Tuesday, September 14, 2021
I've often thought about "Grandpa Ted" after his retirement. I was terribly fortunate to have had the opportunity to work for Ted in the old Pandora station. Most of my fondest memories were of the goofy things, like how you could never find him on Night shift during "nap time", because he would hide in the old bank vault in the basement of the station... Or how on evening shift he would send me to VJ's drive in to get him french fries - and swore at me that if I told Judith about it I'd be dead.... Or how he absolutely hated reading police reports, so he would sit at his desk and loudly say "POOF" as he pushed the enter key to sign off on the reports without ever really reading them. He might sometimes ask me if there was anyting in the report that he needed to read, but not usually..... My favourite one is from his very last day in uniform with the WPS and the only thing he wanted to do was suit up and go walk the old downtown beat where he had started 33 years earlier - so we did - Grandpa Ted and his flock of young constables spent his last overlap day starting at the north end of the Main Street Strip and walking south, visiting every local watering hole and talking to the patrons until we ended up down at the very south end of the strip. The smile on his face that day was much like the one in the obituary photo - pure, unadulterated happiness - he just loved being a beat cop again for a few hours. Bless your soul Sergeant Waller, you were a mentor, a comedian, a father-figure, a "kind grumpy old man", and a genuine gentleman.
