By Mark Wineka
mark.wineka@salisburypost.com

Several readers have offered more information related to a “Yesterday” photo published in Monday’s edition on Page 2A.

The photograph, submitted by Carl Miller, was a group picture of the Salisbury Police Department. But a date for the photograph was not known, nor was Miller exactly sure where the photograph was taken.

Thanks to reader input, here’s more of what can be pieced together, and much of it focuses on the four women members of the Police Department at the front of the photograph.

They have been identified, from left to right, as Virginia Burleson, Katharyn Earnhardt Weaver, Polly Stone and Inez Bassinger.

Kathy Norris proved to be a good source because Weaver is her mother. She said her mother, Burleson, Stone and Jane Page were the original policewomen in the department. Bassinger replaced Page in September 1953.

“I have this same picture from the paper,” Norris said, “and my mother has written ‘1955’ at the top.”

So that’s a great clue, and it jibes with Norris’ noting that Salisbury Mayor John H. Isenhour and City Manager C.L. Linebeck are in the photo, too. Isenhour was mayor of Salisbury from 1953-55. Linebeck also was city manager in 1955.

David Shuler would have been police chief in this period.

Norris said there also was a photograph of the fire department in the newspaper clipping from 1955, and the caption for both said, “These formal shots of the Salisbury Fire Department and the Salisbury Police Department are the first made with the full personnel present in many years.”

Sara Potts confirmed the identification of the women in front. She said Officer James A. Spargo, longtime downtown officer, is standing right behind Weaver and Stone.

Potts’ father, B.P. Tutterow, is in the second row of male officers, and George Brady is in plainclothes on the first row, she said.

“In the very back, the tallest is Glenn Yost,” Potts added. Several other people identified Yost as the tall officer on the back row.

One reader identified the fourth man on the front row from the right as Van Koontz.

As for where the photograph was taken, it seems as though Potts has it right when she offered that the location is on the front steps of the Salisbury water plant, off West Kerr Street.

This would make sense, because in 1955, the Police Department was located on West Kerr Street (behind the Masonic Lodge on North Fulton Street) and would have been a short walk to these front steps into the water plant.

Contact Mark Wineka at 704-797-4263.