes irritated by the other town’s dispatchers. While we were all friends sometimes these guys would talk over us or get in long-winded conversations on the radio. We found a way to combat this. We typed up a “Type 3 Message”, basically a directed message from our terminal to theirs. We figured if one bell would get their attention, we could really annoy them with a bunch of bells. We typed up a yellow tape with 100 or so “CTRL-G” commands. We really weren’t sure of the exact amount as we were running out of tape on the roll and had to cut it off lest we have to start all over again.
We saved that tape and then ran it thru the tape reader whenever they got too annoying on the radio. It turns out it took about 20 minutes for the bells to stop ringing after we sent them. It was hilarious to hear them in the background as they tried to talk on the radio. We laughed and laughed, they swore and swore.
One day the Deputy Chief came in and asked to see the tape we used. We tried to feign ignorance, but he knew how the thing worked. He then walked over to our brand-new shredder and reduced our tape to little strips of yellow wastepaper. He then said we were not to do that anymore. I am pretty sure I heard a laugh coming from down the hall as he walked back to his office.
DX’ing on the police band:
When working afternoon and midnight shifts in the suburbs back in the 70’s and 80’s one had a lot of down time. As a scanner nerd I saw it as an opportunity to listen to stuff I could never hear from my car or home. Big antennas on bigger towers connected to the most modern base-station radios meant I could hear stuff for 100 miles on a bad day, and much more on summer evenings when tropospheric conditions came up. At first, we didn’t have PL except on the main UHF police repeater, everything else was carrier squelch on VHF high band. VHF carried well and it was common for us to hear many other towns on the various channels we had. You learned to filter these other towns out pretty quickly.
At times we actively listened to these far-away places. Our police VHF channel was fascinating. There were some other suburbs that used it 30 or so miles away. More interesting however was a far-western Illinois county that the total population of was less than our one little town. It was mostly a farming area, and we had fun listening to calls of stray cattle on Mrs. Olsen’s lawn or that the town drunk was causing a ruckus on Main Street.
When conditions really popped up, like during temperature inversions, listening to places in Minnesota, Iowa, far southern Illinois, and sometimes Missouri, Ohio and Pennsylvania was possible. You probably heard of low-band skip caused by sunspot cycles, but for those of us using VHF High band it was temperature inversions and ducting. Temperature Inversions occur when a layer of cooler air gets trapped below a layer of warmer air. This can cause signals up into the UHF bands to bounce off that warmer air layer instead of continuing on to oblivion.
Tropospheric Ducting is similar to inversions but usually results in more directed reception over great distances. One might hear lots of stuff from Des Moines when in Milwaukee but not hear closer in stuff from Rockford for example.
Either way, when these phenomenon came around, often on summer evenings, things would get crazy on the radio. We had several High band channels at each of the places I worked in the 70’s and 80’s. Some channels were better for DX’ing, Point to Point (155.370) and ISPERN (155.475) were awesome as the stations would identify on almost every transmission so were easy to pinpoint. Other fire and police channels were more difficult as one had to listen carefully for callsigns or other identifiers. It really helped to have the proper Police Calls to identify stations.
There were days when I would hang out in the comm center well after my shift ended just to listen to the wonderful reception. We had 100-foot towers, high-gain antennas and the latest Motorola and GE receivers. It was great!
Eventually we would add PL to our VHF channels, but thankfully we had a PL Disable button for them so I could play if it wasn’t busy. When we were busy, I just enabled the PL so I would normally only hear our guys. There were times however when conditions were so great that there might be some other agency using our channel and the same PL. This was usually pretty easy to figure out as the signals would be kind of fuzzy sounding most of the time on these distant stations, but it really confused the other dispatchers.
Years later when I was handling all the tech stuff at my later agency, we had big problems with this on our old and then our new fire channels, as well as the police VHF channel. I was able to change to a DPL code on the police channel but on the fire channels we were stuck with the PL we had. I eventually was able to talk the northern Wisconsin highway department that shared our new fire channel and PL code into changing their PL, it seems they were just as sick of listening to us as we were of them.
When bored you had to amuse yourself. While most of the time between calls I studied for the college classes I was taking I did have time to have some fun or be pranked myself. I have written various tales in the past, here are a couple more from my time as a dispatcher:
Be careful running the dispatcher’s plate:
I was working Midnights in relief of the regular dispatcher one summer night. We had 4 beat officers, one sergeant and me, an 18-year-old dispatcher midway thru my first month of solo dispatching. By 2:00 AM the town was safely tucked away for the night and the only things moving were police cars, the occasional drunk that wandered in off the highway (our town was dry…) and a few deer and racoons.
