With cop leading the charge, Gold handcuffs Silver

Photo: Tom Hutchinson with wife Heather.

     By Bill Tarrant

Led by their leadoff man and local police officer, Black and Gold arrested the Silver team’s three-game win streak with a 21-13 clubbing last Sunday  in Culver City Senior Softball action.

     Thom Hutchinson belted two homers on a 4-for-5 day and recorded an astounding nine RBIs from the leadoff spot in a breakout game for him.

     “I’m kind of staying loose in the box,” he explained of his recent success. “Before, I was firmly connected to the ground, dug in. I wanted to go after different pitches, so now I’m keeping my body loose. It’s like golf; the looser you are, the faster you swing,” said Hutchinson, who joined the League about four years ago.

     Hutchinson became a police reserve officer at the West LA station about a decade ago – in his early 50s – after a winding career that began in marketing and led him to acting.

    He was born and raised in Latrobe, PA, a town in the scenic Laurel Highlands outside Pittsburgh, where a more famous black and gold team has its summer training camp – the Steelers at St. Vincent’s College.

     “It’s more protected now, but when I was growing up, you could be standing behind Terry Bradshaw or Lynn Swann in the grocery store checkout line,” he recalls.

     As a teenager in Latrobe, Hutchinson knew what he wanted to do in life.

     “I told my mother, someday I was gonna move to LA and be a police officer. Maybe because of all the TV crime shows I was watching back then.” Think “Columbo”, “Starsky and Hutch”, “The A Team”, “Mannix”, et al.

     That would come much later in life.

     He graduated from Gannon University in Erie with a marketing degree in 1985 when Pennsylvania was rapidly becoming part of the rust belt with high unemployment. He did a stint in advertising and PR before joining the Pennsylvania state police academy, which sends its graduates to small agencies across the state. No one was hiring there, either.

     So Thom hit the road, Route 66 , having dreamed also of going to the Southwest, and wound up in Tucson. He began acting in theater and commercials, including for Lucky Strike and Colt 45 beer. There, he met his wife Heather, a classically trained actor and singer. (She is now a CFO at an LA non-profit.)

     Soon after that, the couple moved to Los Angeles at the turn of the millennium, where both eventually gave up acting. Thom, now a property manager, fulfilled his dream of being a cop by getting state certified as a police officer and joining the police reserves.

     Reserve officers do just about anything other police officers do – except they’re volunteers who work a couple of days a week. He’ll get called in to help with big events, like a presidential visit, and go on patrol with his partner once or twice a week.

    Days after joining the West LA reserves, Hutchinson got his Baptism of Fire. He and his partner were called to a neighborhood where a woman was making a scene, before jumping into her car and leading them on a merry chase that ended at the entrance to a gated community. “She then turned around and tried to squeeze between us and a Corvette, damaging both cars,”  Hutchinson said. The woman was soon detained and sent to a psychiatric ward, apparently not for the first time.

     “That was a whole lotta paperwork,” Thom remarked.

     It’s probably easier to stay loose in the box on gameday Sunday, when your work week features events like that.