Excerpts from an oral hisory of

Captain
Wilfred O. Jyrkas

Part I - 1949 Recruit Officer

My name is Wilfred Jyrkas and I’m seventy-seven years old, I went on the Saint Paul Police Department July 27, 1949, and retired in 1986. In thirty-seven years I held most ranks in the Department, worked primarily in uniform and I was a senior captain at the time I retired.

I was twenty-one, a World War II veteran, and probably one of the younger officers. We had two weeks of training. It was primarily lectures, probably the only really strong classes we had were taught by the FBI.

One FBI agent Sam Hardy was full of stories, a very interesting man, and philosophically a great cop. He just wanted things to be right. He taught us the drive to make the community better. It’s hard to put into words. Your job is to constantly zero in on how you control these 10% to 15% of the public that won’t obey the laws and will take advantage of every other human being they come in contact with. He left a mark in that two weeks.

The other FBI agents taught me a lot about cars and auto theft and robberies. We had some traffic control, a little practice out on the street, which kind of caught my attention, I saw it as a good tool to control a lot of situations and I preached it all through my years when I was an instructor. I remember my first traffic stop, stopping a fellow for going through a red light and my partner says, “You might as well get your feet wet, go on up there and write him a tag for going through the red light.” I was shaking so bad, I didn’t know if I could do it.

I probably wrote more tags than anybody else on this Department later on, because that was my specialty, traffic, but the first one was tough. Keep yourself composed, 90% of the people that I came in contact with after the enforcement event, said thank you. The only thing they could really thank me for was trying to treat them like a human being, because I tried to follow that once I got over this first hump.

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