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In a Life magazine ad nearly five decades back, not long after Detroit's riot, the city tried to attract police applicants with overheated language that sounds like a "Dragnet" TV script or a horrid Ernest Hemingway parody.
"If the job you're doing now is too clean, and you hate it, stop by Detroit Police Headquarters," the city says in a full-page pitch in December 1967 -- five months after 43 people died in four days of unrest.
An image of the ad was posted at Reddit late Friday. The main image, visible in the excerpt below, shows an officer holding his gun and flashlight.
In a sign of the era, this gender-specific slogan is at the bottom: "There are never enough big men to go around."
(Actually, women could apply. Seven years later, 1974: the department promoted Cynthia Eggers to became the nation's first female homicide detective. In 2003, Ella Bully-Cummings became the city's first -- and so far only -- female police chief.)
For an amusing sense of how local cops were recruited when your parents or grandparents read Life each week, here's the full text crafted -- if that's the right word -- by a copywriter gone wild. We dare you not to crack up or think how many commas are needed in the breathless third and fourth paragraphs:
There's a guy on a ledge on a downtown hotel. You're out there, too, trying to get him back through the window. He says, "Beat it, copper." You plead with him. When he tells you to drop dead, you catch the pun, but you aren't laughing.
Your partner's below, trying to get rid of some of those people who came to gawk. Some creep down there on the sidewalk is yelling "Jump!" and you watch your partner rush over to him.
An hour or two go by. If you're lucky you get your man off that ledge and if you're even luckier he'll get the help he needs and maybe some morning he'll wake up glad to be alive and maybe he'll even call you up and say "Thank you."
Anyhow, you go home tonight and you tell your wife and your son you helped save a guy's life and they tell you that's wonderful and since, for once, you pulled the day shift, you all sat down to dinner together.
You hope tomorrow's a little more routine, a couple of speeding tickets, a missing headlight, a B & E. But you know it may not be. And you're ready. You're tired. But you're proud. So you're ready.
That's how doing the world's dirtiest job feels.
If the job you're doing now is too clean, and you hate it, stop by Detroit Police Headquarters or call 224-4333 for more information about becoming a policeman.
Ah yes, those were the days, my friend -- back when there weren't enough big men and people thought Life magazine would never end.
And when an ad agency billed the city for classic prose like that.
