HISTORY OF THE CALIFORNIA HIGHWAY PATROL

O'Hara looked at the picture for several moments and left, asking no questions. The matter was settled. He wanted to "be that officer," to do those good things, to help those in need of comfort and extract justice from those who owed it.

For his entire career as a highway patrolman O'Hara would do just this--but he would continue wondering, "Who was the officer in that photograph?" In time the picture, which had hung in all lobbies of the CHP, was removed. It was said to "disturb" people, so it was eventually replaced by a picture of a chipmunk in a Smokey Bear hat.

In 1980, O'Hara was able to obtain one of the few remaining 16x20 enlargements and continued, as more years passed, questioning fellow officers about the identity of the motorcycle officer and the circumstances surrounding the death of the little boy. No one knew anything about the mystery trio in the picture and fewer and fewer even remembered having seen the picture. In 2008, O'Hara wrote to the CHP Office of Public Affairs and, receiving no reply, finally wrote the Highway Patrol Commissioner's office. They knew nothing about the photo.

This poignant moment in CHP history had been long forgotten--so completely, in fact, that even a 2008 pictorial history of the CHP failed to include it.

Armed with this historic, still-framed copy, O'Hara had long since vowed that if he could find this officer or his family, he would travel any distance to present it to them.

41 YEARS LATER

41 years after first seeing the photograph and jealously guarding it with each move, O'Hara met up with another retiree, Don Burks, Badge 3556, and the two decided to have lunch. As they sipped their coffee and talked about old times, O'Hara happened to mention the old picture--and the words came he'd been awaiting for four decades.

"Oh, you mean Gordon Muir!"

O'Hara turned white as a ghost. "The hell you say--you know who it is?"

"Of course!" grinned Burks. "I remember Gordon. That photo was in Life Magazine and was seen all over the country! I thought everyone knew about it!"

Recovering slowly from his excitement, O'Hara explained that, to the contrary, everyone had forgotten about it, but that he desperately wanted to talk to Officer Gordon Muir. Was he alive? Was there a way of finding him? He was, explained O'Hara, a part of the CHP's history and heritage that had just come back to life and couldn't be forgotten again.

Burks pondered a moment and finally said he would start making contacts and try to track Gordon down. He called O'Hara the very next day. Not only was Officer Gordon Muir alive, but he lived only a few miles away from O'Hara!

Within a few days, a meeting had been arranged and O'Hara arrived at the Muir home. Gordon Muir, badge 2540, answered the door, accompanied by his beaming wife, Judy. Gordon was immediately disarming--at 75, he was quick with a smile and exuded a quiet humility. He spoke freely of his experiences, clearly the wiser for them and highly insightful. As he talked, he unlocked the mystery behind the long-forgotten photograph of a woman, a child and a California Highway Patrolman.

THE NIGHT

January 30, 1960: Officer Gordon Muir, with two years on the CHP, was working out of the San Francisco office at about 7:00 in the evening and was eastbound on the Eastshore Freeway (I.80) near University Avenue (in the Berkeley area) when traffic suddenly began to slow. It had been raining hard, that day, so Officer Muir was in a patrol car rather than his usual motorcycle.

Sensing something wrong ahead, Officer Muir began passing ttraffic on the shoulder. He came upon a scene in which he found a young woman running to her four year-old son, who was lying in a pool of blood in the #2 lane, dead. He quickly learned that that the boy had fallen from the mother's car while climbing into the back seat (this was before seat belts) to retrieve his stuffed bunny rabbit.

No one knew how the door came open, but the little boy fell out. The mother tried to stop and run back to him but the child was struck by another car and killed. "Those people were just devastated," Gordon recalled.

Officer Muir called in an 11-41 (ambulance needed) and 11-44 (possible death) and went to the mother, who was weeping uncontrollably by her son. His instinct was to put his arms around her and, calming her, try to eventually move her from the traffic lanes and away from the child's body.

Typically, there was little time to think at the scene, beyond the business of taking care of the mother, initiating the investigation, controlling the other people at the scene, and clearing things. It would be after that things would begin to hit.

THE AFTERMATH

It was Judy, Gordon's wife, who spoke first about the impact of the incident on Gordon.

"For a time, Gordon was shattered," Judy explained. "He found himself feeling such helplessness, a helplessness he had never felt before. It seemed to hit him hard after this that life can change so much with just one event. He became extremely protective."

It was a short time after the accident, Judy noted, that Gordon put seat belts in their car long before seat belts were required. She recalled he was especially worried about their daughters. She could recall him drilling the holes.

Gordon remembered that, for a long time after the accident, he would just sit with his daughters and think about how fast they could be taken from him. The thought weighed heavily on him. "Even today, I think the little guy would have been fifty-something and I look at my oldest daughter...those are just the ones that stick with everyone, I guess. The little kids--they don't know what's happened to them..."

Gordon lapsed into silence, looking into the distance, his thoughts now his own.

TODAY

After a proud and honorable career, Sergeant Gordon Muir retired in 1978. He is about to celebrate his 56th anniversary with his wife, Judy, whom he has known since elementary school.

"It was a good career and something I always wanted to do," he recalls. In spite of several accidents and serious injuries, he enjoyed motorcycles the most and special details, during which he met such personalities as Presidents Eisenhower, Johnson and Nixon, Nikita Kruschev, Princess Margaret and Haile Selassi.

But it's hard to remember them without still remembering that little boy and his stuffed bunny.