Around 3:30 AM on night one of the guys ran a license plate on the radio (no car computers back in the 1970’s). He reported he was SB on Cumberland Ave from Touhy. Most of the guys would report the location and direction of travel when they ran a plate, otherwise we presumed it was parked. I thought the plate sounded familiar and I ran it thru the Teletype. This was one of those old-fashioned Teletypes that you typed the inquiry with a specific format, (“LZW5.LIC/JP5588/LIS/IL..”, wow, I still remember how to do that almost 50 years later!).
The inquiry was then punched into a yellow tape; each character was a specific pattern of holes. You could tell how busy a night was by how many yellow dots were collected in the bin behind the tape punch, there was usually a bunch on the floor as well as that bin only caught most of the yellow dots. Be careful emptying it or you will be vacuuming them for days. I sneezed once after a really busy shift while emptying the bin and the dots went everywhere.
But I digress (again). I ran the plate and it came back to me; I had just bought the car a short time before and just got my plates after a couple weeks with a temporary tag. Of course, the beat cop knew that; what he didn’t know was that we just got a new security camera in the PD parking lot and that I could see my car in the parking lot right where it was supposed to be and his squad car parked right next to it.
So, I followed the “10-99” hit procedure. I hit the “Beep” button 4 times and woke everyone up from their hiding places. I also pressed the station intercom at the same time as the transmit button so I could be sure the sergeant and anyone else hiding in the police station would hear it. I then announced “873 from Park Ridge, SB Cumberland from Touhy, 10-99 Vehicle: Gray 1979 Ford Fairmont, IL Plate John Paul 5588, that’s J-John P-Paul 5 5 8 8, Unknown Driver. All Units be advised. 880 from Park Ridge, are you 10-4?” (880 was the sergeant, he was not known for a sense of humor and not fond of being bothered when on midnights after 2:00).
Other units started to respond on the air they were heading that way, The sergeant sleepily said he was enroute. There were some radios covering each other, this was an unusual occurrence in this sleepy little town for sure. Then 873, the original unit, finally got a chance to get on the air and called everyone off saying he read the plate wrong.
An hour later he came into the radio room with donuts and a Coke (he knew that I did not drink coffee, 45 years in police, fire and EMS and I still don’t. Donuts, however, are a different story.) He said that I certainly won that one. He was the main practical joker of the department, but I was too new to know that at the time. He never tried to prank me again, but I did give him some hints he could use on others down the road. I debated whether to tell him about the new security camera in the parking lot, but I decided to hold that one back for now. He (and the rest of the guys) would figure it out soon enough.
Ruthie:
Ruthie was our main Midnight Shift dispatcher when I started. She was a really nice, older lady, which is why she kept her job. She was smart, but not “cop smart”. Just before I started, they replaced our phones with “those new-fangled push-button” Touch-Tone models, she was not happy, she knew how to work a rotary phone and had a hard time with the new ones.
Within the same years after I started, we replaced our old Teletype machine with the “Big Orange”, a newer CRT-based Teletype terminal that had a monochrome (green) display and integrated keyboard. It had several premade formats for tasks like running inquiries, entering warrants or stolen items and more. There also was a “Freeform” screen for those of us who still liked things the old way. Instead of creating a yellow tape and running it thru a reader you could just type it exactly the same way on the screen and send the inquiry or entry. It was a lot faster if you knew the formatting.
One night as the end of my Afternoon shift was approaching I was bored so I typed into the Freeform screen the main inquiry screen. I knew that when she ran her first plate, she would get a beep and then an error message and the screen would go blank with a flashing cursor. I assumed that she would then know to just type in the command to get the Inquiry screen back (LFR.LINQ) but no. The computer was down for the night; any inquiries would have to be run by the department we shared the channel with.
I happened to be doubling back for Day Shift in the morning and when I came in there was a note on Big Orange telling me to call the State Police computer room after 9:00 AM and heave them fix whatever was broken and to run inquiries thru Rosemont until then. Before she left, I took off the note and tossed it in the trash. I then ran the Format request command, and all was well with the world. Ruthie finally figured out I had pranked her, but bless her heart, she didn’t say anything. I suspected that I would not be on her Christmas Card list that year though.
