Sheriff Recalls Happy Times (1989)
The Linn County News
Thursday March 2, 1989, Page 7A
Former sheriff recalls happy times tending to jail functions
The atmosphere at the Linn County jail is not what is was a few years ago. By comparision it is almost cold. Back then being jailed was almost like becoming a temporary part of the sheriff's family, his wife and kids living on the ground floor and the prisoners on the next.
Just two of the country's former sheriff's are alive to remember what it was like to maintain law and order in Linn County during the days not so long ago, before the modern jail building was put up.
It was a big job for Lawrence Amer, Bryan Harold and their families........
Many former prisoners became friends, said the Amers, remembering them with gifts and visits during the holidays years later.
Not what Beulah Amer had in mind when her husband decided to take the job in 1959. "I was a scaredy cat. I was scared to go into the next room after dark.," she said. But the night that Amer won the election, she said, she knew it was time to change. I just decided, Well, I'm gonna be brave. So I just went in and took care of the prisoners and didn't think a thing about it........
Like the time a local farmer pulled up to the jail with an Air Force bomb in the back of his pickup. During test flights between Olathe and Texas, remembers Amer, it accidentally got tripped and dropped into Gene Crow's corn field. It about buried it. He was out cultivating when he saw it, dug it up, and put it in the back of his pickup and brought it in. Amer was used to dealing with house breakers and cattle rustlers not bombs. So he called the Air Force to ask them if they had lost anything.
They had. "They told me to put it behind the biggest tree I could find." Amer placed the bomb behind a large tree in the courtyard where it remained until experts arrived in the middle of the night to diffuse it. "They said it'd a blowed the whole town up if it'd went off.
And the Amers still have the Oct 1960 issue of "The Kansas Stockman" describing the events which led to the stackout and arrest of the three Kansas City men who spent weeks supporting themselves on the profits they made selling livestock from Linn County. Using a rented Valentine truck, said Amer, they took a load or two of cattle every week to keep them in dope and girls. One of the guns recovered from them during that episode is on display in the Kansas Bureau of Investigation museum in Topeka, he said. He himself carried a gun but he didn't use it
much. I was pretty handy with these(hands.)......
This story was told at Beulah Amer's funeral by her pastor that no one in the family had ever heard before. It seems as if once when Beulah was feeding the prisoners she accidently left the door open. One prisoner tried to escape, so she picked up a shotgun and threatened to shot him if he didn't get back in. I guess she convinced him because he went back into his cell. Beulah didn't have any bullets in that shotgun though. She said afterwords she had never been so scared, but she wasn't about to let him escape because she didn't want to have to tell Laurence.
