Retiring again

By CAITLIN SULLIVAN/Staff

Bill Slemp, 80, held his cap in both hands and stood next to Washington County Sheriff Fred Newman.
It was the seventh sheriff he had stood next to during his 58 years in law enforcement.
“You don’t see that many people that can stay in a law enforcement career for that many years,” Newman said to a group of fellow deputies, family and friends at Slemp’s retirement party at the Washington County Sheriff’s Office last week.
Newman presented Slemp with his patrol gun and a plaque honoring his service.
Typically people last 25 to 30 years in law enforcement due to the stresses of the job on the individual and the family, Newman said later in his office.
Not Slemp.
“A policeman is a cab driver with his brains knocked out,” Slemp said.
In a 2006 Washington County News interview, Slemp said there was barely a book to follow when he started out in law enforcement. So he said he ran wild on the streets of Abingdon.
“Back then you were blazing the trail,” he said. “I’d do it the easiest way I could, and I went through the knocks.”
Slemp signed up as a road camp guard with the Virginia Department of Corrections in 1951. After only a month with a gun in his holster, the then 21-year-old fired for the first time, igniting what would turn out to be a career filled with shootouts, chases and scraps in the streets.
Here’s what happened: Slemp was on one side of a dirt road just outside Marion. Twelve prisoners were working on the other side. A truck drove by, separating the two sides with a cloud of dust.
“I saw one of ‘em start to get up just before the truck passed and then he took off,” Slemp said.
He thought the prisoner was too far off to shoot but aimed anyway.
“I saw him fixing to jump in the bushes,” he said. “I shot him and he dropped.”
Slemp joined the Abingdon Police Department as a patrolman that same year. Bringing home a $175 per month check, he was charged with taming the streets of Abingdon.
That $175 check had to stretch to buy his own shirt and .38 caliber handgun.
He’d drive a 1949 Plymouth or 1959 Ford around town, and everybody knew his name.
“There weren’t no guidelines,” he said. “I didn’t learn how to fight, I just took it up.”
Saturday nights on Wall Street were the worst, he said.
“I’d fight the drunks,” he said. “It used to be wild. We only had a black jack. We didn’t have no pepper spray or mace.”
Often Slemp would find himself alone, mixing it up with drunken crowds and hauling them to jail. He said he’d come away from a Saturday night with bruises and black eyes.
“If we had a drunk to put in jail we’d have to ring the buzzer from outside and get the jailer out of bed,” he said. “We were lucky if we got a day off a week.”
Slemp wasn’t always on the right side of the gun. More than once, he ended up on the barrel end.
One night in 1955, Slemp was working the night shift from 4 p.m. to 4 a.m. He was making a routine check of the doors and windows at Abingdon Cleaners and Laundry on East Main Street. He jiggled one of the door’s handles and a shot rang out from inside, he said. The bullet pierced his left lung, just two inches above the heart. He said he yelled for his partner and the two cleared the window of the laundry, opening fire into the building, but missed the shooters.
Two of the three suspects were caught in a honeysuckle patch outside Johnston Memorial Hospital. The third was caught hoboing on a freight train in Flint, Mich., a few days later. Doctors had to dig an inch into his back to get the bullet out.
Slemp worked as a radio dispatcher while recovering from his wound. Once back on his feet, he was back on the streets. He soon found action again.
“It was just at daylight, and I was the only one out,” he said. “I was right by the courthouse when there was a call on the radio that some boys had broken into the hardware (in Wise County). Then I saw two guys driving past me on Main Street. I got behind them and thought I’d stop them with my lights down at the bottom of the hill but they didn’t stop.”
Slemp said he turned his lights off and hung with the car at speeds nearing 100 mph as they made their way to Chilhowie. He said he called the Marion sheriff, rousting him from bed, and told him to set up a roadblock.
“Then they turned around this bend and slid down the bank, bailed out of the car and took off running,” Slemp said. “We called the dogs and later that afternoon found them down around Bristol railroad tracks.”
