As Friends Say, ‘Have I Got a Wyatt Story for You . . . ‘ : Hart Brings Colorful Law Enforcement Career to a Close

Just about lunchtime, scores of inmates in mustard-yellow jump suits were ascending an escalator to the Orange County Jail mess hall. One prisoner, a man with a bushy, long beard, brightened as he passed Capt. Wyatt Tipton Hart.

“How ya doin’?” the jail commander asked in his heavy Oklahoma drawl.

“Weeeell,” the inmate answered, without a hint of sarcasm in his voice, “I can’t complain.”

A Nice Guy

Hart shook his head and grinned, proceeding on. “He’s a murderer,” Hart said, glancing back. “Nice guy, though.”

It was vintage Hart, part of the charm of the Oklahoma cowboy who wears monogrammed shirts, and whose standard retort when inmates complain about the jail is: “If you don’t like our accommodations, don’t check in.”

After 19 years with the Orange County Sheriff’s Department, Hart is checking out. When he retires on Jan. 23, the 50-year-old Hart will end one of the more colorful careers in county law enforcement.

In those two decades, Hart has been a bailiff, patrolman, training officer, jail sergeant, high school and college criminal justice teacher, press spokesman, lieutenant in charge of airport security and, for the last 16 months, commander of the overcrowded and politically controversial Orange County Jail.

He has spent much of his career in a public spotlight, particularly after his family’s tragedy in 1982, when his son, Todd, was paralyzed from the neck down during a college football game.

But Hart also became widely known as the spokesman for the Sheriff’s Department from 1979 to 1984. Those were stormy times, when the department and Sheriff Brad Gates were under fire for an unusually high number of jail deaths and for overcrowded conditions that persist today.

Even then, a good ole boy demeanor and “his sense of fairness” were Hart’s trademarks, colleagues said, traits that have endeared him to many of the people he works with.

“He’s like a regular guy, an Everyman,” said Don Blankenship, a sergeant with the Santa Ana Police Department and longtime friend. “A handshake still means a lot to him.”

‘Sure Hate to Lose Him’

And Sheriff-Coroner Brad Gates said wistfully, “Just as a boss and a friend, you just kind of assume they’re going to be here forever. I sure hate to lose him.”

Retirement parties and roasts are planned. But some of Hart’s friends got a head start on their lines recently as they recalled yarns, promising with relish, “Have I got a Wyatt story for you . . . . “

Hart was born in Texas and raised by his grandparents in Duncan, Okla. His first job was farming. He likes to talk about his rural upbringing, and claims that his modest roots are the foundation of his regular-Joe philosophy today. He recites memories of how he used horses instead of cars to get around. Because his grandfather was Tipton, they were called Big Tip and Little Tip, and that nickname would evolve into Tippy.

“Christ, I got rid of that nickname as soon as I left town,” he said.

Hart married young and started a family, and later moved them to California, where he worked in the oil fields of Lompoc. That was his second profession. The marriage ended and he joined the Lompoc Police Department. His friends joke that he became a patrol officer by winning a supermarket raffle--third place.

Fred Horn, a Los Angeles County deputy district attorney working in Long Beach, met Hart in Lompoc. Horn was a 21-year-old police reservist whose training included riding along with sworn officers.

“I made the mistake of telling Wyatt that I wouldn’t be riding on that Friday night, because I had a hot date with this girl from school, who I’d been scheming on for some time,” Horn recalled. “Her father didn’t like cops, but I got a date with her anyway.”

He met the girl at her doorstep and they walked to his car, her father trailing behind them. Just then, two squad cars from opposite ends of the street pulled toward the house, sirens screaming and lights flashing. Hart was driving one of them.

“They screeched to the curb and jumped out, and said, ‘He’s a sex pervert!’ Horn said. “They threw handcuffs on me and shoved me in one of the patrol cars and drove away. And we’ve been friends ever since.”

Said Hart: “That’s a lie. We have not been friends ever since.”

Hart moved to Orange County in 1968 and enlisted in the Sheriff’s Department, where his first job was as a bailiff in the courthouse. There, he met Tom Pfeiffer, now a lieutenant. Pfeiffer’s favorite Hart tale is nearly 20 years old.

He calls it “The Blind Date” story. Pfeiffer arranged for Hart to meet the roommate of Pfeiffer’s girlfriend, told each of them privately that the other was hard of hearing and then watched a shouting match of introductions.

Said Hart: “He told you that? It’s a good thing one of us has some class.”

A Heavyweight Bout

In the next few years, he met Blankenship, who recalled a bit of Hart folklore that, he said, illustrates how his friend earned the respect of those who work for him.

It’s the one about the San Quentin prison heavyweight champion who arrived at the Orange County Jail to await trial for murder. When the former prizefighter wouldn’t return to his cell one day, Blankenship said, deputies sent for then-Sergeant Hart.

The 6-foot-1, 210-pound Hart ambled down to the cell and had a chat with the man, explaining that if he didn’t cooperate, someone would get hurt. It didn’t work.

