Staff photo / Allie Vugrincic Former Lordstown police chief and current Lordstown Board of Education member Bill Catlin holds a photo of himself taken when he was a military police officer with the U.S. Army in the late 1950s. Catlin spent two years in South Korea helping to police the 55th quartermaster base depot, less than 20 miles from the Demilitarized Zone.

LORDSTOWN — Bill Catlin retired as chief from the Lordstown Police Department after 33 years in local law enforcement and now is a member on the Lordstown Board of Education — but before all that, he was Military Police with the U.S. Army in South Korea.

“I’ve been very lucky,” Catlin said. “I look back at my military years and I look back at my career, and I’ve been very fortunate.”

After graduating from Austintown Fitch High School in 1958, Catlin — whose father also was in the service — joined the Army with the intention of doing telephone repair work, but found there were no openings for the position. Instead, he became an MP.

He completed basic training at Fort Benning and MP training at Fort Gordon, both in Georgia, and then volunteered to be sent overseas, thinking he would go to Germany. Instead, he was sent to South Korea and stationed at the 55th quartermaster base depot, less than 20 miles away from the Demilitarized Zone, a neutral buffer area between North and South Korea. The base would have provided backup if serious fighting had broken out again on the border.

He came to South Korea by ships on voyages that took more than 20 days.

“Going there on the troop ship, I worked in the mess hall peeling potatoes,” Catlin said.

He remained in South Korea for two years, working security at the gate, keeping an eye on the civilians working at the base and doing other police work.

He said what he remembers most about the country was its poverty.

“The biggest thing that got to me at the time was how poor the country was,” Catlin said.

Catlin was fortunate enough to employ houseboys who washed clothes and shined shoes for $9 or $10 per month. Other living expenses were cheap, he said, and the country got very cold in the winter.

Catlin returned to the U.S. and finished his service at Fort Meade in Maryland, where he guarded the stockades, directed traffic and performed patrol duty — work not unlike what he later did as a police officer in Niles.

When Catlin’s time was up in 1961, he considered re-enlisting and possibly going to Vietnam to get his sergeant’s bars.

“I decided I’d been out of the country so long, I’d come home,” Catlin said. He never returned to South Korea, but he and his wife, Mary Rose, have traveled to 48 states — only missing Alaska and Hawaii.

Catlin became a police officer in Niles, which then was a booming city, and walked a beat until he became a sergeant, he said.

The Army paid for him to get a degree at Kent State University, and he graduated in the mid-’60s. He later went on to get a master’s degree from Youngstown State University.

Catlin was working the midnight shift in Niles and living in Shadow Ridge when the infamous May 1985 tornado ripped through the area. His whole neighborhood was devastated, and his car was destroyed. Emergency relief crews moved into his house in the days following.

Catlin later left the Niles Police Department to become the police chief in Lordstown, where he said people were very friendly with the police.

“It was more personalized because you got to know people,” he said.

He credits his time as an MP and two uncles who were police officers in Struthers for pushing him toward his career.

A past president of the state police chiefs association and the Mahoning Valley Police Association, Catlin continues to stay active in the community.