Gilroy
– The history of the Gilroy police department has been shelved
away in shoeboxes and retrieved from trash cans: A host of nameless
badges. A flashbulb camera chucked into the garbage.
Gilroy – The history of the Gilroy police department has been shelved away in shoeboxes and retrieved from trash cans: A host of nameless badges. A flashbulb camera chucked into the garbage. A leather-bound fingerprinting kit shoved aside after a PD remodel.
“I look around every day and I see our history being thrown out,” said Detective Frank Bozzo, department historian, “and it bothers me.”
For two years, Bozzo has collected materials from the department’s past, chronicling the women and men who’ve policed Gilroy, his lifelong home. Bit by bit, he’s named the grinning officers in faded photos and matched badges to eras. Retirees volunteer scraps of information, a name or a face, that Bozzo carefully files, building the past out of their memories. Fridays, he and retiree Gil Gallo spend their free time refurbishing a 1950s-era paddywagon, decommissioned in 1979 and sold at city auction. Bozzo found it, and the two are bringing it back to life.
His pet project has won the support of several local businesses, who have donated more than $40,000 worth of restoration, from engine repair to powder-coating the paddywagon’s frame, rusted and damaged over the seven years it was stored outside.
“This is something fun and different,” said Ignacio Magana, owner of Mission Powder Coating. “There aren’t 10 customers a day that walk in with a car frame and say, ‘Let’s paint it.’ ”
Mike Dwight, owner of Gilroy Collision Center, agreed. His business has donated more than $25,000 worth of labor and materials to the project, which he calls “a conversation piece.”
Besides, he joked, “they told me they’d throw me in jail if I didn’t.”
For Bozzo, a veteran officer who’s spent 27 years in a rapidly changing department, PD history has special significance. He struggles to describe why he’s devoted hours upon hours to the projects, storing materials at home, calling retirees and widows to ask for their help, poring over yellowed, century-old newspaper articles in the Gilroy Museum. At home, while gathering research, he often became distracted, reminiscing over photos and memorabilia.
“I had this stuff packed away in boxes,” he said. “It means a lot more seeing it here” – at the department’s new Seventh Street station – “on display.”
When the city unveiled the department’s new building in March, Bozzo’s historical display took center stage, as hundreds of people filed past the collection of badges, photos, even oddities such as an antique narcotics scale. A notebook for the Gilroy Police Benefit Association, the forerunner to the Gilroy Police Officers Association of today, shows how much times have changed: Dues are listed as $2 a month, with a $5 initiation fee.
“There isn’t any particular spot where you can go to gather this stuff,” said retired Sheriff’s deputy Al Gagliardi, who once commanded the South County substation across the street from the former police station at Sixth and Monterey streets. “But it’s history too, and it is something that people want to look back at.”
Often, retirees say they don’t have anything, said Bozzo. Months later, they’ll pull out a photograph or a badge, something stored and forgotten. Retired officer Pat DeLeon donated a flashbulb camera used to document crime scenes in the 1940s, a relic nearly lost as the department remodeled in the 1970s.
“It was in the garbage and I retrieved it,” DeLeon recalled. “I’ve never used that type of camera, but it brought out lots of nostalgia.”
For now, the paddywagon is only a frame, a shell of the beetle-shaped vehicle Bozzo points out in black-and-white photographs. The total restoration will cost between $30,000 and $40,000, most of it donated by local businesses, which have cleaned the engine, touched up the paint, and found old fittings for the vehicle.
“We didn’t know how extensive the restoration would be until we got into it,” Bozzo said.
The officers hope to polish off the paddywagon this year. Bozzo is also restoring a three-wheeled police motorcycle, sold at city auction to a local resident. DeLeon still remembers riding it as a new recruit, circling Friday night football games to keep the peace.
Ask the veterans how the department has changed, and some will say it hasn’t, really.
“Law enforcement is law enforcement,” said Gagliardi. “Technology makes things more efficient … but the manner in which we enforce the law hasn’t changed.”
Others say a changing world has changed police work as well. Bozzo noted the increased diversity of the department, including its first female officers in the 1980s, and more attention to issues of harassment and discrimination in police work.
“We do business a little differently these days,” said Bozzo. “You’ve got to be careful with your mouth. It’s made us more attentive – but sometimes, I think, overly sensitive.
“It seemed easier then than it is now,” he added, “but I think we’re working through those issues for the better.”
