Dossier

Name:
J.C. Odom

Grew Up:
Knoxville's Oakwood neighborhood, off of North Broadway

Education:
Central High School, University of Tennessee

Family:
wife, Wanda, who also grew up in Oakwood, married 50 years; daughter, Sharon, and 15-year-old granddaughter

Career:
1949-1976, Knoxville Police Department; County subpoena officer, 1978 to present

Nicknames:
Wing Ding, Whiz Kid

Weirdest Burglary Ring He Ever Encountered:
"We had this gang of guys who, when they broke into a place, would defecate on the floor. That was their calling card. Some people at Blue Circle Restaurant on Central Avenue saw these guys break into Brown's Appliance Center. Three sets of officers answered the call. This officer and I shimmied up this big drain pipe behind the appliance center, went through a window on the second floor, and came down inside. These guys were running around down there. They had defecated on the floor. We had a tussle. One of them was knocked down and slid right through the whole mess."

by Carol Owen Bell

It's the 1950s. You're a young 20-something rookie police officer in Knoxville assigned to one of the downtown walking beats. It's late at night. You're walking down the Canyon, the alleyway behind the block of buildings on Gay Street dominated by the towering Sterchi Brothers' building. Your only access to communication with your desk sergeant is a call box. The nearest one is more than a block away. Entering the eerie, silent darkness of the Canyon, you wish you could hurry along, even run, but you've got to stop and check all the back doors to make sure they are locked. Even the toughest guy would get the heebie-jeebies.

J.C. Odom , 69, was such a young officer. The retired policeman, full-time county subpoena officer, and well-known character around the City-County Building recounts his vivid memories of policing in a low-tech age over a Fish Filet and Coke with no ice at the Fountain City McDonald's (he usually lunches at home in Halls with his wife Wanda, who, before a stroke ended her 30-year career, was administrative assistant to Knox County criminal court clerk Martha Phillips).

"The only thing we had was a pistol and the good Lord. That was it," Odom says. "All you've got is your flashlight."

Odom's colleagues among Knox County court officers can't help but smile when you mention his name. Given to a good sense of humor, he is popularly known by them as Whiz Kid (Odom says it's because he's smart) or Wing Ding (after a chocolate malt at a local establishment that Odom is particularly fond of). However, he has that quality that makes you wonder if there might be more to the story, if he's not joshing you and having a good laugh to himself. His love for talking, jovial manner, strong opinions, and seemingly endless supply of stories—more often than not risqué—draw you in and make you want to hear more. You get the idea that if he can make you blush, it's all the better to him. But in the end, you may not find anyone who has more passion for police work or more reverence for the old style of law enforcement the way he learned it as a young police officer.

The Knoxville that Odom and his partners knew so well as its law enforcers was much smaller than it is today, a pre-annexation-fever city inside a dry county. Crime was hardly unknown, but the town's chief vices were bootlegging and the drunken binges of its less fortunate citizens on illegal liquor. During Odom's early tenure on the force, Knoxville's city limits were the railroad bridge overpass at what is now Old Broadway and Broadway, near Louis' Inn and the Original Louis' restaurants (north); the intersection of John Sevier Highway and Asheville Highway (east); the intersection of Young High Pike and Chapman Highway (south); and Lyon's View and Kingston Pike (west).

Compared to today's sprawling city, it was a tidy area to patrol. In a car patrol, you and your partner could feel pretty safe, but the walking beats were another story.

"Under the viaduct going down Jackson Avenue where JFG Coffee Co. is, there were a bunch of bums and people who would sleep up under that bridge," he says. "I wasn't working this particular night, but one officer down there was attacked by two of those bums. He had to take care of himself."

Odom recalls that being on the police force was all he ever wanted to do, but since he had to be 21 to join, he took some detours first. He grew up in Oakwood. His father was a steel rigger who lost his life building the Cooper River Bridge in Charleston, S.C., the year that J.C. was born. He dropped out of Central High School, located then in what is now Gresham Middle School, to join the Navy in 1945 as World War II was ending.

"I didn't get into the fighting. I was a landlocked sailor. I was only 17, a little snotty nosed kid. I wanted to get away from home. That was a bad mistake...It wasn't the greatest thing in the world, I'll tell you that," he says. After stints in California, New Orleans, and Memphis, he returned to Knoxville. In 1949, his 21st year, he signed up with the men in blue.

