EVE BYRON Independent Record HELENA (AP)
For 20 years, when the Los Angeles Police Department kicked down the wrong door, they’d call Steve Merrill. “I was on 24-hour call when I first got there,” recalled Merrill in a recent interview at his North Helena Valley home. “They might have a wrong-door incident when they were serving a warrant or pursuing a suspect. They’d kick the door in and those poor people would go Aaahh!’” “So a lot of times when I’d show up, they weren’t real happy. A lot of times I would need a police escort because the places weren’t real desirable.” He laughed, adding in his deep baritone that Los Angeles was the only city he knew that replaces doors in such circumstances. “In New York, if they kick your door down, you’re on your own,” Merrill said. His woodworking job for the LAPD was typical of his life, which often involved a series of contrasts. During the Vietnam War, Merrill was the 60s hippie complete with fringed buckskin jacket and long hair, but joined the Marines after drawing a low draft lottery number. “Both my parents were Marine Corps veterans and my lottery number was small, and I didn’t want to go into the Army,” Merrill said. The unit he hooked up with had just returned from active duty, so Merrill did not have to serve overseas. When his tour ended, he returned to a job he held before joining the Marines working as a mechanic for the LAPD. Feeling it didn’t hold much of a future, Merrill moved to Oregon and took a construction job. When the bottom fell out of that market in the early 1980s, Merrill returned to the LAPD job until he heard about the department’s carpentry opening, a big promotion out of the garage. He was a civilian employee who not only had full security clearance but also possessed a skeleton key that allowed him into any building, a prize he still relishes today. Along with rebuilding wrongly torn down doors, Merrill also replaced fences damaged during police chases and helped find bullets lodged in walls. He constructed custom made “kit rooms” for storing police radios, Tasers, weapons and bulletproof vests and decked out the inside of mobile command posts to create slots for the various gear. “I made a display for the (district attorney) one time that showed a crime scene. He needed to show it to the jury and every time he held it up the pieces fell off, so I built a platform with a giant mirror,” Merrill said. But he focused the most loving attention on the shadow boxes built to house the medals of valor for fallen officers who died in the line of duty. Merrill often came to Montana to visit his sister, who lives in Columbia Falls, and found Helena when checking out Carroll College for his son. As retirement approached a few years ago, he and his wife Anne decided Helena was the type of small town where they wanted to spend the rest of their lives. On this day, clad in shorts and a T-shirt, he was waiting for his 17-month-old grandson to wake from a nap so they could play. But the custom carpentry is never far away, even if it’s only for fun these days. He had a stockpile of mahogany in the garage, waiting to be formed into furniture, a freestanding wall near the kitchen that has to come out and recently built shelves for his church’s buses so they could more easily transport cakes and pies. “And look at those cabinets. They’re an insult to me. They’re vinyl,” he said, adding with a wide smile that he doesn’t have a honey-do list from his wife. “I have my own honey-do list.”
