BRATTLEBORO — Dick Guthrie, who died on Nov. 18 at age 75, held just about every local law enforcement job there is.
Starting at age 21, as the youngest police officer hired by the Brattleboro Police Department, he rose from juvenile officer to police chief to the sheriff of Windham County.
And for five decades, his career was intimately intertwined with Youth Services.
Early on, Guthrie's avowed goal in life was to become a police officer and wear that badge, like the two officers who walked by his South Main Street house each day on their way to report for duty.
He recalled that he'd get permission from his mother to escort these officers, Angus McKenna and Richard Jones, down the hill to the Holstein Building.
“I wanted to be like them,” Guthrie said. “They were always reaching out to you, talking.”
Guthrie soon knew the names of every police officer in Brattleboro.
Another mentor, Sheriff Patrick J. O'Keefe, would stand on the corner of Main and Elliot streets daily. As Guthrie and his classmates walked home from St. Michael Roman Catholic School at lunchtime, O'Keefe would greet each of them by name.
“When we got our report card he would always ask to see it and how we were doing in school,” Guthrie recounted. Building rapport like this with youth in the community became one of Guthrie's goals as he followed in his mentors' footsteps.
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Throughout his career, Guthrie gravitated to issues involving youth, primarily petty theft, truancy, and runaways.
Assigned the evening shift as a juvenile officer, Guthrie would spend lunch hours at Youth Services brainstorming with the directors there about how they could reduce the number of these incidents.
Sally Pennington, who served as executive director from 1982 to 1991 and as a co-director with Lee Weber since 1977, recalled how joining forces with Guthrie “made things happen.”
When a statewide court diversion initiative was not in the governor's budget, Guthrie recruited 35 law-enforcement officers from across the state to show up in full regalia at the appropriations committee meetings, demonstrating how important court diversion was to a police officer on the streets of Vermont.
“This was a very effective strategy and provided pivotal funding for expanding diversion to other Vermont communities,” said Pennington. “Legislators heard firsthand the difference court diversion makes for the offender, their family, the victim, and the community. By holding them accountable, justice was served, and these youth rarely got in trouble again.”
Initially, Guthrie would hand-deliver each diversion case to Youth Services and, for many years, he sat on every diversion board.
“This kind of restorative justice could make the child responsible for the harm they had caused the community and by the same token build on that child's goodness,” Guthrie explained. “As a result, we tended not to see that child again, and so our repeat offenses started dwindling. Not to mention the money it saved the court.”
Guthrie admitted that his work calendar was so busy then with Youth Services meetings that he often had to finish his police work at night.
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Pennington explains the “essential partnership” that developed and lasted many years between Guthrie and Youth Services.
“He cared to the marrow of his bones about youth, and once we began working closely together we created new opportunities and effected real change for youth and families. If you believe we all have our heart's work - this was it for Dick.”
Guthrie's collaborations with Youth Services continued as new programs were added to meet the needs of the community, often at his urging.
He was an early advocate of the agency's taking on the Big Brothers Big Sisters mentoring program. He joined its advisory committee and referred countless children to its waiting list.
By the early 1980s, more than 180 runaway incidences were reported in Brattleboro in one year, and repeat runaways were “tying up our manpower tremendously,” Guthrie said.
“We would spend a large portion of our time looking for children and returning them back home, only to have them run away again,” he said, recalling the frustration.
Guthrie started tracking the reasons for each runaway, which included violence in the home, sexual abuse, or poor grades at school.
He realized that police should be asking the children why they ran away, not just dropping them at their front doors, as was customary.
Doing so would prove more than the police department alone could handle, so Guthrie turned to the fledging Youth Services for assistance with these children living in difficult circumstances.
Co-directors Pennington and Weber enlisted the help of a core group of community members to explore what could be done to address this community need.
Jesse Corum IV, who died earlier this year, was a deputy in the Windham County State's Attorney office at the time. He once said that Guthrie really had the pulse of the under-18 population.
“Dick reminded us that taking care of youth delinquency was key to solving most of the problems of the community. If we didn't find solutions while these individuals were young, we'd be dealing with much bigger problems when they became adults,” he once said.
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With widespread community support and active fundraising, Youth Services was able to launch a full-fledged runaway program. Directed by clinician Eleanor Towle, the program provided safe houses and family counseling with the parent(s) and child before the young person was returned home. Within a year of the launch, the runaway numbers dropped significantly, and the Police Department wasn't seeing reoffenses. The program worked!
Towle recalled Guthrie as being incredibly supportive of the youth and families in the community and quick to involve Youth Services when he came across any youth who could benefit from the agency's programs.
“We'd joke that if a kid wouldn't eat his oatmeal, a family could call Dick to come and talk to him or her,” she said. “He was that proactive!”
“Show me a kid who got in trouble and I can show you something good about him”: that is the underlying philosophy that guided Guthrie in his work with area youth, “because every kid hits a bump in the road somewhere,” he explained.
“Youth Services, through its Court Diversion, Big Brothers Big Sisters, and Runaway programs, showed me that there is good in every child and that if you bring that goodness out and try to enhance that goodness, it often takes care of all the deficits and the child will succeed,” he said.
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During his five decades of police work, Dick Guthrie estimated that more than half of all cases handled by the Brattleboro Police or Sheriff's Department involved youth. That meant he was almost certain to be involved.
“I don't think I would have been as successful a police officer without Youth Services,” he once said.
But it's just as certain that Youth Services would not have been as successful without Dick Guthrie's contributions and commitment to the youth of Windham County.