Officer Beck walked across the grass to the flagpole in the silence of five hundred people, with his German Shepherd pulling gently at the leash, and he knelt in front of the small granite stone and read it to himself first. Then he read it aloud, because the microphone was still clipped to his collar. “Rex, K 9 Unit One. Omaha Police Department, 1974. Handler, Sergeant Lorraine Kowalski.” His voice cracked on the last word. I am Lorraine Kowalski, eighty years old, and I stood behind the rope with my hands folded over my purse. The dog beside him, hearing the old German word again, sat down in the grass and looked at me.
Nobody at the open house breathed. A child dropped a hot dog, and nobody bent to pick it up, and the shepherd at the end of the leash let out one soft whine and leaned his whole warm weight against the leg of Beck. In 1974 the Omaha Police Department had decided, against the advice of three captains, to try a woman as a dog handler. I was twenty eight. Rex was a black and tan shepherd the department had bought from a breeder in Wisconsin, and he did not answer to anyone but me. In the winter of 1975 he found three lost children in a blizzard near the Missouri River, and he was awarded a plaque that nobody in the department ever bothered to hang. After a hip injury in 1980 he retired, and so, quietly, did I.
The sergeant in the white shirt, who had been standing by the grill with his plate in his hand, put it down on a folding table and walked slowly toward me, taking off his cap. His name was Tom Daugherty, and he had been the second handler hired after me. “Lorraine,” he said, softly, “I have been looking for you for forty years.” He turned to the crowd. “Folks, this lady wrote the first training manual this department ever had for dogs. We still use her pages. We just stopped putting her name on the cover.”
A granite stone by a flagpole gave one retired handler the open house hour to bring a young officer back to the truth in Omaha.
I gave my terms when Officer Beck came back to the rope. He had taken the microphone off his collar and held it in his hand like something that might break. “Young man,” I said, “I do not want you to be humiliated. I want you to say to this crowd, in the same voice you used on me, what you now know. And I want the department to hang the plaque of Rex, which has been in a box for forty five years. Then I would like to hold the leash of your dog, if he will have me, for just one minute.”
Officer Beck lifted the microphone with a shaking hand. “Madam, folks,” he said, and he stopped, and started again. “I spoke to a lady today who taught this department how to work a dog, and I told her to sit with the seniors by the bathrooms. I am more sorry than I can say.” His voice thickened. “Her name is Sergeant Lorraine Kowalski, and every handler who has ever worn this pin stands on her shoulders.” The crowd was still. Then a woman near the front began to clap, and the sound spread like a prairie fire.
But not everyone was moved. Officer Lund, the partner of Beck, who had laughed loudest at the rope, stepped forward, red in the face, and lunged for the microphone to cut it off. He snatched the cord, yanked it out of the speaker, and ran toward the sound truck at the edge of the park, perhaps meaning to shut off the whole sound system. He had gone ten yards when a line of old men in VFW caps and department windbreakers, retired handlers from three decades, each holding the leash of a gray muzzled shepherd, stepped out across the grass in front of him.
Lund stopped as the dogs sat down in unison. The leader of the old handlers, a stooped man named Hollis, held out one hand for the cord. “Son,” he said, “I trained with this lady in 1974. You are not going to unplug her.” Lund handed over the cord. His ears were crimson. Behind him the microphone crackled back to life, and the voice of Sergeant Daugherty rolled out across the park, calling the crowd to attention for the first time in forty five years in honor of Lorraine Kowalski.
The consequences were warm and a little late. The department hung the plaque of Rex in the lobby of headquarters that very week and added my name to the wall of the K 9 unit. Officer Lund wrote me a letter of apology that took three pages. Officer Beck asked me to teach the next class of handlers, and I did, two Saturdays a month, in a drafty gym with a space heater. The dog beside him, whose name is Duke, now sits when I say the old German word, and only then.
In the name of my husband Walter, who passed in 2016, I started the Walter Kowalski Fund. It pays for the retirement care of police dogs and for scholarships for women entering law enforcement, in Douglas, Sarpy and Washington counties. In the first year we paid the veterinary bills of fourteen retired dogs and sent nine young women to the police academy. One was a packing plant worker from South Omaha who is now the first woman handler in the Bellevue department.
On the first Saturday of August, with the cottonwoods shedding their white fluff over the picnic tables like a late snow, I stood in the park by the flagpole with Duke at my side, in the sun, and the crowd gathered for the K 9 open house. Beck introduced me with his own microphone. I put my hand on the head of the dog, and I whispered the old German word, and he sat. The little stone by the flagpole had been cleaned and polished, and someone had laid a bunch of marigolds at its base. I bent down, my knees creaking, and touched the name of Rex.
