‘Truly one of a kind.’ Fabled Macon traffic officer P.J. O’Hanlon dies at 78
P.J. O’Hanlon, the most renowned Macon traffic cop of his day, died Oct. 14. He was 78.
His wife, June O’Hanlon, said the cause was a heart attack.
After serving as a Marine in Vietnam in the late 1960s, O’Hanlon joined the Macon Police Department.
As a no-nonsense sergeant from the old school, Patrick Jerome O’Hanlon Jr. cut his teeth at a time when traffic enforcement was considered an elite policing unit. Officers in those ranks even wore different uniforms. They often rode souped-up motorcycles. When the interstates cut through, theirs were high-profile positions, glamorous even, as they rode sentry along America’s newly open road.
O’Hanlon was raised in south Macon. His father was a traveling circus clown from Ohio known as “Bear.” Oddly enough, the junior O’Hanlon was as strait-laced as constables come.
But then his mother, Billie, from Laurens County, had met his father on the circus circuit in Macon and, to take up with him, worked her way into a role in a high-wire act. They later settled off south Houston Avenue on Auburn Drive, where O’Hanlon grew up.
After leaving the Marines, he had a choice of jobs: the railroad or policing. He had done some of the latter in the military. It seemed to suit him.
Two decades later, a front-page article in The Telegraph in 1991 about speeding tickets featured O’Hanlon prominently.
The story described him as “rosy-cheeked” and “silver-haired” — “a Norman Rockwell policeman come to life.” The write-up began with a line about his by-the-book reputation, which lives on to this day: “P.J. O’Hanlon would write his own mother a speeding ticket, so his colleagues say.”
At the end of the article, O’Hanlon wryly disputed the claim. “My mother,” he said, “doesn’t drive.”
A former cop who for a time in the early 1970s shared a squad car with O’Hanlon as they patrolled the city’s south side, recalled that O’Hanlon, on occasion, cut traffic violators a break. It was just that when he was on duty, O’Hanlon worked nonstop. The tickets, which he was a prolific writer of, were just a byproduct.
“Nah, he didn’t write everybody a ticket,” retired police Capt. Jimmy Barbee said with a chuckle, “but he came close.”
O’Hanlon, for all his seriousness, packed a dry wit.
Barbee was driving their cruiser one day when they wheeled up behind a man on a minibike. The bike was not street legal. Its rider had stopped at a dead-end intersection, where motorists either had to turn left or right. Going straight meant rumbling down an embankment into someone’s yard.
Barbee tapped the cruiser’s horn.
The minibiker, startled, careened down the bank.
“Well,” O’Hanlon deadpanned to Barbee, “I reckon he heard you.”
Not long after O’Hanlon joined Macon’s police force, a drunken driving suspect tried to give him and another officer $100 to look the other way. O’Hanlon rang the man up on DUI and bribery charges.
News clippings from O’Hanlon’s time on the force hearken to an era when law enforcement kept tabs on what now are seemingly lesser evils. He was once part of a raid that collared six men and one woman, charging them with illegally selling beer at Broadway’s Chicken House Restaurant.
“He was truly one of a kind,” his wife, June, said. “He was straight as an arrow about everything. ... Everything was black-and-white with him. There was no gray. If you were wrong, you were wrong.”
Often when they went out to eat, people would walk up to O’Hanlon and say things like, “You gave me my first ticket.”
To which O’Hanlon would often reply, “Were you guilty?”
It is possible that a serious car wreck that happened in 1950, when he was 5, influenced his future work as a cop. A truck smashed into his parents’ station wagon on Madison Street near downtown. The impact hurled Billie O’Hanlon out a back-seat window and left her critically injured. A news item at the time mentioned she had been in “grave condition,” but she survived.
During O’Hanlon’s 36-year law enforcement career, he served terms as president of the local Fraternal Order of Police and, after retiring from the department, he worked as a bailiff at the Bibb County Courthouse.
“He was a man of principle,” Bibb sheriff’s Maj. Eric Woodford, a former Macon police traffic officer, said. “Meaning that if it was the law, he was gonna hold you to the law.”
For about a dozen years, Woodford worked under O’Hanlon in the city’s traffic division.
“You knew what your expectations were,” Woodford said. “Your expectation was to go out and do your job. ... You made sure your wreck reports were correct, because if not P.J. O’Hanlon was gonna send them back to you with all kinds of marks on them.”
When Woodford became a cop in 1991 after leaving the Army, having a stickler like O’Hanlon around proved helpful.
“He had no problem telling you what to do,” Woodford said.
Bibb Sheriff David Davis remembered O’Hanlon as “a great traffic officer” and someone whose presence is missed at the courthouse.
Davis also recalled receiving a “stern warning” from O’Hanlon one evening years ago when Davis, off duty as a patrolman, was riding home a touch too speedily.
“He struck trepidation into the hearts of many as far as citations,” Davis said.
The sheriff then mentioned the thought of Sgt. O’Hanlon in the afterlife.
“I can only pray,” Davis said, “that Jesus ain’t speeding.”
This story was originally published November 1, 2023 at 10:39 AM.