Confidential File

Chief Parker Sniffs Lavender, Old Lace

William Parker, the duly appointed police chief of this teeming metropolis, is all things to all men.

But to me, he's something else. He is, I swear, a homely philosopher.

Beneath his gruff, stern exterior, beneath his cold, gold badge, beats the warm heart of a hopeless sentimentalist.

Even
though he is right here in the swim of things, Chief Parker is
overwhelmed by a wistful desire to return, forthwith, to the good old
days. And when he says "old," he means it.

He revealed this soft side of his nature last week during a speech before the Southern California Hotel Assn.

In
it, he laid the blame for our current crime wave on the fact that we
have somehow slipped away from the manners and morals of mid-Victorian
times.

And come to think of it, he's right, you know. Somehow we have slipped away.

"During
the middle of World War I, America lost touch with the Victorian
principles which had sustained it for decades. It lost these principles
in the name of freedom of expression," he said.

He added that, as a result, Americans have lost much of their ability to distinguish between proper and improper conduct.

Thus, all this cigarette smoking and jazz dancing, because we shook free the shackles of Victoria's genteel influence.

The chief seems to imply that before our urge for freedom of expression, the only peril in society was Pauline's.
And a juvenile delinquent was just a feisty lad like Penrod who did no
worse than swipe pies from the kitchen window sill, kick the gong
around with apipeful of corn silk or hide frogs in his bedroom.

Now
my quaint, Victorian-tainted mother always cautioned me: "Kid, play it
cool. Never argue with a cop." But in this instance, I must disagree.

Life,
no matter what the chief says, was no four-poster bed of roses in those
dear, dead days. There were plenty of shenanigans going on.

It
was the era when the robber barons of finance wiped out the poor widows
and orphans at the opening of the Exchange every morning. When the
Hudson Dusters, armed with brickbats, roamed Hell's Kitchen. When the
atrocious table manners of Diamond Jim Brady were lauded as
"glamorous." And, while there may have been no sound on Mulholland Drive
except for the occasional raucous cry of a drunken Indian, there was
lots of fancy sparking going on in hansom cabs parked elsewhere.

Across
the creek, Jack the Ripper was staked out near London lampposts in his
search for fallen women. And, I might add, he was finding quite a few.
Over at Horsemonger Lane Gaol they had just hung a Mr. and Mrs. Manning for murdering Mrs. Mannings's
lover, Patrick O'Connor, and burying him under the kitchen floor after
robbing him of everything but his false teeth. Down in theLimehouse ,
enterprising hoods were picking up 3 pounds 2 shillings a head for
every able-bodied seaman they shanghaied aboard waiting vessels.

So,
Chief Parker can slip on his policeman's blue with helmet and retreat
back to those good old days if he wants to. Not me. I like it here.