By Paula J. Owen
Worcester Telegram & Gazette
PRINCETON, Mass. — It’s unusual for a police chief in a small, rural community to respond to two fatal shootings, but retiring Police Chief Charles P. Schmohl’s career has never taken a normal course.
Chief Schmohl, 61, has seen the department go from using a typewriter to using computers and sophisticated technology, and from using a station wagon to respond to all calls, including medical, to using police cruisers.
He entered police work when radio communication between departments was difficult. Now cruisers are tied into the Registry of Motor Vehicles’ computers and one another.
“You can pull up a photo from the RMV on a computer in a cruiser,” he said. “If you had told me that 25 years ago, I am not sure I would have believed you.”
He has managed the challenges of the doubling of the town’s population on weekends, when thousands of visitors head to Wachusett Mountain State Reservation, and had a buddy die in the line of duty.
Chief Schmohl has served on the Princeton Police Department for more than 40 years, 21 as chief, but if you ask him the career track he was on when he was in his 20s attending college and working as a groundskeeper in Worcester, he’ll give you an unexpected answer:
“I expected my career to be in landscape design and horticulture,” he says. “I enjoyed working with my hands and Mother Nature, and I found it to be a very rewarding field - to finish planting and create a design - just the beauty of it is a good feeling.”
He grew up in Sterling and joined his father as an on-call firefighter there at 16 while attending Wachusett Regional High School. Sterling’s fire chief was also a full-time mailman and owned an apple orchard and a business flying crop-dusters.
Chief Schmohl worked for him after school and on the weekends - no doubt where he developed his green thumb - and responded to fire and ambulance calls, sometimes heading to a big brush fire instead of going to school, he said.
In 1967 after graduation, he married Bonnie C. Thorell, his high-school sweetheart, whose father, Warren O. Thorell, was a sergeant on the Princeton Police Department.
“He started asking me if I would get on the department, and I had no desire to get on the police department,” he said.
Instead, he joined the Army Reserve while working on a degree in horticulture from the Stockbridge School of Agriculture, at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
He held his father-in-law at bay for almost two years, finally joining the department part time at 21 to assist with medical calls. Later, an accident he responded to would change his life and career path dramatically.
“I took a cruiser out alone to an accident where there was a minor injury,” he explained. “It turned out the car was stolen. The operator was not hurt, and I arrested him, booked him, and went through the prosecution and court process. Then, I started taking cruiser shifts and started taking calls. It grew on me.”
He and his wife worked at the former State Mutual Insurance building on Lincoln Street in Worcester - he as the head groundskeeper - and both worked on the Princeton Police Department from home, she as a part-time dispatcher.
When Mr. Thorell became part-time chief in 1977, Schmohl was promoted to part-time sergeant. Chief Thorell retired in 1981, and his successor, Raymond Lawson, became Princeton’s first full-time chief in 1984, until suffering a heart attack two years later.
“I became acting chief in 1987 full time, and permanently took on the role in January 1988,” Chief Schmohl said.
In February 1994, his friend, Paxton Police Chief Robert Mortell, was killed while in pursuit of three men who had broken into a home in Holden.
Chief Schmohl was on a task force with Chief Mortell, he said, and both responded to the call.
“Bob spotted three people that had just done a house break,” he said. “He went off on Route 31 by foot in the snow and was ambushed and killed.”
Chief Schmohl, at the coaxing of his son Charles “Pat” Schmohl Jr., had gone through emergency medical technician training and had medical equipment in his car.
He and two others were the first to reach the mortally wounded chief.
“Franny, a West Boylston detective, and I had medical backgrounds, and Michael Ahearn from the Paxton Police Department was there,” he explained. “I had all my medical gear in my car. We did everything possible in the field until the ambulance came.”
Chief Mortell did not survive.
“If my son hadn’t pushed me to go for medical training, I would not have been able to help him until the ambulance arrived,” he said. “EMT training was not one of my top priorities as police chief in the 1990s.”
His son was the first paramedic on the Princeton Fire Department. He also served as fire chief for several years. He is now a registered nurse and paramedic instructor at Quinsigamond Community College in Worcester.
In 1996, all five members of the Princeton Police Department were trained as EMTs, Chief Schmohl said.
“To have a police department with all of its full-time members EMTs was not common,” he said. “But as chief, I felt it was important to the community for our police department to be trained up a level.”
Chief Schmohl responded to the call May 10, 1999, when Westminster Officer Larry Jupin of the Westminster Police Department was shot near the Westminster/Princeton line. Officer Jupin, who had attended the police academy with Princeton Lt. Michele McCaffrey-Powers, succumbed to his injuries in 2002.
Ms. Powers will take over as interim chief for Chief Schmohl when he retires Sept. 13.
Chief Schmohl credited his family for supporting his career.
“My family was the best,” he said. “In this type of community, with the level of commitment required, I don’t think you could do it without the support of your family.”
The chief plans to spend more time with his three children and five grandchildren, as well as his wife, who has served as tax collector since 1986. Another grandchild is due this month.
On the day he retires, Chief Schmohl also plans to do the Jimmy Fund run with the Massachusetts Chiefs of Police Association, from New York to the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, as he has every year for the past 20 years.
Police Chief Charles Schmohl and his son Charles “Pat” Schmohl Jr. take a look at the defribrillator carried in the police cruiser.
Copyright 2009 Worcester Telegram & Gazette, Inc.