Robbie Waters, an old-school cop and legislator, dead at 84
Robbie Waters won four terms as the only Republican on the Sacramento City Council. He once won 98% of the vote.
But that’s not all: He was a former police lieutenant and sheriff who, in 44 years of public service, crossed paths with both newspaper heiress Patty Hearst and Lynette Fromme, the Charles Manson follower known as Squeaky; marched in President Ronald Reagan’s inaugural parade; and was hanged in effigy by his own deputies. He also created the sheriff department’s domestic violence unit, coached Little League, ran a hardware store and published an autobiography.
And a public library was named after him.
About that hardware store: “It wasn’t a good idea to try to shoplift at a store owned by Robbie Waters,” said his daughter, Deanna Earl. “You’d get cuffed to the palm tree outside. I saw that happen a couple times.”
Waters broke his hip in his Sacramento home June 30. While he was recovering in a nursing home, a test revealed that he had the novel Coronavirus.
He died July 27 at Sutter General Hospital, his daughter said. He was 84.
Waters was a fixture of California’s capital city, which had nearly quadrupled in population since his days on the football team at Sacramento High. At various times he smoked Salems, wore turtlenecks and cruised the neighborhood in a 1932 Ford, his friend Sam Jackson, a former city attorney, said.
“He could tell you who worked what shift at Gunther’s Ice Cream,” Jackson said. “That hometown, old-school thinking was a part of who he was. But he was willing to change with the times.”
James Robert Waters was born on Jan. 16, 1936, the oldest of four children of James and Joyce Waters. His father was a printer, and his mother stayed home with the children.
He survived polio in junior high school. That was the first of several health challenges, including prostate cancer and melanoma, which required regular operations.
“He joked that he got a face-lift an inch at a time,” his daughter said.
After high school he enlisted in the Air Force, and after four years he joined the Police Department, where he rose to the rank of lieutenant. He had a knack for getting involved in big cases that attracted news cameras, Jackson said.
In the mid-1970s, when radical group that called itself the Symbionese Liberation Army was hiding in Sacramento, Waters knocked unknowingly on their door to ask about a crime nearby; only later did he realize the woman who answered was Hearst, who had been kidnapped by the group. In 1975, when Fromme was apprehended for pointing a gun at President Gerald Ford, Waters transported her to jail and joined in her interrogation.
His marriage to Judie Kent in 1960 produced three children, Darren, Daniel and Earl. His wife and children survive him, as do his brother Dick; his sister, Margaret Anne Blaney; and two grandchildren. His brother Donald died in 2016.