
Former Brookfield Police Chief Tim Gladis holds copies of his two self-published books that detail “the blue life.” Gladis recently rejoined the force as a part-time police officer.
When Tim Gladis was a full-time police officer, he rarely, if ever, talked about his work at home.
“It’s not something you’re really gonna talk to children about,” the Brookfield man said.
But, now that his three kids are grown, he has found a need to open up about his experiences on “The Job,” as he called it.
Gladis has self-published two books, “Blue Life Stores: A View From Life Behind the Badge” and “Blue Life Stories 2” that draw from his 40 years in police work and public safety.
He said he hoped that by writing these stories his kids would come to understand why he missed so many ballgames and dance recitals, or had to go back to work after he had come home after his scheduled shift.
“I thought, if I put these stories down, it’ll be a little bit of a legacy and maybe they would read that and try to gain an understanding, now that they’re adults, of me as a man, as a police officer, as a dad,” he said.
“It’s just trying to give my kids a view of why I was like I was.”
With encouragement from friends, Gladis, who was Brookfield’s police chief from 1992 to 1997, made the stories public, publishing them through Amazon.
“This isn’t some kind of a political thriller or police procedural,” Gladis said. “In fact, I skipped most of the procedural stuff. What I wanted to do was have somebody read that and gain an understanding of the impact not only on police officers, which is huge, but on their families, even on the families of suspects.”
A former steel worker and truck driver, Gladis writes of how he decided to get into police work; how being a police officer is a 24-hour job; and why he had to take the extraordinary measure of developing a plan with his ex-wife if ever someone attacked him while he was off duty and in public with his family.
There were days when he questioned whether he wanted to continue, such as when he had to wrest a 4-year-old child from the only family she had ever known. It was the legal thing to do, but was it the right thing to do? he asks.
“Sometimes you cry, sometimes you laugh, sometimes you feel you think you, maybe, don’t wanna do this anymore,” said Gladis, who was a police officer in Pennsylvania and Virginia before moving to Ohio.
In one instance – when a man was murdered in front of his family with a shotgun he was trying to sell – a fellow cop decided she did not want to do it anymore, and she resigned.
“It always for me was, this is what I do and this is what I am.”
The books have opened discussions with his children and grandchildren, and provided for him a later-in-life therapy.
“I think it’s better to talk about it and put it out there and say this is a vulnerability, this is a thing that happened, this is how it affected me, this is how it affected some of these other folks,” Gladis said. “I think it’s important to say that for me at this point.”
@ @ @
Please help support NEWS On the Green’s work:
Click here: http://news-on-the-green.fundjournalism.org/news-on-the-green-page-1