Adele Ferguson: Arrests of pols for drunken driving

ANOTHER PUBLIC official was snapped up by the cops for driving under the influence after getting sauced at a party. Port Orchard Mayor Lary Coppola was the culprit and the event was the May 2 Port Orchard Rotary Crab Feed and Auction. It’s only been a month or so since Superintendent of Public Instruction Randy Dorn failed a sobriety test when he was stopped for speeding and a defective tail light on his way home from a community dinner.

I wrote right after the Dorn affair about the time Lt. Gov. Brad Owen, a Shelton state senator at the time, became the first public official to get caught by the new tougher drunk driving law passed in 1983. Too many juries were letting drunk drivers go under the “There but for the grace of God go I” excuse so the law mandated 24 hours in jail and Owen served it without complaint, as did Dorn this year.

It happens that Owen too had made the mistake of getting juiced at a party and operating under the illusion that he wasn’t too drunk to drive himself home. That’s common for drinkers until they get caught and publicly humiliated, in which case they usually have learned their lesson and don’t do it again.

I have sympathy for these people because they are in a different position at public events then the rest of us, who can drop in and drop out of gatherings rather than hang in all evening to make sure every voter there gets a hand shake.

HAVING A DRINK in your hand at an event where drinks are being served can get to be a habit. Your drink holding hand can develop a sort of permanent curl.

As for Mayor Coppola. he is one of my employers. That is, he purchases my column which he still runs in the Kitsap Business Journal despite statements to the contrary by a Seattle newspaper columnist who took offense at something I had written and informed his readers that I had been dumped by Coppola. Not so.

Anyway, most of the officials snared by the DUI regs managed to continue in public service because they were smart enough or not drunk enough to get snotty with the arresting officers. Federal Judge Walter T. McGovern. the judge in the GamScam case, made the front pages when he tried that “Don’t you know who I am?” with the cops who pulled him over for DUI after the trial. They did. Too bad for him.

I ONCE WAS PULLED over by Shelton cops on my way home from a party in Olympia for the head of the State Liquor Control Board. The officer was compassionate. He told me to get in the passenger seat and let my husband to take the wheel. No arrest.

Another time, I spent an afternoon finishing lunch with a couple of pols which required considerable after dinner drinks and on the way home from Olympia took the wrong turn and wound up going south on a road intended for those going north. It was winter and dark and the first car I met coming at me swerved by and I realized what I had done. I immediately made a left up on the grassy bank to get out of traffic and then found I couldn’t get back off. Too slippery.

Fortunately, a state fisheries truck came by and stopped. The driver got out a rope and pulled me off whereupon I swore by all that was holy never ever to do this again. I never have either. All I could think of driving home was how humiliating it would have been to have been arrested by the cops and see my name in the papers after all I have written about drunk drivers.

Now, when I go to family parties where drinks are served, I may drive there, but one of my daughters drives me home.

(Adele Ferguson can be reached at P.O. Box 69, Hansville. Wa., 98340.)