Court Official Finds Retiring Like a Divorce

To hear Carrolle Aldrich tell it, she did not retire after a 33-year career at Citrus Municipal Court. She escaped a marriage.

“It’s like having nine husbands,” Aldrich said of her duties keeping the courts running for nine judges. “This is like getting a divorce and I’m very relieved.”

Aldrich, 61, was only half-joking.

As court administrator, Aldrich oversaw 74 employees and a $10-million annual budget in the busy West Covina courthouse. Each month, 200 felony preliminary hearings and filings, 2,600 misdemeanors, 900 civil actions, 900 small claims cases, and up to 9,000 traffic tickets are processed there. She also dealt with the judges, all with their own ideas on how to run a courtroom.

“I never tell judges they make mistakes,” Aldrich joked. “I say I may have erred in advising them.”

For the past 16 years, Aldrich has advised judges and watched over her employees, all but two of whom she personally hired. Last Friday, she left the job behind forever.

In a break from her packing chores last week, Aldrich lit a cigarette in her office--one of the few smoking areas in the court building--and reminisced.

“This was referred to as a little country courthouse when I first came here,” Aldrich said.

When she began as a typist in 1959, two judges held sessions in makeshift courtrooms in the American Legion hall on Azusa Avenue. Prisoners were chained to metal rings set in the floor beside wooden captain’s chairs because no lockup cells existed, she said.

Later that year when the court moved into its present quarters on West Covina Parkway, a cow pasture and a chicken ranch were across the street. Accused cattle rustlers occasionally were brought into court after being caught snipping barbed wire in that pasture and loading cows into trucks, Aldrich said.

The court also bordered a Little League baseball field. And after parents at one game got into a fight, 25 of them were jailed at the courthouse. It was the most people in court custody from one incident ever, Aldrich said.

During the 1960s, farm laborers from a camp in Irwindale were prosecuted for running illegal cockfights. Aldrich said about 70 gamecocks were seized in one raid and subsequently the fowl were butchered and cooked for residents of a county board-and-care home for the disabled.

“Those chickens were so muscular. . . . I think those poor people are probably still chewing on those chickens,” Aldrich said.

The courthouse had only one prisoner escape during Aldrich’s tenure. Instead of following a marshal into court, the inmate scrambled up and over a decorative block wall in a patio. He was found hours later at a construction project across the street, sound asleep, Aldrich said.

“I don’t think the marshals say, ‘Follow me,’ anymore,” she said.

Aldrich got personally involved in one crime case when she suspected that one of her employees was embezzling money from parking ticket fines. After authorities said it would be impossible to ferret out a suspect, she did her own investigation.

The woman employee mailed in the pocketed traffic citations anonymously along with cashier’s checks totaling $1,300, the amount taken, in hopes of avoiding prosecution. But Aldrich had the papers checked for the employee’s fingerprints and got a criminal conviction against her and fired her.

“Those were fighting words, to say I’d never get enough evidence on a dishonest employee to fire them,” she said.

The day-to-day work of the court is not often that dramatic, but there is a seasonal rhythm to crime, Aldrich said. In summer, it’s murders and wife-beatings. Spring is rapes, sex crimes and teen-agers’ beer parties. Christmas brings thefts.

It’s a rhythm that Aldrich, who is divorced, said she will be happy to leave for the rhythm of travel. Canada, the Caribbean and the East and West coasts are on her agenda.

“I’m going to miss a lot of the people at work, but I’m not going to miss the job,” she said.