"They didn't have what you would call an academy then...It was on-the-job training mostly. They paired you with an older officer, and we had some training through the FBI...At that time, money was short in the city and they didn't pay but $210 a month when I went to work. We had to buy all of our uniforms, even furnish ammunition...Superior officers were only making $214 a month.

"Then you began as what they called a supernumerary. We had to serve a probation for six months without being assigned to a particular detachment. We had to go in in full uniform at 6 a.m. and show up for roll call and see if we [were needed]. Then you had to be there at 7 a.m. and 9 a.m. in case you were needed for traffic detail, at 1:30 p.m. for patrol, 3 p.m. for traffic, 10 p.m. for patrol, and 11 p.m. for traffic. Every day you had to show up to see if you could work." It was five years before he had a regular beat.

One of Knoxville's most notorious vice districts in Odom's days was Happy Hollow, at the intersection of Anderson and Central.

"Down in that area there were a bunch of beer joints and a bunch of bad, tough people. Many of them worked in the mills. There were a lot of drunks...We had a lot of fights down there...In that whole area, a lot of people were blue collar workers. Some of them didn't make but $25 or $30 a week and had four or five kids. They'd go out and get drunk and spend every bit of it, then have nothing for their children.

"We'd catch some of them, and we'd talk to them very sternly, if you understand what I'm saying to you, and take them home. See if you put them in jail, they'd have to probably go to the workhouse and pay a bond, which took more food from their children's mouths. So we kicked their butts. They didn't say anything about it because they knew they deserved it...You can't do that anymore," he says.

On some weekends as many as 100 people would be brought in on the police wagons to the jail for drunkenness. The policeman's uniform normally was long sleeved-shirt, tie, and coat, but working the night shift inside the jail meant getting to wear short sleeves and go tieless, because "we had to fight all night long," Odom says.

"They would bring those drunks in. They would fill up eight big cells. It was terrible. It was knock-down, drag-out. We had to call time about 2 a.m., sweep up and clean up and start all over again. But those days are gone. I've seen people who I got into it with, and they've come back and apologized."

When Odom wasn't dealing with drunks, there were of course homicides, suicides, and burglaries. He and his captain walked into one murder scene where the victim lay in the floor with 15 or 20 big gashes, any of which alone could have killed him.

"There wasn't a drop of blood anywhere...My captain rolled him over and there was a knife laying under him. He said, 'That's the damnedest case of suicide I've ever seen' and just turned around and walked out, leaving it for the homicide captain to deal with. My captain knew the woman who killed the man. She had really cleaned him up. There wasn't a drop of blood anywhere.

"A lot of people might not tell you this, but you get used to seeing dead people. What really bothered me was seeing children and old people hurt...I've been in some places where the stench was so bad that you could smell it in your nostrils for two or three days. Just unreal...Nine times out of ten when a man dies, the body relaxes and everything comes out of it. I don't know whether you know that or not."

Then there was the time Odom and his partner were called to a possible suicide. When the man in question answered the door, he had cut himself all over, only missing his jugular vein.

"My partner turned white as a sheet," Odom says. "He and I had to down the guy fast, put a towel on him and get him to the hospital. He lived. I thought my partner was the one who was going to die."

Police officers today still deal with suicides, homicides, and robberies, of course. But Odom thinks the profession has changed, and not for the better.

"At one time, when I was on the car beat, people would drive by and say, 'What do you say, man?' They don't do that anymore. You could go into a place and sit down and talk to a lot of the people. Things were a lot different. On the day shift, we were required to go out and talk to all the people on the beat because from day shift, we went on the night shift, when you were supposed to check all the buildings. We had to know where the business places' safes were so we could check them and know what lights were supposed to be on and who to call if a light was off. They don't check beats anymore. It upsets me because they don't do it.

"This younger generation [of policemen] has a whole completely different set of values. It's unreal some of the values they have. They don't have much respect for authority at all...A lot of them don't have respect for what they're doing."

Asked if he would walk a beat again today, Odom says yes without hesitation, but only if he could do it the way he became accustomed to as a police officer.

"We had a lot of good times. We had a lot of bad times. We had a lot of problems...But I loved it. I loved it better than anything."