LITTLE ROCK — Little Rock police officer Robert Lusk retired Friday after spending most of his 30 years with the department patrolling the streets.
His supervisors say they’ll miss him because of his dependability and off-color candor at morning lineup.
Despite his retirement, Lusk, 56, won’t be far from the realm of public safety. His wife, Debra Lusk, works as a North Little Rock dispatcher. Her daughter, Courtney Hagar, 31, is a paramedic with Metropolitan Emergency Medical Services, and son, Bo Hagar, 29, is a Little Rock firefighter.
The family is rooted in public service. Debra Lusk’s mother was a county jailer and her father was a North Little Rock police sergeant. Lusk’s grandfather was a firefighter in North Little Rock.
“I’m just here by accident,” Robert Lusk said. His dad was a lawyer.
The couple met in the Little Rock Police Department’s radio room in the 1980s, got married, raised children and had a fairly normal family life. Now, family members regularly cross paths on the job and at home find that talking about work experiences eases the stress.
“If our family wasn’t normal growing up, we would never know,” Bo Hagar said.
To Courtney, they’re just as “dysfunctional” as every other family. Bo and Robert trade jabs at each other’s occupations. Courtney, a die-hard Chicago Cubs and Boston Red Sox fan, said she regularly fights with her dad, a St. Louis Cardinals and New York Yankees fan.
Even Debra and Robert Lusk clash, and have since they first met back in the early 1980s after he filled in for a supervisor in the dispatcher’s radio room where she worked.
“I thought he was the worst thing that walked this earth,” Debra Lusk recalled, saying he seemed grumpy and conceited.
That soon changed as they worked together more and later started dating, they said. The two briefly broke up when Debra wondered if she wanted to marry a police officer.
In 1987, they married and Lusk traded the role of bachelor for stepfather to Bo and Courtney Hagar.
With Debra Lusk’s rotating schedule, Robert often drove the children to sports practice and music events. He tried helping with homework but the children said he had trouble simplifying his explanations on mathematics and civics.
After exhausted explanations, sometimes Robert would give up, Bo Hagar said.
“He’d start doing your homework for you,” he said.
For her part, Debra did what she could to be at as many events, rehearsals and practices as she could — often missing out on sleep between midnight shifts to make sure she kept her children on schedule, she said.
For the Lusks, the main goal was to give their children a normal life despite their own crazy hours and jobs. That meant leaving work and all its troubles outside as they entered their home, Robert said.
But later, when their children took jobs in public safety, they would all confide in one another.
Courtney Hagar became a paramedic with MEMS seven years ago.
“The idea of being able to legally run red lights made me happy,” Hagar joked.
In truth, medicine has always fascinated her, and her parents raised her and her brother to respect and help others, she said.
Bo Hagar started out as a volunteer firefighter with the Oak Grove Fire District near Maumelle and later applied to the North Little Rock and Sherwood fire departments. They rejected him.
Just when he had given up on being a full-time firefighter, Bo received a call from his stepfather, who told him to apply with the Little Rock Fire Department, he said.
In January 2007, he became a Little Rock firefighter.
That was the “first time my parents were proud of me,” he joked.
Working in and around emergencies in Little Rock and North Little Rock, family members said they couldn’t help but run into each other.
Once Bo and Courtney Hagar and Robert Lusk all responded to the same car accident — the siblings exchanged “good-to-see-you” greetings at the scene.
The family members now exchange texts after they work the same scene and say it helps them ease the stress.
Courtney Hagar and her mother help each other vent after traumatic calls, such as one where a mother called looking for her baby only moments before she found the child in the dryer. That’s only something that people who work with trauma every day can understand, they said.
“People who don’t deal with trauma don’t have a clue,” Debra Lusk said.
In the early 1980s, while the two were still dating, Debra’s and Robert’s jobs overlapped. Debra was monitoring radio calls between Robert and another officer chasing some suspects on foot. Robert ended up injuring himself and reported on the radio that he was heading to St. Vincent Infirmary Medical Center.
He had only injured his ankle, but he didn’t break it, he said.
Debra said she held her composure, and he called her after he was released.
Siblings Bo and Courtney Hagar, who also are parents, say the prospect of bumping into their own children on the job won’t come for some time — if their children decide to work in public safety. The siblings say they’ll give their children the latitude to decide their own futures, and be proud regardless of their choices.
The parents are as proud of their children as the children are of their stepfather, who became their dad even while their biological father was still living.
“Our real father died about three years ago, and everybody thought it was Bob,” Courtney Hagar said.
Debra Lusk said her nowretired husband has a long “honey-do list” waiting for him. Robert Lusk said he’ll spend much of his time with his grandchildren and might even enroll in law school, an opportunity he declined when he was younger.
At 55, Debbie said she doesn’t see herself joining her husband in retirement anytime soon.
“I’m going to stay till they run me off,” she said.
Arkansas, Pages 15 on 07/29/2012