At the end of the day, the two fishermen were still upset about being cheated out of their money when they earlier put coins in a South Williamsport bait machine near West Southern Avenue and Curtin Street, but nothing came out.

“The two men decided to come back late at night to try to get their money back from the machine. However, they actually tried to steal the machine,” borough Police Chief Robert Hetner said.

“They put the whole vending machine on the roof of their car,” Hetner said, recalling an incident he believes happened in the 1970s.

As the men were lifting the machine on to the car’s roof, they were unaware that Hetner, a part-time police officer who was then living across the street, was watching them from his front door.

“When they tried to drive away, the machine slid right off the car onto Curtin Street,” Hetner said, adding that he grabbed his portable radio to alert the on-duty officer of the attempted theft.

“I told the officer ‘I got the machine here. It’s laying in the street. The car was last seen heading down Curtin Street,'” said Hetner, who was off-duty on the night of the attempted theft.

Thanks to the efforts of a state Fish and Boat Commission officer who was in the area, the two thieves were soon nabbed a few blocks away.

“They initially denied their involvement in the theft, but you could clearly see on the car white marks the machine had left from sliding off the vehicle,” Hetner said. Both men were promptly arrested.

“That was a bizarre one for sure,” Hetner said during a recent interview in which he reflected on some of the episodes he’s experienced in his nearly 50 years as a public servant.

At the end of this month, Hetner a borough native who been with the police department since 1981, will retire as police chief, a full-time position he has held since 2012. Up until then, he moved up the ranks in the department as a patrolman, corporal and captain as he worked as a part-time officer.

“I really considered it an honor to have worn the badge. I have very much appreciated the trust the people have placed in me throughout my career,” Hetner said.

Law enforcement – which Hetner began at the age of 19 when he was hired as an officer for the South Williamsport Area School District – is just one component of his professional life.

After serving seven years as the school district’s police officer, he gave up the officer’s uniform and moved to the classroom to teach social studies at the South Williamsport Junior-Senior High School.

Prior to becoming police chief, Hetner spent 30 years with the East Lycoming School District; first as a social studies teacher at the Hughesville Junior-Senior High School for 20-plus years, and then in the last several years he served as the district’s police officer in which part of his responsibilities involved helping principals with disciplinary matters. He retired in 2012.

Hetner is a graduate of Lycoming College, where he received a degree in sociology and was certified as a secondary social studies teacher. He earlier received an associate’s degree in education and social work from the former Williamsport Area Community College. He received his Act 120 police training through a program sponsored by at the Police Academy at Lackawanna College and he went on to obtain a masters degree from Mansfield University.

His devotion to helping others dates back even before the future teacher had a driver’s license.

“I think I was in ninth grade. I thought it would be interesting to become involved in law enforcement and the fire department,” Hetner said. “I started doing ambulance work when I was 16. At that time, the fire department didn’t even have an ambulance. The ambulance service was then run by the American Legion Post 617. The old ambulance garage was behind Insinger’s Personal Care Home at Central Avenue and Market Street,” Hetner said.

“I lived in the 200 block of West Southern Avenue. I didn’t even have a driver’s license yet. I would run from my house to the garage. We didn’t have radios then. There was an answering service that received the emergency calls. The answering service would then reach us at home by phone,” he said, remembering what it was like in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

“I was interested in all of it – police, fire and ambulance service. I joined the ambulance service first because I couldn’t join the the fire department until I was 18. I wanted to get involved,” he said.

In Hetner’s teen years, there was no 911. There was no state-mandated emergency medical technician training. As he explained it, there was no required training at all to run on ambulance calls.

“When I went on my very first ambulance call, that was literally the first time I was in the ambulance. I had absolutely no training,” he recalled.

“I took one of the first state-certified training courses. It was called emergency ambulance attendant. This preceded EMT (emergency medical technician) classes. It was about 40-plus hours,” he said.

At age 18, he joined the nearby Citizens Fire Co. on West Southern Avenue.

“I always had a desire to help and try to do my part. I just wanted to help people because I cared. I tried to show people compassion,” Hetner said. “That’s been my life – in the fire department, the ambulance service, obviously teaching, all the years I taught school, and my work in law enforcement,” he said.

