People of Darlington County – See you soon, S.O.!
Sylvester “S. O.” Robinson Photo by Jana E. Pye
By Jana E. Pye, Editor, editor@newsandpress.nett
“I loved being a police officer,” said Sylvester O. Robinson, known to many of his old comrades of the Darlington Police Department as “S.O.” – his initials were used by his former police chief because his name was simply too long to fit on the badge at the time. “Those were my happiest memories of living here in Darlington.”
Mr. Robinson was our photo for the “Where is this in Darlington County” in last week’s issue, a photo of him atop a rag-tag horse by the police station on Pearl Street. The photo was shared by one of his dear neighbors, Barbara Benjamin, who was saddened that he was moving soon to Lake City to live near his eldest daughter.
“You won’t find a kinder man,” said Benjamin. “We will miss him terribly!”
Sylvester Robinson started working for the Darlington Police Department in 1967, fresh from the steel mill in Florence. He, along with his father before him, inherited a pulmonary fibrosis that affected his lungs, and his doctor at the time suggested that he work somewhere more out in the open. Being a police officer fit the bill perfectly.
“Back in those days, we had a beat that we walked,” recalled Robinson. “If you had the downtown, you walked along during the day or night on foot. We went to the churches and everything on the second shift. We had to work, got out on foot. You met pretty near everyone that way.”
At night, Robinson recalled, the officers tried each door to insure they were locked, and often helped prevent a crime before it occurred just by being at the right place at the right time.
“Oh, we had a good team,” said Robinson. “We knew everyone, and they depended on us for a lot.”
Robinson was a single father of two children when he first got to Darlington, which was unusual for that time. “After I came home from serving in the Korean War, my wife at the time decided she no longer wanted to be married.” Fresh from a post in Germany, Robinson set out to raise his young daughter and son on his own, with the help of his family.
“Lucky for me, I met Lucille that decided to be my bride,” he said with a smile. “We met over in Camden, at a dance place over there. She helped me raise my children, and the Good Lord blessed us with one more, a baby girl.”
He and Lucille were married for many years before she passed away from cancer in 2003. “She worked at Dixie Cup for many years, and everyone loved her.”
His career as a police officer ended by a young lady that was high on substances. “I didn’t want to hurt her,” recalled Robinson. “She kicked me in my stomach and I hit a rail on a wrought iron railing. I’d already had the first back surgery, and I was getting along fine with it, but that fractured my vertebrae and it went into my sciatic nerve.” He is still bothered by the pain from that incident even now.
“They talk about us as being in the golden years,” says Robinson, who is going on 83 years of age. “I don’t see anything so fond with it though. We get the pain and the doctors and the hospitals get the gold!”
The story of Mr. Robinson on the horse was quite a tale.
“It was taken back 1977,” said Robinson. “Me and the Sergeant we were riding one Saturday afternoon back over on the West End and we got a call that this gentleman was coming through town riding a horse he had thrown his clothes off and just had his undershorts,” he said. “He had a sheet over his head like the Ku Klux Klan, and had a rifle under his sheet – he was drinking pretty heavy and rode down through the town, by all the stores, and back through the county jail at the time, it was uptown then so we got the call about him. They said ‘we got him down here on South Main Street’- there used to be a Saveway and a vacant lot. He was at the vacant lot when we got to him. We got him off the horse and got the handcuffs off him, and they said well someone has to ride the horse back into town. Since they knew I had lived out in the country and had experience with horses, I was the one that had to ride the poor old thing back into town.”
Robinson said he loved to share the photo at the table where he studies; his Bible is always open where he reads and studies it daily. “I wish I had read it more when I was a younger man,” he said. “It has every lesson you need.”
The photo of him atop the house is also at the Police Department. “Jay Cox had it fixed up,” he said. “They all got a kick out of it.”
This was not the only time he had to bring a horse back through town when he was on the police force.
“We had another time when there was a man uptown on a little horse who was drunk,” said Robinson with a laugh. “He had a beer in his hand and each time he tried to get back on the horse, he fell off. He wanted us to help him get back up and hand him back the beer…but we just gave him a free ride to the jail house, and poured out his beer.”
He does not have a photo of that one, but he hopes that someone may have one they could share.”
“That second horse was so small it was more like a Shetland pony. I was a good big bigger at their time – I weighed about 240 pounds. They all said it looked like I should have toted the horse into town on my shoulder instead of the horse toting me.”
Robinson sympathizes with the officers that are working today. “People need to know they are not in it to get rich,” he said. “It’s a hard job.”
Robinson said he will miss his friends and church members from Central Baptist Church. To send him a card or a note, send to: Sylvester Robinson 589 Cooktown Rd., Lake City, SC 29560.