Retired policeman turns focus to refining his green thumb

DARLINGTON — Redmon Kelley is a retired Darlington policeman who long ago turned in his gun to refine his green thumb.

Kelley’s latest endeavor is speckled butter beans. He started growing them on a chain-link fence in April. Now they have snaked some 175 feet around the fence and started climbing 30 feet up a metal rod into the wild blue yonder.

“The Lord has blessed me,” Kelley, 71, said admiring the bumper crop of butter beans amidst the soothing chirp of crickets and a rooster crowing hallelujahs in a neighbor’s yard. “I pick the beans about twice a week. I been picking mostly off the fence. My wife, Frankie, has put up right at three quarts.”

Kelley has planted a garden for years. He even grew two 21-pound striped Cushaw pumpkin squash last year.

“Both of them was on the same vine,” he said. “It was all I could do to just hold them.”

Kelley said the corpulent squash make good pies.

“I taken them and cut them up when they cure out,” he said. “Frankie boils them and makes pies. They’re better than potato pies.”

Before Kelley became a gardner, he was a police officer for 25 years. He joined the Darlington Police Department on July 3, 1963.

“I always wanted to be a policeman,” he said as a boxer named Chopper barked for attention. “I got out of the Navy, spent a year in Florida, and then joined the department. Mayor Jay Ward and members of city council gave me the job. All of them done passed.”

But Kelley only worked for 3½ years before he went to Sonoco Products Co. in Hartsville. Although he thought the grass was greener at Sonoco, it wasn’t. He decided to come back.

The “boss man” at Sonoco, however, liked his work ethic. He talked Kelley into returning for 3½ more years.

But it wasn’t to be. Kelley missed law enforcement too much.

“I had to beg to get my job back in 1971,” he said. “The late N.G. Dudley was the chief then. I told him I wouldn’t never leave again. I worked the third time until I retired.”

Kelley said he enjoyed helping people while he was a police officer. He especially enjoyed helping younger people, although they could get a “little aggravating” at times.

But Kelley had a solution.

“I told them I would tell their daddy or momma on them if they got too bad,” he said.

And as far as the older set was concerned, Kelley was patient up to a limit. He would even take some home if they had too much to drink.

But one night at a Sav-Way station, he told a man to go home or else he was going to have to arrest him. The man had consumed entirely too much alcohol.

“I told him three times to go home,” Kelley recalled. “Finally, I told him to come with me because he was under arrest. His brother, who was with him, said I was going to have to arrest him, too. I took both of them to jail and locked them up.”

The brother who volunteered for the clink later told Kelley that he would never do that again because he was charged with interfering with a police officer. It cost him more to get out of jail than it did his brother.

“I enjoyed being a policeman and made a lot of friends over the years,” Kelley said. “I earned a lot of respect from young and old alike.”

Other than gardening, Kelley is an avid angler. He’s also the Sunday school superintendent at the Church of God along the North Governor Williams Highway.