For Hetner, serving people, helping others, whether that be in a community setting, or teaching students in a classroom setting, has been his lifelong passion.

“I had the opportunity to have multiple careers. I’ve been very, very fortunate,” he said. “You see the bad and the good. You see a lot of negatives, but certainly there are a lot of positives that I’ve been able to enjoy with all the different hats that I’ve worn.”

A lifelong member of the the fire company, Hetner, in his younger days, battled a number of fires.

“I liked the challenge of interior firefighting. At the time, I lived very close to the firehouse, and many times I was on the first truck to get out the door. I had the chance to be inside (the fire building) and attack the fire with the first line (hose),” Hetner said.

One blaze that came to mind was an intense inferno in which he and other firefighters were forced to beat a hasty retreat after spending several minutes in the building.

“We were taking a line up the stairwell, trying to knock the fire down with some additional firefighters. However, we heard some popping and we weren’t sure at first what it was,” Hetner recalled. “We determined it was ammunition going off. We decided it was time to exit the building. The building was well involved with fire from that point on. We had to fight the fire from the outside,” Hetner remembered.

The blaze was the afternoon Pine Street Mall fire in the city that destroyed several stores in January 1980.

“Unfortunately, the fire just took off. It clearly was getting too dangerous (to be inside),” Hetner said, adding that the popping ammunition was coming from Harder’s Sporting Goods, one of the businesses wiped out by the multiple-alarm fire.

As a police officer, not once has he ever had to fire his weapon.

He believes his experience as an educator helped him resolve situations before his gun had to be fired.

“I know of at least two circumstances where I was able to get people to put knives down (before anyone was hurt),” Hetner said.

One was a domestic situation where a man feared he was going to be killed by a female family member who was armed with a knife. The family member also was suicidal,” Hetner recalled. “It was a tense situation.”

The young woman was very distraught, and Hetner was successful in calming her and convincing her to put down the knife.

“It took about 15 to 20 minutes to resolve the situation. She put down the knife and gave it to me,” he said.

On another occasion, Hetner responded to a scene where a young woman was armed with a knife and was threatening to harm herself.

“I was successful in getting her to put the knife down before anyone was hurt”

In several ways, Hetner believes that his duel careers as a police officer and a teacher complimented one another.

“I’ve always felt that I was a better educator because of my work in law enforcement, and I have also felt that I was a better police officer because of my career in education,” he said. “My experience as an educator kind of gave me a little different perspective with what I did in law enforcement, and vice versa, primarily in how to relate to people and try to build relationships.”

Through the years, Hetner pulled from his experiences the lessons each career uniquely offered, and in the end, tried to use those lessons to become a better teacher, a better cop.

Whether it was dealing with a suicidal person, a tense domestic disturbance, or an out-of-control student, Hetner felt that the patience he developed from both lines of work helped him to relate to people better and more often than not, bring about a “positive outcome.”

Hetner said he will be eternally grateful to his wife, Kathy, and their three daughters, Nicole, Andrea and Melisssa for their endless, invaluable support through the years.

“My family has been my anchor,” he said.

Another bizarre story from Hetner’s memory archives involved an intoxicated man who fell asleep on the railroad tracks in the borough, was run over by a train, but walked away unharmed.

The horrified engineer operating the train, which consisted of two engines and 17 cars, saw the man laying on the tracks, but there was no way he could stop in time to avoid hitting him.

“As we all know, trains don’t stop quickly,” Hetner said. The engineer stopped the train as it was going over the man.

“When the engineer stepped off the train, he was fearful of what he was going to see, what he was going to find. He was thinking ‘I going to see this person missing limbs.'” Hetner recalled. “The individual woke up and crawled out from under the train. He was fine,” Hetner said, adding the unusual incident, which he responded to, occurred sometime in the 1980s or 1990s.

“The man was so intoxicated that he laid still between the rails and never woke up until the train stopped,” he said. “The engineer was in state of shock. He was dismayed. He anticipated he was going to walk to the back of the train and see a terrible tragedy. Fortunately, this time it ended well,” Hetner said.