“I was born in Royal Oak,” Ronald August began. “Well, my birth certificate states it’s Royal Oak Township, which I believe now is called Madison Heights. March 27, 1939.
“My father’s a tool grinder; he’s done this for the last thirty-some years, he’s been in this trade. My father was brought up in Grand Rapids. He ran away from an orphanage, as I recall him telling; at the age of sixteen he came to Detroit. His parents weren’t deceased, they were separated, and he, along with his two other brothers—he has three brothers, but as far as I know, the two of them out of the three were in the orphanage with him in Grand Rapids.
“My parents moved here in this same vicinity of town, Northeast Detroit, when I was approximately four and a half years old, and I started kindergarten in the fall of ’45, and I went there two years, at Burbank Elementary. Then I switched over to St. Jude Catholic School, that’s on East Seven Mile Road, and I went there to the eighth grade. My grades were, I’d say, maybe a B or C average.”
“I liked building model airplanes,” he told me. “They were never, I would say, a really advanced, complicated kit, but I did a lot of that. And I was always messing around with electricity or electronics, and I remember building my crystal set, and gee, I haven’t seen a crystal set for quite a while now. Then my dad bought me a Heath radio kit, and I built the radio, and I remember the electric train I had. It was older than I was when I got it, a Lionel, and I had two engines; my dad bought it used. And oh, it ran for a good many years. I still have it, but it doesn’t want to go anymore. The tracks are rusty, and I guess the cold attic doesn’t do it any good.
“My interest in sports—I like sports, but I was never that enthused to get out there and get knocked around that much.
“When I was a boy, it seems to me my dad bought me a new bike when I was about ten years old, and I practically lived on a bicycle. We’d go on bike hikes, and I can recall one time calling my dad up at four o’clock in the afternoon—he got home about then—telling him to come and get me, because I broke the chain on the bike. My mother always knew where we were at; she’d pack us a lunch, and we’d take off maybe ten o’clock in the morning, and there was at least three of us, two or three of us. I can recall most of my boyhood just riding that bike. I rode up to school, I even rode it a little bit to high school, till it was stolen, and then I never had a bike after that. I walked.”
“I had one brother, he’s five years younger than I am. He is somewhat different than what I am, I always believe. He’s more or less of the sports enthusiast, where I never was. He was strictly the varsity type all the way through school.
“We’ve always had a good brotherly-love relationship, as far as brotherly love will go. He was always the toughie, where I was more or less just satisfied to do something not as strenuous as he was doing. He was all the time wanting to play football, he’d be going to basketball practice and things of this nature, where I was just happy to, well, go play cards, go play Monopoly, and things of this sort, or go on a bike hike, or go down to the City Airport and see the airplanes. Well, he didn’t do these things. In fact, when he got his bicycle, he wouldn’t even change a flat tire; either my dad did it, or I did it, or it sat in the garage. His interests were strictly nothing mechanical; he just wanted sports.”
“My first car came along when I was sixteen. I always regretted my first car, because it never ran. It was a 1946 Ford. I swear, I’ll never have another Ford. I was working in a gas station, and I was too young to pump gasoline, so I was washing windows and sweeping and my primary task was washing automobiles, which got to be a very good-paying proposition in the wintertime, because you just couldn’t keep up with the cars that came in wanting a car wash.
“This fellow pulled in the station one day with this ’46 Ford, with a for-sale sign on it. It was noisy, but I figured, ‘Well, that can be fixed.’ Where actually it could have been fixed, but not on the wages I was making, because it needed a new manifold, and if you recall the ’46 Fords—this was another pastime of mine, I just loved to tinker with automobiles—you had to put a fuel pump in them bloody things every six months if it wasn’t every six days. I just got it home, and I was real excited about having a car, and after we ate dinner that night, I said to my mom, ‘Come on, we’ll go for a ride.’ I got in her and it wouldn’t start!
“I only had that car three months, and between putting in new fuel pumps and changing the transmission or something, it was just sitting there all the time in the garage. I sold it at a loss, for forty-five dollars; I’d paid sixty for it. That was sort of a poor investment.”
