Lou’s View

By Lou Bernard

Lock Haven has a lot of weird quirky stuff. I’ve written about much of this before. There are laws, probably still on the books, about what containers things can be sold in, how many cows are allowed to be on the street per herd, and one law stating that the mayor can raise his own private army. There are a lot of odd little details in Lock Haven’s law enforcement, and I’ve just stumbled on another one.

Apparently in Lock Haven, it was once possible to vandalize a policeman. That is, as long as the policeman was made of wood. And once, a live one.

The headline ran on the front page of the newspaper on September 3, 1924: “Officer Wenker Upset Like Silent Policeman.” It detailed a small accident that happened to Patrolman C. Irvin Wenker of the Lock Haven police department.

Apparently back then, fake wooden cops were used to remind people to follow the traffic laws. These were placed throughout the city in his-traffic areas. And they seem to have had very little effect on anyone’s driving abilities, routinely getting run over.

To read the article, it doesn’t seem to have been viewed as anything different; it was just part of daily life at the time.

“A live traffic cop is no safer than the dummy policemen which used to adorn Lock Haven streets and which were frequently knocked down and demolished,” the article reported. “At least that’s what patrolman C. Irvin Wenker thinks about it and he knows, for although he was not demolished he was certainly knocked kerflop Tuesday night while he was stationed in the middle of the street at the intersection of Main and Vesper Streets.”

Wenker was out directing traffic when Paul Ely came along. Ely was driving a Ford Coupe, and going east on Main Street. Clearly, this was before Main Street was made into a one-way street, otherwise he wouldn’t have been able to legally go east at that corner.

Ely was looking out for other cars, and never saw Wenker standing in the street directing traffic. He claimed to have no desire to deal with a policeman at that moment. He didn’t see Wenker until it was too late, and “Officer Wenker was sent sprawling before he knew what hit him.”

At that point, Ely helped Wenker up and drove him home to 411 North Vesper Street in the same car he’d hit him with. Then Ely ran and got Dr. William Welliver, who appears in a lot of these incidents. Dr. Welliver was a local physician who had a habit of throwing people out of his office if they disagreed with him, and he seems to have been the go-to doctor of this era when someone got injured.

Welliver came to help, and treated Wenker for a dislocated right knee, and bruises on his foot and side. He assigned Wenker to bed rest for the next few nights.

“Officer Wenker has frequently viewed the remains of one of the wooden traffic cops which had met its fate through accident,” the article said,”But he never expected that the future was reserving the same sort of experience for him.”

Wenker died twelve years later of injuries sustained during a fall, including a fractured hip, on November 27, 1936. He was sixty-nine years old at the time, and fell while getting out of his bed. Cars were not involved. As for the wooden policemen, they’re no longer in use, but you never know. There may still be one hidden away in a city storage facility someplace.