FARMINGTON — When Raymond Orr first became a constable for Farmington in 1958, he was one of only two police officers.

There was no police department and no training.

Over his 21 years of service, Orr, now 86, worked to change that.

He formed the Farmington Police Department in 1967 and voters accepted it in 1968, he said. He became Farmington’s first police chief. Before retiring on Jan.1, 1980, he worked to institute a 20-year retirement plan for police.

“It has been a good life,” he said as he recently reminisced. “I liked police work. I felt like I was doing something.”

He recalled incidents that were difficult and sad to contend with along with the ones that brought a smile to his face as he remembered.

When Orr started, police were told “there’s the uniform … put it on and go enforce the law,” he said. There were just a couple books they could read about the laws they were asked to enforce, he added.

A small room, across from the town office in the basement of the Community Center, was home base for Orr and Constable Arthur Vanderhoff, he said. Orr designed the police space for the new Municipal Building, he said. A space he only enjoyed for a year before retiring.

A third officer was added in 1961, he said. The department had grown to six officers at the end in 1980.

They refereed domestic squabbles, dealt with five old, town drunks who were harmless and traffic infractions, he said. But, there were also suicides and murders, shots fired at them and eventually the start of dope-related issues in Farmington.

In those early days, a living room in Phillips became a court room as police took less serious offenders, mostly traffic cases, to the home of Cony Hoyt, a judge-justice of the peace, he said.

“If we caught a person at 10 p.m. we drove him up to Hoyt’s living room. Hoyt always found the person guilty,” he said.

They would pay a fine and go on their way… no waiting for weeks, months for a court date. In more serious cases, the person was locked up and faced a day in county court.

One night Vanderhoff called him for help dealing with a man who had a gun in the downtown area, Orr said while reflecting on recent police interactions.

“We never pulled a gun out even though he shot at us,” Orr said. “We talked him out of it.”

The son of a prominent family, the man was never charged for shooting at the officers.

An officer was out there all by himself, he said. There was no one readily available for backup and no cell phones to call for help.

Another night Orr got a call from dispatch that Officer Sheridan Smith was in a struggle with a man near the courthouse. Orr got up, dressed and drove in to town to find Smith struggling to breathe, he said.

Back then, they wore regular ties. The man had grabbed on to Smith’s tie and pulled so tight Smith couldn’t breathe.

“That ended regular ties,” he said. “The next day we went to clip-on ties.”

There were several suicides during his years. The worst was when a teenager was told to leave school in 1968. He went home alone and took his life, Orr said. The scene was pretty bad, he added.

Another hard case involved a prison inmate who talked another inmate, who was about to be released, in to setting a fire at a house on the Fairbanks Road. The fire took the life of a woman and her baby, he said.

Orr was also police chief when a young teen, Judy Hand, disappeared while walking down Middle Street in the summer of 1971. Her body, with her clothes folded in a pile next to her, was found during a second search of a nearby family sawmill, he said.

State police took over the investigation as they do in these cases now, he said.

Orr felt they did come close to finding Hand’s killer. A lie detector used on one suspect was inconclusive. Police wanted to use a truth serum test but the suspect’s parents wouldn’t allow it, he said.

The murder has never been solved.

But police work in the idyllic “Mayberry-type” life of Farmington changed for Orr with the department’s first dope-case, he said.

A California couple wanted to get their two daughters away from the dope scene there, he said. The brought them to live at Clearwater.

They could take the girls out of California but not the dope out of the girls, he said.

They slipped up and police intercepted dope coming through the mail to the girls.

Orr began to think about retirement. Before that we only dealt with harmless drunks, he said.

There were many nights from then on spent babysitting someone on dope at the old hospital. There was no place to put them and staff didn’t want to deal with it so Orr did.

Domestic fights required time and patience to listen to the participants but usually didn’t end in arrests as they often do now. Orr remembered one case when a woman dumped a bowl of hot soup over her husband’s bald head. Another used a mug of peanut butter on her husband’s head. He listened for over an hour to both before telling each to come see him the next morning… they never did, he said.

There was also the day, Orr stopped a vehicle on the Walker Hill Road and told the driver to open the trunk.

“What do you suppose was in that trunk?” he asked.

It was a dead heifer just taken from a pasture not far away. Police had received two or three reports of cattle theft that year but this was done in broad daylight, he said.

After graduating from Wilton Academy, Orr first put on an Air Force uniform.

“I was a Truman Trooper,” he said of the four years served which took him to England.

He came back to marry his sweetheart, Leatrice, and then he started agriculture courses at the University of Maine at Orono with the intent to teach, he said.

After his third year, there was an opening for a Farmington constable and he took it.

He led a 4-H group for 25 years and once retired, he started showing Herefords at area fairs.

“At first, I didn’t make enough to buy my dinner, he said.” At the end, he was doing quite well.

He also served as a Selectman for Farmington for nine years, he said.

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