“I recall starting Denby High School,” he said, “and went there two years. Ninth and tenth grade I went there. I had a C average. And then in ’56 it was that my dad—the company moved. He worked for Palmer Bee for thirty years, the Palmer Bee Company, and they moved to Marysville, Michigan, so that’s why I just put two years in at Denby. Consequently after we moved up there to St. Clair, Palmer Bee went out of business or went bankrupt, I don’t know what happened, but they disappeared. He kind of followed them up there to keep his seniority without any rewards as far as financial status goes. But then he worked for Mueller Brass, Port Huron.
“And then I started at St. Clair High School, which would be my junior year, and I graduated from there in June of ’58. My last two years that I finished up, I can boast of an A average with a few B’s.”
“This is one part I forgot to mention,” he said, “where I had a very good interest in music. I played saxophone and clarinet, and at the time I did a lot of playing in a small combo, quartet actually, it was four pieces. We enjoyed playing mostly, at the time, high-school dances, parties, and we’d advertise in the newspaper as catering to weddings and banquets and parties. The Blue Lancers. We were going to call ourselves the Blue Notes, but that didn’t sound too good, so we decided on the Blue Lancers. We played together about three and a half years, and we could play the polkas and the waltzes and the sambas and rhumbas; my favorites are the old standards like Star Dust and Dream and Tondoleyo, all the old danceable items. I was a tenor, tenor sax and clarinet. I began taking lessons at about ten years old, and I plugged along with the lessons for about three years, and I met this fellow that was a year younger than I was that played the alto, and he was just fabulous. In talking to him, he had a little experience in playing different parties and weddings, and in speaking with him I found where this wasn’t getting anywhere, so with his help I learned how to transpose, which was necessary if you want to play in a small combo. About two years after that, I was doing fairly well, I thought.”
“Before I was in the Navy,” August told me, “I met my wife. At the time she was seventeen years old, I was nineteen. And she comes from a large family, by the way, she has two brothers and two sisters, and they live on a farm.
“I met her in Canada, as I recall. Oh, how could I explain it? I met her in Canada where she thought I was Canadian and I thought she was Canadian, come to find that we lived in two towns on the St. Clair River just eight miles apart. It was at her high-school junior prom, I believe that’s how you’d classify this. We were playing for it. And when I met her, she thought, like I said, she thought I was Canadian, but she gave me her phone number, and then when I called her I found out that it was a Marine City number instead of inside there. It was at the Guildwood Inn in Sarnia, just across the Blue Water Bridge, and I believe it’s more or less traditional, they went over there every year. It sounds like having it in Canada, that you’re actually going across the continent to get there, but it was only a matter of twenty miles from Marine City. But then we met at this dance, and we dated for about ten months, and we corresponded regularly while I was in the service.
“She was born in Detroit, December 19, 1940, and she moved, I don’t know when she moved to the farm—her father has a hundred acres in Marine City, but I don’t know, I guess now that it would be fifteen, sixteen years ago. And she grew up on a farm, and she tells me she fed the chickens, drove the tractor, and helped her dad and mother out. When her brother got old enough, well, that relieved her of the outside chores, and she stayed in the house. She has a marvelous personality. She talks all the time, which I guess most women do, but the most striking thing about her is her personality, I mean you just can’t help feeling acquainted with her after you’ve only known her a small amount of time. She’s very sensitive, she loves children, and sort of, I’d describe her as softhearted. When I met her, she always wanted to be a nurse, and she was a nurse’s aide at the time, working in a hospital in Mt. Clemens.”
“Then I enlisted in the Navy,” August said, “in March, ’59, and I had my basic training, I recall, at Great Lakes. From there I was stationed aboard an aircraft carrier, and there is where I stayed until I was discharged. The Intrepid, which was classified then as a CVA, or attack carrier.
