For one cop, bald sends a beautiful message
Published: March 7, 2007
On one of those cold mornings when everyone is tired of winter and spirits are down, a morning when no one felt like coming to work, Bill Spalding walked into the Weld County Sheriff’s Office up on O Street and found five deputies standing in a row. At attention.
Spalding, a 30-year vet of the department, has seen it all. He’s tough, hard and sometimes exacting.
And when the tough sheriff’s supervisor saw the five fellow officers standing in line, heads shaved bald, tough ol’ Bill Spalding came very close to tears.
The shaved heads represent the support that Spalding and a fellow sheriff’s officer Jan LeMay are getting from the department. Spalding’s daughter and LeMay’s wife are both fighting a life-or death battle against cancer.
Lyndi St. Aubyn is married to a Greeley cop, and Spalding is her father. She has melanoma — skin cancer — which started with a bump on her head and is spreading. For the next month or so, she’ll go to a Denver cancer center, where they’ll put her under and pump chemotherapy drugs into her 24 hours a day for five days.
She’s been through one treatment and is back for another. Lyndi and her family hope it works.
Georgia LeMay has colo-rectal cancer, fourth stage, which means the doctors have given her only a few years to live. Her husband, Jan LeMay, is a criminologist for the sheriff’s office; Georgia has been the evidence technician for the Greeley police for 25 years.
To some, shaving your head can be a silly thing. To the cops and deputies here, it was deadly serious. Both Lyndi and Georgia will lose their hair in chemo, and the shaved heads of other police officers shows they aren’t alone.
The night before Spalding was surprised by the bald deputies, a group of them met at the Fort Lupton Substation and shaved their heads.
Bob Dye explained: “Someone decided that some action might show out love and support more than words.” About a dozen deputies shaved their heads that night. “We all wish there was more we could do,” Dye said.
For Jan and Georgia LeMay, the deputies also knew they were big Colorado Avalanche fans, and so, one day last month, a limo picked up the couple at their home, drove to the hockey game for seats on the glass, got them an autographed jersey and put them up for the night in a Denver hotel.
It meant a lot to the couple. “We were able to forget about cancer for awhile,” Georgia said. Added her husband: “It’s an honor to work with these people … they are family to us.”
Other police officers around the county, in Greeley, Kersey and other towns, also shaved their heads to show support. Women officers donated lengths of their hair to “Locks of Love,” an organization that provide wigs for women who have lost their hair to cancer treatments.
Bill Spalding still thinks back about that cold morning when he found the bald deputies standing at attention, waiting for him. “I had to laugh,” he says now. “If I stopped laughing, I would have cried.”
Staff writer Mike Peters’ column about Weld County people appears Mondays in the Tribune. His humor column, the Gnarly Trombone, appears Saturdays.
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