The man everybody calls "Chief" turned in his badge, ending nearly half a century as an officer of the law.
James R. Grissom spent his final hours of guarding the back door of the courthouse, as usual. At noon another deputy relieved him, and Grissom headed over to the Agriculture Center for a lunch in his honor.
All that week, fellow officers stopped to say they'd miss him, and to thank him. In all the years since his first swearing-in, Grissom never missed a day's duty, never showed up late, other than a single illness that forced an operation.
Lawyers on both sides of the bench, deputies from jailer Eddie Johnson to Sheriff Lane Carter, courthouse workers and others used to seeing him, all described a true gentleman, firm in the law but understanding.
"He is the kindest, gentlest man I have ever met," said Judge Jayrene Russell. "He has always got a smile. He always greets you with such warmth every time you see him. He's the same person every time you see him."
Son of a sharecropper, middle boy in a big family, he was born in Mount Gilead in Montgomery County
His father and mother, David and Bessie Grissom, moved from farm to farm over the years, a dozen Grissoms in all.
"See, there were 10 of us children," Grissom says. "By the time the baby came along, the oldest was getting married."
Frequent moves meant many different schools growing up. Grissom was living and working with his brothers and sisters on a farm outside Raeford by the time he reached ninth grade and entered high school.
By the time Grissom turned 26, he had decided he'd had enough of that hard work and started looking for some better way to make a living, finally taking the first private job he'd ever had in his life, and feeling good about it.
"I was working for myself," he said. "I worked in a planing mill near Broadway for two and a half years."
Leaving the planing mill job, Grissom, like many in North Carolina, got a textile job. J.P. Stevens.
"I worked for J.P. Stevens for five years," he says. "I ran a slicer at Gullistan Carpet. After that, I went to drive trucks, long distance trucks. I did that about three years -- Textile Motor Freight."
Life-Changing Step
Finally, Grissom took a step that set the course of the rest of his life. He lifted his hand to be sworn in as a prison guard at Siler City.
Grissom stayed in that prison job a couple of years, then accepted an offer to join the Vass Police Department as an officer. He doubled the size of the force, which consisted entirely of the chief and Grissom.
"After I started work, they called me ‘assistant chief,'" he says. "Alvin Lobster was chief about 37 years, and I worked for him his last six years. "
Grissom was married by then. He'd met his future wife, Nora Lee Thomas, in the little Methodist church they both attended when he went to work at the Broadway planing mill. In Vass, they joined the Methodist church there.
The family was growing. The Grissoms had two boys.
One son, David, became a Methodist minister. The other followed their father into law enforcement, but on the federal level. His son Paul is in the U.S. Customs Service.
"We have six granddaughters and one grandson," Grissom says. "We have one great-grandson and two great-granddaughters -- 3 years, 5 years and 6 months old."
In two years as a guard, 30 years a policeman and 16 more years as a deputy, Grissom never had to fire a shot on duty -- though he did have to draw his weapon a time or two, ready to pull the trigger if he'd had to do it.
"I pulled it after a fellow was coming on me with a knife," he says. "I told him, ‘One more step and I'll drop you.' Another boy grabbed around him, and he took him on down."
Kidnapping at Gunpoint
He had been attacked and beaten and once was kidnapped.
"I tried to stop one man from speeding," he says. "The state was fixing blacktop on the road, and he went through it. I went after him. He went to a friend's house, and I went down there to get him. You know what a post-hole digger is? This post-hole digger was in two, and he grabbed one half. He scratched me up pretty good. He run and got in a truck with somebody else, and they took off. Me, there by myself, I didn't shoot. But I pulled a gun on him."
Extending courtesy, even when clicking on the cuffs, is part of the legend of Grissom.
"I always tried to do that," he says. "I always felt, when I put the badge on, if I was going to be arrested, how would I want to be treated?
The kidnap story is typical. The kidnapper would later call Grissom wanting to surrender to him.
"I went to arrest Barney Coleman," Grissom says. "He had been charged with rape. He wanted me to take him to his mother's house to tell her that he was going to be in jail. So I did. Something stupid. He went in the house, then he come back to the door and said, ‘Come in the house -- my mother wants to talk to you.' When I came up on the porch, he poked a shotgun at me. He said, ‘Lay that gun over on that table there.' I didn't argue with him."
Coleman wanted the chief to give him a ride out the Fort Bragg road to Spring Lake.
