Thursday's column

Kandee Kahn worked as a police dispatcher throughout what might be considered the Wild West.

In more than 35 years on the job, Kahn, who grew up in La Puente, spent time in some pretty rough towns -- places like Yakima, Casper and Reno.

But perhaps the roughest place she worked was Azusa in the early 1970s as one of the city's first civilian dispatchers.

I came across Kandee in a sort of unusual way -- via a phone call from a copy machine place in Reno. The clerk had a customer who wanted to photocopy an old newspaper. The clerk wanted to know if it was OK to copy it.

Thinking it might be one of my masterpieces, I asked the clerk what the article was about.
"Judging from the clothes and the hairdos it looks like something from the late '60s or early '70s," she said. "It's titled, 'She was not too young at all.'"

The clerk said the story was about a teenaged police dispatcher in Azusa who had earned the admiration of her colleagues and the city's police chief.

I said, "Hey, do you have the number of the guy who wants the copies?" I got it, dialed away and left a message.

Bob Kahn called me back and put Kandee on the line. He was making a copy of the article in honor of the couple's 20th wedding anniversary. And, they wanted their two children to have a memento of an interesting life.

"I was 19 when they wrote that article, and too young to be working," she recalled. "I mentioned that to one of the reporters and he wrote about it."

Police Department rules at the time required dispatchers to be 21, but the administration winked and looked the other way.

As Kandee tells it, those were some wild days in Azusa.

One Saturday afternoon a couple of cops responding to a rambunctious wedding reception somewhere in town were hauled out of their car and nearly beaten to death.

"It was a pretty tough community during that time," Kandee said. "It got to a point that I remember officers from other agencies would call and ask, 'Where do you think the riot is going to be this weekend?'

"A lot of times when swing shift went off duty instead of going home they would sit in the dispatch center waiting for the riot of the day," Kandee continued.

Then there was the day an angry mob of 300 or so marched down Foothill Boulevard from the drive-in headed straight toward the police station.

The sergeant comes in and says, 'they are coming here to the station to get the prisoners and they claim they are going to kill anybody in the station.'"

Kandee said her boss handed her something like a "flamethrower" and gave her a hand gun as well because he didn't have enough people to protect the police headquarters. His final instructions were simple:

"'If they come in here, grab the records clerk and run into the back office and pray,'" she recalled.

Kandee hasn't been back to the San Gabriel Valley since the early 1980s. But at least she has a souvenir that's better than any postcard.