“It was home-ported out of Norfolk, Virginia. When we were to go to the Mediterranean, it would usually be a seven-month cruise, and we’d go to Naples, Italy; Livorno, Italy; Barcelona, Spain; Cannes, France; Istanbul, Turkey. I went to Rome to the Olympics, either in ’60 or ’61. Rome is inland; I always thought of Rome as being a seaport. They told us we were going to Rome, so I figured we were going to drop anchor, and there’s Rome. But it didn’t happen that way. We had to take a bus. And we saw the Rock of Gibraltar; Beirut, Lebanon; Athens, Greece. I saw the Leaning Tower of Pisa—oh, I guess Pisa’s around thirteen miles inland of Livorno. I enjoyed it. I enjoy traveling. We made three cruises while I was on the ship, and the third cruise was really six months of saving up to be discharged, because I’d already seen this stuff two years previously, and I was happy just to save a few pennies to come home on. Oh, I’d saved I think around eleven hundred dollars when I was discharged. They paid us in cash on the ship, and you had to fill out what they call a money receipt, you handed it to the disbursing clerk, and told him how much you wanted to draw out of your account, see, and naturally if you didn’t withdraw it, it would keep adding up.”
“We picked up Scott Carpenter, the astronaut,” August told me, “in 1962, I think it was. As I recall, there was our ship, the Intrepid, and a couple of destroyers, and we were in the Caribbean. It’s just beautiful down there; the water’s always sky-blue and not a ripple in it, the only ripple you see is what the ship makes. And we were tensely waiting for the word to—for the splashdown. Nothing was happening. We were just waiting around, and of course we were all in our white uniforms down there, so we’d look presentable when we got on the flight deck, and it was an hour overtime, as it was. We thought something actually disastrous had happened. But finally they told us that—this was right after we had changed to support carrier, we carried nothing but helicopters—so the helicopters were launched, and they flew away, and it was explained to us that the capsule had landed, landing relatively fifty miles away from the ship, and they were flying there to pick up the astronaut. And which they did do so, they got there and picked up Scott Carpenter. I seen him. I have pictures of it. But the idea was that the capsule was still there after they got the astronaut, and in order to retrieve the capsule, one of the ships had to get there first. I don’t know if you’re a sailor or not, but if you ever hear any talk about a destroyer outrunning a carrier, it won’t happen. We did get there first. We picked up the capsule.”
“I really didn’t have any job prospect when I was discharged,” he said, “something around the 28th of February of ’63, I believe that’s what the separation date was.
“We got married in May, which was roughly six, seven weeks. In ’63 I wanted to start in an apprenticeship in electrical work, or plumbing, or carpentry. Any apprenticeship. But the doors were closed then, it seemed to be, because every place I went, they just weren’t hiring any apprentices, or if you weren’t a skilled tradesman at the time, well, they didn’t want you. And the Police Department has always had a recruitment drive, so to speak, where they’re always hiring—and I think this is going to last for quite a few years to come, because they need more men and more men all the time. But I went down there and put in the application and within a few weeks I had heard that I was accepted. I learned about a month before we were married.
“There’s a little story to that, too. The Police Department has what they call a oral interview, where after your application is accepted and they clear you as far as your past record if you have one or not, then they call you in. They asked me if I was married, and I actually was not married, and I told him I was single. So he asked me when I was getting married, and I told him May the 4th. I don’t know who it was, but he stated, ‘Well, I have bad news for you, Ron. We’re not starting the class, the way it was supposed to be, on May the 13th, starting in the Academy. We’re going to start it on the 4th of May. Which would you rather do, be a police officer or get married?’ He threw me off balance there momentarily, but I told him I’d rather get married. I told him the party was all set, the caterer was hired, the band was hired, and there was no way of backing out of it. Oh, we had had the hall for over a year. Then he admitted that they don’t start classes on Saturdays anyway. He was having fun with me.”
