A retirement party was held at the SeaTac Police Department for Joe Peluso. He was sworn in Sept. 11, 1962, on his 25th birthday, and officially retires this Sept. 11, 50 years later, when he turns 75. He was surrounded by family, colleagues and friends.

"Today was the department and city's going away gathering for Joe honoring his 50 years as a reserve sheriff's deputy, including 10 years in investigations in my detective group, particularly with investigations around elderly abuse," said SeaTac Police Chief Jim Graddon, who has been with the sheriff's office for 34 years, and SeaTac's Chief for five and a half years.

Lawrence Graddon, Jim's father, was born and raised in Burien, and was with the Sheriff's office from 1950 to 1970.

"Joe volunteers at the LeMay Auto Museum, and is also on the Honor Guard at Tahoma National Cemetery in Kent," Graddon added with pride.

"They don't come any better than Joe," Graddon said. "He is a friend, co-worker, mentor, just a great man. This is unprecedented, to serve in any capacity for 50 years."

Graddon said Paluso will receive a key to the city of SeaTac at the Sept. 11 council meeting during a brief presentation.

"Joe will be presented with a key to the city for his 50 years of service to our citizens out here. Since a portion of his family is from here, McMicken Heights, before SeaTac was incorporated, and given that Joe is a native son here, that's the justification for the mayor approving the justification for Joe receiving the key to the city."

"We moved out here to McMicken Heights, in 1954 from Cicero, near Chicago, where Al Capone used to live," said Peluso, a resident at Brown's Point in Tacoma. "I graduated Highline High School in '55.

"These 50 years It went by pretty darn fast," he said. "I spent about 17 years in a patrol car. The rest of the time I worked as an undercover detective in vice and proact. I was on the Green River task force. Unfortunately, I knew some of the ladies who were missing and gone."

Peluso was a detective in the Sheriff's Dept. for King County in Burien in 1981. Ten years ago he served as detective in SeaTac.

"It's not as glamorous as it is on TV," Peluso said of being a detective. "A lot of people in this room today are my ex-partners. There is nothing like having a partner. You spend a lot of time in the car together. You tell each other the story of your life.

"People taking advantage of the elderly is probably the most underreported type of crime in the United States," he said. "In a case I'd been working on recently, one guy charged an 88 year-old man $5000 to trim eight trees. Catching these people taking advantage of what I consider the greatest generation I found to be very satisfying, and they appreciated the help. They are embarrassed. They need some TLC, someone to talk to."

Peluso has a collection of five classic cars. They include a '67 Corvette, a '78 Silver Anniversary Corvette, a '56 T-Bird with portholes, a 1930 Ford Model A "open wheel race car", and a Ford Deuce Coupe with a Chevy 350 engine "just like the yellow one in the movie 'American Graffiti,' but mine is periwinkle," he said.

Racing must be in Peluso's DNA. His daughter, Lisa, a Boeing employee, revealed, "I happen to know that when my father was a teenager in the '50's he'd drag race all over the place in his '39 Chevy. Illegal? Possibly so. Military Road was the main place to go."

Lisa recalled helping her father polish his brass in '60's and '70's as a young girl.

"I polished every single button with Brasso," she said. "That was our special time every Friday night. Then he'd splash Hai Karate on his face, then splash it on me and that was my signal to leave the room while he got his revolver out."

Lisa and her sister, Sally Mendel, a sergeant with the King County Sheriff's office for 29 years, now in Kent, recalled their father teaching them how to fingerprint others.

Said Lisa, "In second grade for show and tell we taught the entire class how to do finger prints."