All the hard work didn’t go unnoticed. Slemp moved steadily up the ranks. In 1958, he was hired on as a deputy in the Washington County Sheriff’s Office. There he had to use his own car, but he got paid 7 cents a mile.
“I wanted to spread my wings,” he said.
And he got to. He broke up moonshine stills. Broke up prostitution rings near Bristol. He even acted as a chauffer when President Harry S. Truman stayed at the Martha Washington Inn in 1960.
Four years later, Slemp was moving on again. He took a job as a deputy U.S. Marshal in Roanoke in 1964, covering the western district of Virginia. He spent weeks at a time out of state, transporting prisoners back to Virginia. He traveled by car most of the time, he said. Every day, he’d call into the office at 5 p.m. to see if any more pickups had been added on.
“They’d run you all over the country,” he said. “When you got back home you were wore out.”
When he first started transporting inmates on planes he didn’t have to tell anyone he had a weapon on the plane.
Under the five U.S. Marshals Slemp worked for he was always in rotation for special assignments.
Like at a 1967 anti-war protest at the Pentagon a photo was taken of him swinging his baton at a protester who broke the security line. Another photo shows Slemp carrying a female protester.
Another clipping in his scrapbook shows Slemp dumping and crushing $400,000 worth of bootlegged tapes at the Washington County dump.
Then there’s the snapshot of Slemp serving injunction papers in Big Stone Gap during a coal strike.
He worked court security for trials, including one for murder in the Virgin Islands and Muhammad Ali’s draft-evasion trial in Texas.
But much of his time was spent transporting prisoners in the backseat of his car. Most of the time they would talk, he said, but he made it a point to never answer any legal or personal questions. The prisoners usually never gave Slemp any trouble, he said. Some were aggravating, though, he said, and he was always glad to see them go.
“I don’t make a habit of getting to know them,” he said. “They’ll talk about what work they do or their home life and all about their life story. They just want someone to listen and they’re nervous, I guess.”
With 26 years in as a U.S. Marshall, Slemp retired in1990, but he couldn’t stop working. He rejoined the Washington County Sheriff’s Office, serving civil papers until 1992, when he went to work as an administrator at the Washington County Jail. He retired from the Sheriff’s Office in 1996.
That retirement didn’t last long either.
“I’d sit around waiting for a call,” he said. “I thought I retired for good, but I didn’t.”
He said he was bored and within a year was back at the Sheriff’s Office. He now works part-time transporting prisoners, just like he used to. He also works court security and performs civil unions at his home.
“Sometimes you see people who look down or talk down to people in jail and he never did,” Newman said in his office last week. “He is a kind person and he will be greatly missed.”
Last year, Slemp supervised the inmates while they painted the new sheriff’s office before the move.
He said he liked working with inmates. Newman said the inmates he supervised would fight for him.
“All of the inmates treated me with respect, if they didn’t then I wouldn’t bring them,” Slemp said.
Out of all the jobs, Abingdon patrolman, road camp guard for the Department of Corrections, U.S. Marshal, Slemp said he liked working for the Sheriff’s Office most. It was better, he said, than tromping around the country for two or three weeks at a time.
“The people, I’ll miss them,” he said. “That and being out and about. I’ll miss the fellowship with the officers… I’d do it all over again if I had the chance.”
Slemp’s wife, Dot, met her husband on the corner of Wall and Main streets in Abingdon.
Last week, she had to tell her husband a little story to get him to the surprise party. She said Lut. L. J. Doss, who called Slemp every week to give him his work schedule, had something to show him.
Slemp’s last day of work was Dec. 31.
“I got so I couldn’t hear,” Slemp said of his decision to finally quit working.
“And he couldn’t chase people,” his 9-year-old granddaughter Taylor said while lying on the rug at the Slemp home.
On that day, he’s still wearing his black, shiny deputy shoes as he looks out the window.
His days have changed now that he’s retired.
“I watch the squirrels, birds eat,” he said. “And when it gets warmer I’ll go out and work in the yard and I’ll hate every minute of it.”
To contact Caitlin Sullivan e-mail csullivan@wythenews.com or call (276) 628-7101. Information from a 2006 story on Bill Slemp was used in this report.