“We had a bank-holdup-in-progress run,” August told me. “They gave it to us and two other back-up cars. And at the time I was on the John C. Lodge Service Drive, which is nothing but a straightaway, and you have no stop signs whatsoever, and I had no turns to make, because the John C. Lodge runs right into Hamilton—this was Hamilton and Collingwood, Detroit Bank and Trust. So I picked up speed. Traffic was light. And I was approaching a light, which I think there wasn’t too many lights on the way there. I believe this light was at Pallister. When I got there, I was going about fifty-five, sixty miles an hour, quite excited to be the first one there, and out of the glimpse of my eye I could see a car coming. I was going north, and this car was coming east, from my left, and he was going to run that red light. Well, it was a Tactical Mobile Unit car, blue-and-white, with the city’s finest in special radio equipment, highly specialized trained men, and they were making this run also. How we didn’t hit each other I’ll never understand, but I slammed the brakes on, and he was going too fast even to make the left-hand turn, he kept on going straight.
“But when we got there, we were far from being the first car there; I think we were about the last one there. And here some advertising company was filming an old-time holdup—you know, the gangland twenties, the gangster-type deal with the old black limousine and machine guns and the works. So we pulls up there, here they are standing around with clothes on looked like in the twenties, with this old limousine they had, and the cameras are coming, and it really looked like the real thing except the props just didn’t look like 1967. I recall this because I almost got smacked broadside on the way there.”
“The officers down there to Woodward Station,” August said, “you’re just not doing your job if you don’t get a stolen car at least once a week, and some fellows pick them up on an average of three a week, because they’re really prosperous in that area. We were traveling north on Woodward Avenue, and we seen this car. You know, a car thief never tries to be suspicious. They stand out because your eyes are trained. There are a few police officers that seem to have a photographic mind; they can spot a number and tell you it’s a hot car. But most of us don’t use this method at all. You can look at the plate number and look at the hot sheet, and within seconds you have your answer, but some of them just tell by looking at the plate. I don’t mean by your plate being on crooked or looks like it’s wired or anything of this nature, either, but a car thief never tries to drive conspicuously, he’ll be real careful. But when we got on his tail, he took off, because he knew we had him. And there was three boys in the car, and we were driving a Buick, and they were pulling away from us in a big cloud of blue smoke. Well, anyway, they made a left turn off Woodward, and it was approaching Second Avenue, and they came to almost a rolling stop and they bailed out. And then the car hit a telephone pole, and they all went in all different directions. Between the two of us we caught all three of them. The third one would never have got caught except for the fact that he tripped and stumbled and fell right on his face, so I was able to catch him. My lungs were burning so hot from running and running. I don’t jump fences very well, either. But I had a commendation for that incident.”
“The base pay for a police officer in Detroit right now,” he said, “is $8,335 a year, which is tops. I started at $5,500, which was the starting salary in 1963. Top salary I was getting last summer would bring me home, after taxes and pension fund came out, hospitalization and whatever else you can think of, about $122 take-home weekly.
“I had one day out on blue flu. This is a very bitter subject. Now, my personal feeling on this was, the pay wasn’t that bad, what with the wife working and whatever little thing I can pick up on the side, carpentering work or something; the money didn’t mean that much to me, but I just couldn’t see this monthly report. Now every police department’s got your monthly log sheets and reports you have to turn in, well and good. But I couldn’t see where, if you were working a B. and E. car, or doing something very concrete as far as good police work was concerned, and you still didn’t have your twenty tickets for the month, you were a bad policeman. Now, that wasn’t right. You take a guy that could catch twenty stolen cars in a month, make fifteen felony arrests, and double that amount in misdemeanor arrests, spend half his time in court, plus the other half on his days off in court, then give him a service rating of eighty-five and he doesn’t get promoted because of that service rating, simply because he didn’t write twenty tickets a month. This doesn’t affect me, because I don’t have enough seniority on the job to even get promoted. But the idea and my feelings are, you take the guy that did nothing but write tickets, well, he was the man that was getting points.”
I asked August what the morale of the Detroit force had been before the riots.
“Very low,” he said. “Very low. I know that’s sort of a meager answer, just two little words, ‘very low.’ But there was tensions. I don’t think any of us actually expected any trouble last summer. If somebody would have asked me, the week before or the day before, if I thought there was going to be any trouble in the city of Detroit, and I says, ‘Well, no, because I don’t feel any trouble as far as racial problems come along.’ Seemed to me, I been down there in the precinct for three years, and I never seen it any different then than what I started down there. I didn’t actually feel anything different.”