"I wouldn't take the police car," Grissom told him. "I said I'd take my private car to drive him, to go out of town with him. We started down that way. When we got into Fort Bragg, he said, ‘Just pull over here.' He wanted my handcuffs. I told him I'd left them back there in the police car. I did have a set in the glove compartment of my car, but I didn't tell him that."
Grissom found himself abandoned on a deserted stretch of road in the reservation watching his car disappear into the distance. He started hiking back toward Vass. Finally, he reached a house and knocked on the door to ask if he could use the telephone.
"I reported it then, when I had the chance to," he says. "They had everybody out looking for him. He left my car at Spring Lake and got another ride into Sanford."
A month and a half later, Grissom's own phone rang.
"He called me," Grissom says. "He called me, and said he wanted to give himself up. I said I'd come up to get him. He was at his mother's house again."
This time, the chief called for backup from the sheriff's office.
"I called J.A. Lawrence to go with me," Grissom says. "He was a deputy."
Lawrence let Grissom wait, arrested the fugitive and brought him to Grissom.
"He went on out there and brought him in," Grissom said. "I don't know what he thought, but he got him. And he had my gun and everything in a shoe box."
Coleman didn't get a long sentence for what he did, Grissom says.
"He had to pull three years," he says. "That's all. He got out. Then he tried to run over some of the grand-kids around over there. His father-in-law shot him; killed him."
Made an Impression
Many a tale is told of Grissom's days in Vass. One time, they say, a holdup brought teams of investigators to the crime scene, but Grissom disappeared.
"Where did the chief go?" was the question. He'd been there, now he was gone. Then, somebody noticed the time, and they knew the answer.
"Chief'll be up at the school, directing traffic," they said.
And so he was.
For the rest of his life he'll be known simply as "Chief."
"Everybody came to love and respect James Grissom," says Moore County Sheriff Lane Carter. "That's why everybody still calls him ‘Chief.' He is a true, dedicated professional, has been since 1960. Knowing him has been an honor and a privilege -- for me personally -- 'cause I have known him even before I got into law enforcement."
Carter had once been halted himself by Grissom's flashing blue light in Vass.
"I ran a stop sign in his town one day," Carter says. "Years ago, probably 1974, '73 or '74. He pulled me over. Actually, he was meeting me (laughs). He said, ‘Boy, go back there and look at that sign.' I went back there and looked at it."
The sign said "STOP," as Carter knew it would.
"He said, ‘Now -- next time -- I'm going to give you one of those pink slips,'" Carter says. "‘Don't ever let me see you do that again. (laughing) I don't even know if he remembers that, but I remember that as if it was yesterday."
Sending people walking back to read a sign they'd ignored, as an alternative to a ticket, was his way of seeing to it they would drive more carefully.
"I did that several times," he says. "One judge used to make people walk. I figured if a judge could do it, I could, too. I would tell people, ‘Walk back there and read the sign, tell me what it says.' There was a lady, maybe 60 years old, went through it. I made her walk back, read the sign."
It made an impression.
"About a year later, a car pulled off at that same school crossing," Grissom says. "She pulled on one side of the road, came over to shake hands. She was from Pennsylvania. Said, ‘You don't remember me, do you?'
"Said, ‘No, ma'am, I don't.'
"She said, ‘You made me walk back to that sign down there or get a ticket. I walked back. Every time I see a school sign, I think about you.' It helped, too, that you didn't try to arrest them, treat 'em ugly or something."
‘True Public Servant'
Grissom wanted to get people to go by the law, rather than see them punished for breaking it.
It wasn't all he did. Vass folks remember seeing him, in full uniform, running a backhoe and working on town water lines.
"I'll have to say that he's a true public servant," Carter says. "He did whatever it took in the town of Vass to make municipal government work there. He did a great job for those folks, something anybody would be proud of."
Grissom embodies the best idea of law enforcement, Carter says: keep the law from being broken in the first place. He came to work as a deputy after retiring from Vass.
"I am proud to say he is my friend and a great law-enforcement officer," Carter says. "He has been here for 16 years. He has been court bailiff, done an excellent job for us."
The courthouse has Chief legends as well. For years, the Law Enforcement Organization used to raise money with a chicken fry. Nobody could pass the Chief's desk on their way into court or to offices of the sheriff or the clerk of court without being offered fried chicken tickets.
Those dinners are now a thing of the past. But as long as they went on, Grissom held the undisputed record for selling the most tickets.
Things won't be the same around the courthouse.
"We'll miss him," Carter said. "Yes, sir. Certainly will. It has been a privilege to work with the gentleman."
John Chappell can be reached at 783-5841 or by e-mail at jchappell@thepilot.com.