“Wyatt made the mistake of grabbing the guy and he was like a stone wall. He just didn’t move,” Blankenship said, and a fight began. “Wyatt became infamous after that for winning the fight. . . . He won the heart of some deputies. But Wyatt doesn’t take credit at all for winning it,” Blankenship said. “He claims he ended up just sitting on the guy finally.”

There is also the ‘Swallows Day’ incident, or Hart vs. an entire party at a San Juan Capistrano wedding reception. Hart was trying to stop a fight between two men when he attempted to seat one of them in a chair. Someone misunderstood the courtesy, and soon Hart had an entire crowd slugging and screaming at him in a foreign language.

“It’s a good thing the Sheriff’s Department patrols San Juan Capistrano,” Blankenship quipped.

Said Hart: “He told you that?” A more gratifying memory for Hart followed a family’s tragedy. As a patrolman, Hart was sent to a house where a man had gunned down his estranged wife and then killed himself, with their children present. Hart, “knowing what the system was going to do with them,” bundled up the children, put them in his patrol car and took them home.

Promoted to Captain

“I am absolutely the worst guy to send out on something involving kids,” said Hart, who also has a 12-year-old son, Ryan.

In September, 1985, Sheriff-Coroner Gates promoted Hart to captain and made him commander of the overcrowded and politically thorny jail in downtown Santa Ana.

He thus took charge of what has been a public relations sore spot for Gates: a jail system that, because of overcrowded conditions, has been under attack by the courts and the American Civil Liberties Union for nearly a decade. In March of 1985, a federal court judge found Gates and the Board of Supervisors in criminal contempt for failing to relieve chronic overcrowding at the jail.

But even his would-be nemesis, the ACLU lawyer who has sued the county over jail conditions, adores him.

“I love Wyatt Hart,” ACLU attorney Richard Herman said. “He’s a gentleman, and he has the interest of the inmates at heart. . . . He’s a charming man. More importantly, he’s effective. He’s done more in one year than anyone before him. It breaks my heart that he’s leaving.”

One of the things Hart did was spruce up areas in the jail such as the basement, with a little advice from his wife. Susan Hart, who has a successful commercial design business, recommended that jail corridors be painted with a soothing blue stripe. “Above center,” he pointed out, “so it makes the place look bigger.”

Herman said such details as the new paint may seem minor, but they show Hart’s efforts to make changes that “are in the interest of the inmates and really are of no benefit to the administration to do.”

‘Fatherly’ Chats With Inmates

Herman ticked off a list of what he called Hart’s accomplishments: He diffused some racial tension among prisoners, set up a call-ahead system so attorneys no longer have to wait hours to see inmates and got involved personally when an inmate’s medical needs had been overlooked in the shuffle. Herman said that Hart, on occasion, has gone into inmates’ cells to have a “fatherly” chat.

On Christmas Eve, Hart also instituted open visiting hours for inmates of the men’s jail. Previously, families and friends could visit them only during restricted hours, and with advance sign-ups, which often meant long waits. Men inmates now have unlimited visits five days a week between 8 a.m. and 5:30 p.m.

Hart, who felt the inmates’ loved ones suffered most from the restrictions, said open visitation was one of the things he wanted to do, if nothing else, before retiring.

(The women’s jail, because of logistical problems inside the structure itself, still has restricted visiting hours, he said.)

Why is he leaving a job even the ACLU thinks he’s good at?

“Survival,” Hart said dryly. Being in jail is no fun, but working in one is no picnic either.

Restless, curious, a smidge burned out by the day-to-day tragedies that all law enforcement officers face, Hart says it’s time for a change.

“It’s not really the job; the law enforcement profession has been very good to me. It’s just an inner desire to learn something else.

23 Years Is Enough

“I’ve got 23 years in this business. That’s enough,” he said. “I’ve done three things in my life: I’ve been a farmer, worked in an oil field and been a cop. And that’s pretty limited; like that’s the extent of my 50 years.

“I’d like to go out in the private sector and give it a go. I have 415-plus employees here, 1,500 inmates--on a good day,” he said with a wink, “and in excess of a $15-million yearly budget. I should be marketable in management. I’m just gonna see how it goes.”

For all the amusing yarns Hart is remembered for, he is best known by the public for the ordeal his family has lived through, played out in the media since 1982.

That September, his son, then a free safety with the Cal State Long Beach football team, was seriously injured in a game against UCLA. Doctors told the Harts that Todd, then 19, might not survive. In later months, they were told he would live, but was likely to be permanently paralyzed from the neck down.

Now 23 years old, Todd Hart can get around with the aid of a walker and has returned to school. He has thanked many people for their emotional support, but he credits his father with being his life raft.

At a golf tournament last February for Athletes for Athletes, a foundation established by Todd Hart to honor injured athletes, the younger Hart ambled with his walker in public for the first time. It was a shaky but triumphant debut. Under his own power, he moved ever so slowly from his table to the podium at the El Niguel Country Club, where he was met by a standing ovation.

“There wasn’t a dry eye in the house,” Blankenship recalled. “It was the high point of Wyatt’s life.”