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By Donald H. Harrison
 SAN DIEGO—A crowd officially estimated at 1,000 paid tribute to retired Sheriff Bill Kolender, 73, on Monday, October 5, in an evening of tribute, some pointed ribbing, and enough Jewish references to morph the seven-pointed star of the sheriff’s office into a six-pointed Magen David.
Rabbi Yisroel Goldstein of Chabad of Poway began the evening with the traditional three-part blessing said by the Kohanim (May the Lord bless you and watch over you…), and that was one of the few serious things said all evening.
Goldstein was followed by the Rev. John Sorenson, who retired as senior chaplain when Kolender retired as sheriff earlier this year. “The rabbi represents the good old time religion, and I represent the amendments to it,” Sorenson, a Lutheran, told the crowd at the Town & Country Hotel. He added that Kolender “scared the heck out of me (when the sheriff said) ‘I want you to read a eulogy for me.’ I said, ‘Bill I know that you are retiring, but how far do you plan on taking this?’”
Maybe the sheriff meant an invocation? Sorenson suggested. “Yeah, that’s the word!” Kolender agreed. “Thank you good Lord, thank you for giving us one of the best schmoozers around. L’chaim Bill, Mazal tov!”
Walt Ekard, former chief administrative officer of the County of San Diego, sang a parody of Bob Hope’s theme song, “Thanks for the Memories.”
Among the stanzas:
“Thanks for the memories;
An honorable man was he
His career was pretty scandal-free
But it would have been nice
If just once or twice
He would have fixed a ticket for me….”
Radio personality Joe Bauer and television personality Larry Himmel – who co-emceed the evening – reported that before he could officially retire Kolender had a bit of unfinished business to take care of. They explained that when Kolender and Michael Witte went to Hoover High School together, Kolender somehow never signed Witte’s 1953 yearbook. Witte brought it up to Kolender, who promptly made amends.
San Diego Magazine editor Tom Blair, who moonlights as a singer, entertained between presentations and speeches about Kolender, who prior to serving as sheriff had been director of the California Youth Authority and police chief of the City of San Diego.
In one of the videos, Kolender’s wife, Lois, revealed they met when she was jammed against him in a crowded elevator. “He looked at me and he said, ‘Are you married?’” When she affirmed that she was not, he got her telephone number and soon asked her out to dinner. “And boy, could he dance, he took me in his arms and it was wonderful, and I wasn’t thinking, I was just feeling!”
In the same video, Kolender said that his father was against him becoming a cop, wanting him (like many Jewish fathers) to be a doctor or a lawyer. But the father was happy when Kolender, at age 40, became San Diego’s youngest chief.
Another video featured some shtick in which Kolender pretended to be Sergeant Joe Friday of television’s old Dragnet series. “We were working the day shift out of robbery and we got a call about an 805,” he said. No, corrected his partner, “someone called 911 from the 7/11 off the 805.” The video pictured Sheriff Kolender at some point doing every job in the sheriff’s department, from dispatching to rappelling down a wall (thanks to a body double) to working in the filing room.
Members of San Diego’s congressional delegation weighed in on the video with congratulations to Kolender. “Thanks very much for keeping my brothers out of jail,” said Brian Bilbray, a Republican.
Bob Filner, like Kolender a member of the Jewish community, said in tribute to Kolender having championed community policing: “I used to say when I was a member of the City Council that I was the only urban councilman in America who can walk into an audience of mainly African Americans and Latinos, with police, and get a standing ovation….”
Susan Davis, another Jewish community member, recalled that back in her days as a member of the San Diego School Board, Kolender “did so many things to reach out and try to change perceptions that people had about law enforcement…”
Republicans Darrell Issa and Duncan Hunter (Jr.) also added their congratulations in the video that was a prelude to such live speakers as San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders, District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis, and former California Governor Pete Wilson.
Sanders, who was among Kolender's successors as police chief, joked about not getting hoped-for promotions while Kolender was chief, “but I knew I was on the team because I heard other people tell me that Bill had called me the 'Passover candidate.’”
Sanders quipped that at one point before he was promoted to lieutenant, Chief Kolender looked at him and said, “son, we’ve both gone as far in this organization as we are going.”
Turning his humor on Filner—who has been arrested many times for civil disobedience in political protests and once in an altercation at a Washington D.C. airport, Sanders said that in the congressional video there was “some serious b---s---. When Filner says those things about you… he still appreciates your loosening his handcuffs one of the many times he was arrested.”
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Becoming serious, Sanders said he will always appreciate how Kolender stood by him and other policemen who had to answer questions following the 1984 massacre of 22 people and the injury of 19 others by a lone gunman at the McDonald’s Restaurant in San Ysdiro.
He added, “Bill is the best of policing… the community policing model that Bill built 30 years ago was one that the rest of the nation adopted.” Furthermore, said the mayor, “when we think about diversity, Bill did it when it wasn’t fashionable.” Kolender insisted that the police force “reflected the community we served, and he stood by that, he lived by that, and he made each of us think about it every single day.”
Next up was District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis, who also is a Jewish community member. She and Kolender used to race each other to the podium at community events, with the first to arrive declaring himself or herself to be the county’s “chief law enforcement officer.” Now that Kolender had left, she said, she was claiming undisputed ownership of the title. “Eat your heart out, Gore,” she said to the new sheriff, Bill Gore.
As a sidelight she mentioned that she had hired Gore, a former special agent in charge for the FBI, to be the chief investigator of the district attorney’s office, only to see Kolender hire him away and make him assistant sheriff. But she said she got back at her friend, hiring from him assistant sheriff Paula Robinson to take Gore’s old job.
When she was elected to office, Kolender gave her good advice, she said: to build a sense of team and to create a mission statement and philosophy that everyone in the office could understand and get behind.
She described Kolender as a mensch, defining the Yiddish word to the largely non-Jewish crowd as “a person of integrity and honor—that’s synonymous with Bill Kolender.”
The featured speaker of the evening was former Governor Pete Wilson, who had been a mayor of San Diego and a United States senator before occupying that position.
He said Kolender had been a young sergeant with the Police Department when, as one who had not yet entered the political world, he asked Kolender to address his downtown Kiwanis Club. After the young policeman complied, Wilson said he tried to persuade him to run for the state Assembly, but Kolender wanted to remain in law enforcement. Instead, Wilson ran for the seat and had it been otherwise, “tonight he would be sitting out there as the retired governor of California.”
Wilson told of a time when Kolender listened to a young African-American teen telling about the difficulties of his life. When the teenager finished, Kolender introduced a bit of levity: “You think you got things tough? What about a Jewish cop with a lisp?”
After Wilson became mayor of San Diego, he appointed Kolender as chief, and one time he said he shall never forget was when the two of them responded in 1978 to the midair collision of a PSA jet and a private Cessna that took 144 lives including those of seven people on the ground.
It was one of the longest days of their lives and “that evening, late in the evening, he drove me home, and I said ‘Come on Bill, I could use a couple fingers of bourbon and maybe you could too.’”
Kolender always took his responsibilities very seriously, although he was ever ready to poke fun at himself. After Kolender left the police department, serving briefly as an assistant to the publisher at the Union-Tribune, Wilson appointed him as head of the California Youth Authority.
And when Kolender returned to San Diego from Sacramento, Wilson said he wanted him to again consider running for office (Kolender weighed a bid for mayor) but ultimately he decided his life was in law enforcement.
The evening continued—with comments by Gore, and a surprise drop-by visit from the current governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, but by that time Nancy and I reluctantly had left the function – I had to get Tuesday’s edition of San Diego Jewish World up on line.
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