Retired Sheriff Al Solomon visits with NBNK Rotarians
NEW BREMEN — Newly retired Sheriff Al Solomon stopped by Speedway Lanes on Tuesday morning to visit the New Bremen New Knoxville Rotary Club and talk to them about his career and his proudest moments of being sheriff.
Solomon got his start with the Auglaize County Sheriff’s Office in 1979 at 21 years old under former Sheriff Jim Knoch and Chief Deputy Jim Wachauf.
He recounted one story shortly after being hired when he needed to participate in 80 hours of firearm training so the office sent him to Chillicothe to complete the training. He said the sheriff’s office let him take one of the cruisers for his training and someone at the hotel he was staying at ripped one of the antennas off the car.
“They tore one of the whip antennas off the sides so I come back and had to explain to Chief Deputy Wachauf that I lost the antenna off the back of the cruiser. So we got through that and he said to take better
care of it,” Solomon said laughing. “So I went back down to Chillicothe the following week, stayed down there and lost the other antenna off the other side. That didn’t make the chief happy.”
Solomon detailed his career with the sheriff’s office, highlighting moments that were accomplished under his tenure as sheriff, which began in 2004. The Explorer program began in March 2004 and Solomon said it helped community youth see law enforcement as friends.
“[Kids] need to see law enforcement in a better light, not just when they show up at their house in bad situations. We wanted to start this Explorer program. It was set up for kids who were interested in law enforcement,” he said. “But we also took one or two from different areas of the county who were maybe walking that thin line and we wanted to get them into positive things.”
Solomon said he recently received a phone call from one of the kids who participated in the first year of Explorer program.
“He’s got a job at a corrections facility in Texas and he’s doing very well,” he said. “That was very refreshing to hear from him.”
Citizens academy was another thing that he was proud of.
“I wanted people to see that cops are human and they have lives and families and they go through the same things that everybody else does,” said Solomon.
Solomon talked about the DARE Program, something that he is a very strong proponent of.
“I believe in it. It helped me the last three or four years to be part of state committees and we would bring in high school students to hear their thoughts on the program.”
He said hearing high school students’ feedback on DARE was a great experience because it helped him better understand their thoughts and feelings on it.
“At six meetings at least, the big consensus was all those kids liked DARE, the problem was you saw it in fourth, fifth and sometimes sixth grade and then it went away. There wasn’t any repetition.”
He said DARE America recently started a high school program that the sheriff’s office wanted to implement into local schools last year but were unable to do so because of the coronavirus.
Solomon stressed that he was not alone in his endeavors as sheriff, saying it was a group effort.
“I’m very proud of the things that we did and I stress that ‘we’. It’s not a sheriff — he runs the office and has the final say on some of the things — but there are a lot of people in that sheriff’s office that don’t get recognized for everything they do,” he said.
As far as post-retirement, Solomon said he misses the job and is considering other part-time employment somewhere but hasn’t committed to anything just yet. He also added that he would love to break his routine of getting up at 5:45 a.m., saying that he hasn’t been successful thus far.
“It just drives me crazy. I got so used to getting up at quarter ‘til six in the morning that I can’t get out of that. I’m trying to work on that because I’d like to sleep in until 7:30 or 8 o’clock sometime,” Solomon said with a laugh.