arts&culture
Retired 209 police officer pens memoir By TERESA HAMMOND
S
ome might call Jim Waddell a simple man and more than likely he’d not disagree. Yet simple men may have interesting stories and Waddell has a few to tell. The Escalon native who’s resided in Oakdale the majority of his adult life recently had his story published by reputable publisher Covenant Books. Waddell’s biography, “A Kid, His Guns, and His Badge,” was released in late 2021 and is available for purchase on Amazon, Barnes and Noble as well as Apple. “I didn’t actually decide to write a book in the beginning,” Waddell shared of his 400-page memoir, which depicts life at a much simpler time in the Central Valley. “I had a lot of fun and really good childhood memories living the first 12 years of my life in the town of Escalon,” he continued, likening the town at the time to Mayberry. A time when no one locked their doors and everyone knew one another. A father of two and grandfather to seven, Waddell shared he wanted his grandkids to know the stories and what life was like then. But that wasn’t the start of the book. That was quite simply the start of some bedtime stories when his grandchildren would spend the night
with him and his wife Rhonda. “They just loved my bedtime stories,” he said. “Some of them were about what it was like growing up in the small town of Escalon and all that goes with that. A lot of them turned into my law enforcement, police stories.” As the grandkids became older, their interest in grandpa’s stories seemed to grow. Overhearing a few on occasion, Waddell shared both his wife and daughter Jamie Waddell-Humble encouraged him to start writing the stories down to save for sharing later. “It was actually kind of fun. I enjoyed composing stories,” the retired law enforcement officer shared, mentioning his days of writing reports as a pastime he never dreaded. “I was never good at composing anything that was fictitious.” Over the course of time, Waddell followed the wisdom of the two ladies in his life and began gathering stories via word documents on his computer. A process which morphed and continued over the past seven years. “It sat there for a while, before I started writing others,” he shared of the process. “I did not write it sequentially. Every chapter is its own little story.” Yet Waddell shared he had never actually set his sights or goals on actually being published. He said that it was more for his family and envisioned, if anything, one day he’d put it in some type of print via a self-published memoir. As an avid reader himself, however, he began making inquiries to a few publishing houses of books he had personally read. Inquiries which eventually led him to Covenant Books, which after 10 days
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