'Not Easy Job,' Remnant Says After 26 Years

"Id advise a young man to do som e thinking bef ore he goes into pólice work today. It's not an easy job. It's been made more difficult. The pay is not the best." This frank assessment of the career- and the problems- a young officer faces is made with the weight of 26 years of pólice work behind it. Howard Remnant, who completes his pólice duties as a District Court bailiff today, knows the difficulties of the pólice job because he's been experiencing them since 1943. When Sgt. Remnant was appointed to the Ann Arbor Police Department by Chief Sherman Mortenson 26 years ago, the area was swelling with a war-time population boom triggered by the worker influx to man the new Willow Run boinber plant near Ypsilanti. "They came in from al over," he recalls. "And when they began loading up on the trailers at the bus station to be taken to the bomber plant, it was like a regular staging area." Remnant was never struck or injured in the line of duty. That record could well have ended on the day Remnant captured a felón who only hours before had escaped from a Circuit Court hearing. The man was awaiting sentence but managed to flee from a detention room and run down a back stairway of the court house. Remnant was off-duty at the time, and when he heard of the escape he joked to his wife: '.'Vil catch him when I go on." When he reported for duty he began his usual beat patrol along E. Ann near Catherine. There had been no recent report of the probabb whereabouts of the escaped felon, and many officers believed at that time that the escaper had successfully fled the city. "I remember walking towarc this basement entrance a n c something- maybe just a hunch -made me decide to just give it a check. There was no reason for it. No one had seen the guy around," Remnant recalls. The patrolman eased dowi the basement steps, peered carefully around and there in the shadows saw a man. Draw ing his gun he ordered the man out. It was the escaped felon. The man was returned to the c County Jail and later sentenced 3 to prison. Another event which sticks in the sergeant's mind is the 1 pearance in the fall of 1951 of c :he key tipster in a murder ] case. Pauline Campbell, an tractive nurse, had been bludgeoned to death as she walked j home alone from night duty at St. Joseph Mercy Hospital. Four days of intensive investigation turned up no real clues ' to the killer, and officers were preparing for a long probé when a 19-year-old Eastern Michigan ; University sophomore, Daniel ' Baughey, walked into the Ann ', Arbor Pólice Department. The first officer Baughey encountered was Remnant. "He said he had some information on who may have killed the nurse," Remnant recalls. "He said he'd talked to the parties." The sergeant went immediately to the Pólice Department Detective Bureau, then located in the basement of the old City Hall. The City Hall then was located at the present site of the City Center Building at S. Fifth Ave. and E. Huron. Remnant told Detective Duane I Bauer about Baughey, and thel detective began questioning the youth. i It was from information provided by Baughey that three teen-age youths- two 18, the I other 17- were subsequently I rested and convicted of the I der. Remnant has made no definite I plans for retirement. He does plan to relax for a I time and then take a part-time job. His wife, Peggy, and his three sons, Harry, Neil and Roger, may be unaccustomed to the absence of the badge and gun around Remnant's home after 26 years. "But we'll all get used to it together," he says.