Joe Friday was a fictional detective who, on radio and television, roamed the virtual streets of Los Angeles, solving crimes and sticking to the rule book.
But one character Friday relied on in the weekly television drama "Dragnet" was a civilian, Chief Forensic Specialist Raymond Pinker. Unlike Friday, Pinker was based on a real-life LAPD figure named ... Raymond Pinker.
Pinker, whose career with the department spanned almost 40 years, solved crimes not with shoe leather but with a Sherlock Holmesian magnifying glass and other tools of the consulting detective's trade.
"Dragnet" used Pinker's real name but never paid him a dime, his widow, Ruby Pinker, said in an interview. "He never even got any Chesterfields.... I think that's the cigarette company that sponsored the show."
In 1929, Pinker joined the LAPD's 7-year-old Police Scientific Investigation Division. It was the first such lab in the country, sparsely equipped with a few test tubes, a microscope and a Bunsen burner.
Over the years, Pinker transformed the grimy, crammed quarters into a renowned crime lab with 61 experts and state-of-the-art equipment. As a leader in forensic science, he and the lab became a model for police departments in other cities.
Pinker pioneered the use of paraffin tests and gamma rays to determine if someone had fired a weapon. He was among the first to use color and 3-D crime-scene photographs, Breathalyzers and lie detector tests, which he trained officers and attorneys to perform and evaluate.
The "Dragnet" stories were said to be true because they were based on real cases from his and others' files.
"We used to sit and laugh at some of those 'Dragnet' episodes. They would take facts from one case and mix them with facts from another to make the stories more interesting," said Ruby Pinker, 88, a former Vaudeville hoofer and real estate agent. She still lives in the Mount Washington house the couple bought after their 1948 marriage, her first and his second.
A quiet, bespectacled man, Pinker helped put some of the hardiest and most elusive criminals behind bars, including one of the LAPD's very own: Capt. Earle Kynette, the head of the Special Intelligence Squad. Kynette was convicted in the 1938 car-bombing of a former LAPD detective who had been investigating police corruption.
Pinker's remarkable contribution to the department will be highlighted Saturday at the Los Angeles Police Museum and Community Center's public event, "A Night With Joe Friday: A Tribute to LAPD Detectives Real & Reel." An outstanding LAPD civilian employee also will be recognized with the first-ever Ray Pinker Award.
Born in Nebraska in 1905, Pinker arrived in Los Angeles with his family as a teenager. In the 1920s, he put himself through USC working at a drugstore. He graduated with a degree in chemistry.
"He was a very quiet, curious person and always wanted to know what made things tick," Ruby Pinker said.
Four months before the 1929 stock market crash, Pinker landed a job as a chemist with the LAPD. He worked at the Central Police Station, which was built in 1896 at 1st and Hill streets.
"That old police station was really quite a place," Ruby Pinker said. "It had rats bigger than cats and there were more of them than there were workers on the third floor."
Smoke stained its walls and bullet holes riddled its ceiling, the result of misfired weapons. But it was the place Pinker called home for decades as he waged his own quiet war on crime.
Often he was summoned in the middle of the night to help collect evidence at a crime scene. He was the specialist in demand.
"Capt. Jack Donahoe, a big, wonderful Irish man who was in charge of the Robbery-Homicide Division in the 1940s, would always shout, 'Don't get me so-and-so, get me Pinker,' " Ruby Pinker said.
Pinker attended many of the autopsies performed on the victims he had examined at the crime scene. But he didn't much like them.
Her husband "didn't have much hair," his widow said, "but after gruesome autopsies, he would come home, take his clothes off on the front porch before coming inside, then shower, scrubbing his head until it shined. Our neighbors thought he was quite a character."
Pinker made hundreds of court appearances a year, never letting anything stand in the way of his job. In 1938, while on the witness stand during the Kynette case, Judge Thomas Ambrose cut Pinker's testimony short with a smile: "May I interrupt at this time to say that the hospital just called and you are the father of a bouncing baby girl." Court adjourned early.
The same blushing chemist cracked the Louise Peete case in late 1944. Peete, a convicted murderess out on parole, was suspected of robbing and slaying a woman who had befriended her and cared for Peete's daughter, Betty, while Peete spent 18 years in prison. But the woman had merely disappeared; no body had been found. Six months later, the LAPD called Pinker into the case.
