E.Y. affected generations I guess. There are generations that knew
E.Y.or still know E.Y. or knew E.Y. as sheriff. That is the E.Y. people
that you're going to, they expect you, they call me the little E.Y.
They'll come down and say, 'Well you're the next little E.Y.' or 'God
bless you.' To be sheriff of Madison county is just unbelievably great
sometimes because I can walk into Carl's up here, restaurant and some
little old lady will come over and just hug my neck and just say, 'God
bless you. You're doing a good job.' I don't know them from Adam, and
that'll make a glass eye cry. That's great. Then sometimes though I'll
have them down here in the lobby, and they'll get in a knock down drag
out and I'll be—I often tell the story that I feel like King Solomon and
the two harlots. That one rolls over and smothers the child, and they
come to me to decide who's going to get the live baby. He says, 'Well
cut the child in half.' In Madison County half the people would say,
'Saw it up,' and they'd start fighting over who got the head or the
feet. That wouldn't work in Madison County. You've got to even be
slicker than that. But the sheriff settles a lot of things. But at the
same time with E.Y., he never had to worry about luminol or blood
splatter or DNA. Those were a different generation of law
Page 37enforcement. He never had to deal with any of that, and I
have to have the ability to understand that. I have to have persons
capable of recognizing that and working with that and being able to work
with the State Bureau of Investigation Crime Lab and these attorneys. It
doesn't make any difference whether I keep up or not. The attorneys are.
If I'm trying, if your child, son or daughter, uncle or cousin has been
murdered, and I go over there, and I don't put on anything less than the
best case possible, they're never going to forget that. I owe them that
much. I am never going to allow myself or my personnel to go over and be
made a fool of in the courtroom. I don't know about E.Y. E.Y. lost some
cases. He won a lot of cases, but he began to change then from '86 to
'98 in Madison County depended on who you talked to was really the dark
ages in Madison County in law enforcement wise because they may not have
kept up. They may not really have cared toward the end, and that's
probably what got them beat. You've got to care. When you get down here
and you get to the point where—. If I ever get to the point where I
don't want to come to work, if I ever get to the point where I don't
care about my personnel and the people of this county, I won't be here
because if you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem.
I believe that. Maybe somebody young and all is what they need to carry
them through and somebody else will be here. There will be another
sheriff. Nobody stays forever. E.Y. tried. He stayed for thirty-two
years though. The only thing that caught him was his age. If he'd have
started, of course he probably did, he did start at my age. He was about
thirty-two when he was elected his first term and he was sheriff at
seventy. People will say, 'You're the next E.Y.' I don't want to be the
next E.Y. Ponder. Stresses of this job now are so great that nobody can
stand it more than twelve, sixteen years unless you
Page 38did—. It's an amazing amount of stress. There's more stress being
sheriff. There's ten times the amount of stress being sheriff as there
are being a deputy or an alcohol agent or SBI agent or anything. You've
got twenty-some thousand people in this county, and you're everybody's
sheriff, and they're all going to call and ask you.