Bells, Bells and more Bells:
When we had that old Teletype machine with the tape reader, we realized we could have some fun. We shared our dispatch channel with the town just to our southwest and even had an intercom between our two radio rooms. Us dispatchers all became friends and would meet up after work for pizza and beer, once we reached drinking age anyway. We also liked to prank each other once in a while. One fun gag was “sending bells”. These old Teletypes were loud, so many towns bought or made enclosures to deaden the noise. This worked well except for bells. Sending a “CRTL-G” command in a message would sound the bell on the receiving Teletype. These were obnoxious by design and seemed to be amplified by whatever enclosure covered the machine.
My friend and coworker Bob and I were sometimes irritated by the other town’s dispatchers. While we were all friends sometimes these guys would talk over us or get in long-winded conversations on the radio. We found a way to combat this. We typed up a “Type 3 Message”, basically a directed message from our terminal to theirs. We figured if one bell would get their attention, we could really annoy them with a bunch of bells. We typed up a yellow tape with 100 or so “CTRL-G” commands. We really weren’t sure of the exact amount as we were running out of tape on the roll and had to cut it off lest we have to start all over again.
We saved that tape and then ran it thru the tape reader whenever they got too annoying on the radio. It turns out it took about 20 minutes for the bells to stop ringing after we sent them. It was hilarious to hear them in the background as they tried to talk on the radio. We laughed and laughed, they swore and swore.
One day the Deputy Chief came in and asked to see the tape we used. We tried to feign ignorance, but he knew how the thing worked. He then walked over to our brand-new shredder and reduced our tape to little strips of yellow wastepaper. He then said we were not to do that anymore. I am pretty sure I heard a laugh coming from down the hall as he walked back to his office.
DX’ing on the police band:
When working afternoon and midnight shifts in the suburbs back in the 70’s and 80’s one had a lot of down time. As a scanner nerd I saw it as an opportunity to listen to stuff I could never hear from my car or home. Big antennas on bigger towers connected to the most modern base-station radios meant I could hear stuff for 100 miles on a bad day, and much more on summer evenings when tropospheric conditions came up. At first, we didn’t have PL except on the main UHF police repeater, everything else was carrier squelch on VHF high band. VHF carried well and it was common for us to hear many other towns on the various channels we had. You learned to filter these other towns out pretty quickly.
At times we actively listened to these far-away places. Our police VHF channel was fascinating. There were some other suburbs that used it 30 or so miles away. More interesting however was a far-western Illinois county that the total population of was less than our one little town. It was mostly a farming area, and we had fun listening to calls of stray cattle on Mrs. Olsen’s lawn or that the town drunk was causing a ruckus on Main Street.
When conditions really popped up, like during temperature inversions, listening to places in Minnesota, Iowa, far southern Illinois, and sometimes Missouri, Ohio and Pennsylvania was possible. You probably heard of low-band skip caused by sunspot cycles, but for those of us using VHF High band it was temperature inversions and ducting. Temperature Inversions occur when a layer of cooler air gets trapped below a layer of warmer air. This can cause signals up into the UHF bands to bounce off that warmer air layer instead of continuing on to oblivion.
Tropospheric Ducting is similar to inversions but usually results in more directed reception over great distances. One might hear lots of stuff from Des Moines when in Milwaukee but not hear closer in stuff from Rockford for example.
Either way, when these phenomenon came around, often on summer evenings, things would get crazy on the radio. We had several High band channels at each of the places I worked in the 70’s and 80’s. Some channels were better for DX’ing, Point to Point (155.370) and ISPERN (155.475) were awesome as the stations would identify on almost every transmission so were easy to pinpoint. Other fire and police channels were more difficult as one had to listen carefully for callsigns or other identifiers. It really helped to have the proper Police Calls to identify stations.
There were days when I would hang out in the comm center well after my shift ended just to listen to the wonderful reception. We had 100-foot towers, high-gain antennas and the latest Motorola and GE receivers. It was great!
Eventually we would add PL to our VHF channels, but thankfully we had a PL Disable button for them so I could play if it wasn’t busy. When we were busy, I just enabled the PL so I would normally only hear our guys. There were times however when conditions were so great that there might be some other agency using our channel and the same PL. This was usually pretty easy to figure out as the signals would be kind of fuzzy sounding most of the time on these distant stations, but it really confused the other dispatchers.
Years later when I was handling all the tech stuff at my later agency, we had big problems with this on our old and then our new fire channels, as well as the police VHF channel. I was able to change to a DPL code on the police channel but on the fire channels we were stuck with the PL we had. I eventually was able to talk the northern Wisconsin highway department that shared our new fire channel and PL code into changing their PL, it seems they were just as sick of listening to us as we were of them.