“Detroit,” August said, “has one of the finest police departments in the nation. The men have the ability, they have the desire to do the work, and I don’t think their cry is actually more pay. Sure, the money is going to help, but that’s not what they need. They need the public’s backing. Not the city government’s backing, but just the public’s general opinion and backing. You see, being a police officer is strictly not a get-a-patsy-on-the-back job. You can do the best job you can, and you’re still going to get criticism. You can stop a man for speeding, even catch him on radar, and onlookers are going to tell you you did it wrong, or you didn’t use the right approach. I think it’s the best police department in the nation, if they’d just let these men be policemen.”
“When we were an attack carrier,” he said, “we had ninety-three fellows in our Fuels Division, and when we changed over to support carrier we lost about half the division, they transferred them off. I think we had at one given time—let’s say when we had the ninety-three men, we must have had eight, nine, ten colored fellows in our division at the time. They had no trouble getting along.
“I know a lot of colored people, and I always got along with them.”
“When you work a Negro neighborhood,” he said, “naturally you’re going to have a high per cent of colored arrests. When you’re working a white neighborhood, it goes the other way.”
“By the way,” he said, “I don’t go along with any sort of brutality. I blame your news media for playing this up so much. You get a police officer out there, not only in the state of Michigan, but what they had in Watts, and what they had in Harlem, and all the racial trouble they have across the nation, they never show you what the people are doing to cause all this thing, they just show you what the policemen are doing trying to stop it.”
“When you’re walking down the street,” Ronald August said to me, “and you see a man with a rifle on a rooftop, and you suspect a sniper in the area, you been sent over there to look for a sniper, and you ask this guy to identify himself, and, ‘Halt!’ and the guy disappears, maybe he runs along the roof and he climbs down a telephone pole, and you haven’t got the building surrounded as well as you thought you did, and you miss him, see. Well, say you do run up against him and you catch him, and you’re lucky enough not to have any cross-fire, well, I don’t go along with the idea where you got to beat the vinegar out of this fellow, but you can’t treat him with kid gloves, either. You have to be persuasive in the line of police work when you’re dealing with these people. You just can’t put diapers on them, and powder them up, and put them in the car. I mean you put the cuffs on them, you put them in the car, and if they give you any lip, you use force to effect your arrest, so to speak.”
“I mentioned to you before,” he said to me, “that I had quite a lot of interest in music. Well, the Police Department has a very fine Police Band, which I believe, along with the mounted bureau and your traffic safety and so on and so forth, is very good public relations for the Department. Well, anyhow, I played with the Police Band. I worked straight days.”
“I’m a police officer,” August’s partner of that Tuesday evening, David Senak, said to me, “and they could fire me, and ten years from now you could ask me and I’d still be a police officer, whether I’m fired or not. But August I don’t think is. I think he’s just a nice family-type fellow. I worked with him one time in uniform, and all he talked about was his family, and the band. Just a general nice guy. I worked with him a little bit in the riots, and there was a lot of rough-housing, you know, because after Olshove died, you know, everything just went loose. The police officers weren’t taking anything from anyone. If they gave him trouble, August would go out of his way not to give anyone trouble, or not to have to resort to violence.
“He’s not a police officer in the degree that my friends are, and myself. He takes it as his job. It’s a job. I work as a rigger, it’s a job to me. He works as a policeman, it’s a job. You could almost say that when I took the oath as a police officer I married the Police Department. And I’m sure my sergeant did the same thing, even though he’s happily married. He gave a certain part of his life to the Police Department.”
Robert Paille said to me, “Well, Ronald August there, I think he’s sincere, you know, he’s got a family and all that there, you know, and he’s responsible. He’s not a leader of men and all that there, you know, but I feel that he’s done a good job in the past there, you know. He hasn’t been outstanding or anything like that there, as far as I know, but as little as I do know of him he’s quiet and respectable.”