By Carl Keith Greene / Staff Writer
When Laurel Sheriff Fred Yaden retires his badge at the end of the year, it will mark more than 60 years of law enforcement by the Yaden men.
But for 2010, he has chosen not to seek re-election for a second term as sheriff.
“I have spent 36 years in this kind of work, and I’m ready to try some new things,” he said.
Yaden, 63, grew up amid the law enforcement life.
Fred’s father, Les Yaden, started his law enforcement career in the Kentucky Highway Patrol in the late 1940s and became a Kentucky State Police trooper when the KSP was established. Les eventually became a KSP detective and after he retired was elected Laurel County Sheriff.
In that environment, it just seemed logical to get into law enforcement, Fred said.
He graduated from London High School in 1964, then from Cumberland College.
Fred went to work for the state department of corrections community services branch, essentially “probation and parole” work.
There, he spent 32 years before retiring as the local district supervisor.
Retirement didn’t really suit him.
“I was so used to getting up and going to work, I was lost. I didn’t know what to do,” Fred said.
Danny Evans, then Laurel and Knox counties’ commonwealth’s attorney, hired him as a commonwealth’s detective.
“It kept me off the streets and I was able to piddle around, help with the grand jury and run record checks,” he said.
After some thought he considered running for sheriff. To make the decision, he and his wife, Carolyn, flipped a coin.
“I said, ‘If it comes up heads, I run, and tails, I don’t run.’ Well, it came up tails, not run. I said, ‘But, what if.’ She said, ‘Well, let’s run then.’ And so, I ran, and the people of Laurel County were kind enough to elect me, as they had elected my dad 33 years before.”
Fred’s work in probation and parole taught him about how people think and what makes them do the things they get in trouble for.
And, he added, “Dealing with state government, there’s always change after change after change.”
He recalled an incident when he started his career as a parole officer.
It was his first arrest of a parole violator and he and his partner, Earl Nicholson, got word as to where the man was and they headed to pick him up.
“He was in Whitley County, out of the district without permission. Rules were stricter then,” Yaden said. “He was at a junk yard and we walked in and people started coming in all around us.”
He and Nicholson decided to get the man out of the crowd.
When they got him alone they told him what they were there to do. “He said, ‘Are you going to arrest me?’ and I said, ‘Yes, you ran off from parole. You’ve absconded and we have to.’ He broke and ran.”
When he ran, he accidentally struck Yaden across the nose, then ran across a field full of briars.
That was about the time double-knit polyester trousers had come into vogue.
Once Yaden had chased him through the briars he said, “My pants looked like a Chia plant.”
Fred’s pistol was stuck inside his waistband and as he ran, the weapon dropped down inside his trousers.
When he caught the man, he said, he was angry because he had been hit in the face. “I started to pop him one and he said, ‘Don’t hit me. I just got my brand new (denture) plate in’.”
Yaden agreed and asked Nicholson for the handcuffs, but Nicholson was poking around in the weeds. “I said, ‘What are you doing, Earl?’ He said, ‘I’m looking for he cuffs’.”
When the prisoner ran, Nicholson had lost them.
Things have changed quite a bit since Fred Yaden started his law enforcement career, but law remains in the family.
His daughter, Leah, has completed law school and works in a Lexington law firm.
