Lee Gericke, one of Park Forest’s first police officers, dead at 94

Park Forest was a fresh, first-in-the-nation community designed for veterans returning from World War II, and the town needed to build a police department from scratch.

Lee Gericke was a fresh-faced, 22-year-old who thought being a cop looked like fun.

So he met with the department’s new chief and was honest: He had no experience.

No matter. In short order, the chief handed him handcuffs, a ticket book and lent him a gun until he could buy his own.

It was 1950 and Mr. Gericke was told to “go out and protect people and property,” according to his son, Shane Gericke, a crime novelist and former Sun-Times editor who took notes about his dad’s life in recent months.

“We had burglars, robbers, and hard guys, same as cops do now,” Mr. Gericke told his son. “But we both played by the same rule back then: ‘Don’t give me a hard time and I’ll treat you with respect.’ It wasn’t my job to punish suspects, that was up to the courts. My job was to arrest them with as little fuss as possible, and I found that being nice to crooks did the trick.”

Mr. Gericke died March 6 of natural causes in Arizona, where he’d retired. He was 94.

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Park Forest Police Chief Paul Winfrey said Mr. Gericke sent the police department several letters in recent years describing his time on the force.

“Lee said if you treat people with respect you get respect, and in the last couple years there’s really been a focus on that in policing, and he realized it then,” Winfrey said.

Shane Gericke moved from Naperville to Arizona to help care for his father toward the end of his life and listened intently as his dad shared his most gripping tales.

“I was chasing a burglar hightailing it out of town,” Mr. Gericke said. “I hit the lights and siren and went real fast, but they had better cars than us. So, when the taillights faded, I called the next department south and said, ‘Catch my fish, I’ll come clean him.’ They obliged, I bought them coffee, then I drove the burglar back to the station.

“On the way, I asked about his family and how the crook business was these days. He wound up telling me something we used to arrest some other guys. No downside to being nice, you can always go the other way if you need.”

When he started, the police station was in a farmhouse. And cops didn’t have radios. If a call for service came in, a red light atop a tall pole in the center of town was turned on. Officers on patrol would see it and return to the station to get information on who needed help.

Mr. Gericke turned down promotions that would land him behind a desk. He spent 30 years behind the wheel of a squad car and helped solve the village’s first murder, an endeavor that Shane Gericke said caused his dad to miss a day of hiking with his Boy Scout troop.

The only interruption to his time as a cop came six months into his career when he was tapped to serve in the Korean War and paid a visit to his local draft office.

According to his son, Mr. Gericke recalled the meeting vividly: “Nice Army man said, ‘Well, son, what kind of job do you think you’d do best in the Army?’ I said. ‘Well, I’m a police officer, so I guess the MPs sounds right.’ Army man said, ‘That does sound right, the MPs. But you’re going to be a combat engineer. Next!”

He spent the war ducking machine-gun fire while tightening bolts and welding steel plates to build floating bridges.

“We built them nice and tight. Enemy blew them up. We built more. Enemy blew them too. ... Good job security if you could handle the working conditions,” Mr. Gericke told his son with a chuckle.

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Mr. Gericke received a Bronze Star for meritorious service. He claimed he wasn’t exactly sure why they gave him the medal but figured “he earned it for not screwing up too much,” his son recalled.

Mr. Gericke grew up in rural California and in 1948 moved to Illinois with his brothers to work on the water pipeline network starting to crisscross the booming postwar Chicago.

Policing would be more fun and provide more financial security, he figured.

He also appreciated a good prank, like the time a few officers rigged their lieutenant’s cigar to explode as he smoked it or when the occasional canister of tear gas was tossed in a little structure that officers used to fill out reports.

In addition to his son, Mr. Gericke is survived by his wife, Almarimor “Mary” Gericke, and his daughters Marianne Taylor and Diana Gericke.

Services have been held.