Page 339 - NIXBOOK

Oh look here’s the complete 1995 line up of our trading cards. The first two rows were the regular full time paid officers, the
bottom half were the unpaid volunteer reserve officers. The old timers in the top row: 20 years later two of them were dead from
poor health and the other five had been forced to resign in various levels of disgrace and humiliation. For the other 3 rows, only
six of them ended their police careers with a less-than-honorable discharge.

Okay back to uniforms. The patrol officers at the PPD were able to eventually convince the chief that we could save the city
some money if he let us change to a more casual wash and wear polo type uniform shirt instead of the dress shirt and the dress
pants that needed dry cleaning once a week. He readily agreed and so we switched over to a dark blue uniform that we could
wash at home. Unfortunately it took us several years of frustration to conclude that we’d never match each other in dark blue
because different shirt vendors had different ideas about what dark blue was. We learned there are a dozen different shades of
dark blue – there is even a difference between “NYPD Blue” and “LAPD Blue” and so we eventually decided to stop trying to
figure out the 50 shades of dark blue and just go to straight black instead. At that time we had to also redesign our shoulder
patches from full color to a black and white scheme to match our uniforms. And because we were able to wash our own uniforms
at home now, each officer needed really only two complete sets, which also saved the department some money. Nobody missed
the old security-guard look.