By Clint Confehr

Senior Staff Writer

CHAPEL HILL - After 30 years of service as police chief, Jackie King is retiring.

"I'm in good health and while I am, I want to do stuff, so I'm going to do it," King said.

He'll have more time with grandchildren, and spend two weeks in the mountains at a rustic cabin owned by a friend. His wife, Kay, wants to see a Broadway show, so they're going to New York this summer. His last day as chief is April 24.

King succeeded Chapel Hill Police Chief Bryant Horton after serving as a sheriff's deputy and Lewisburg police officer.

"They put me on night shift and I didn't like that," he said of when Ray Green was Lewisburg's police chief. Danny McDaniels was sheriff when King was a deputy.

Being police chief of Chapel Hill is like being sheriff in the fictional TV town of Mayberry.

"If I had a dollar for every time I opened somebody's car door, I could pay for my trip to New York," he said.

At 4 a.m., one Christmas, King unlocked a truck because a man, who wanted to go hunting, had keys locked in the truck. King responded in his pajamas.

He's never had to investigate a murder. His "biggest headache" was a modern-day peeping Tom case.

"A man set up a camera to take pictures of women taking their clothes off to get in a tanning bed," King said. "I had to call in a lot of people to look at the video tape recordings of themselves while we were there."

He was as uncomfortable as the victims. Most were and probably still are his friends.

The perpetrator "got a little bit of jail time," King said. "He's out. I don't know where he's living at."

When the Saturn plant opened in Spring Hill, he said, "People from Flint, Mich., moved here. A boy got into trouble so I brought him down here to the police station and made the kid call his parents to have them come here.

"The father said, 'They don't do that in Flint,' and I told him, 'Well, you're not in Flint. You're in Chapel Hill.'"

Parental application of corporal punishment started in the fire hall driveway.

"Once they get past the bay doors, the kids are fair game," King said.

His love for people is evident in every story he tells of life as the town's police chief.

"I'm the type who does community policing," he says. "In Chapel Hill 70- to 75 percent of the people are retired or elderly and so you take care of your hometown people. They'll call my house before they'll call the police department.

"What makes my job easier is that the old people, when they see something that doesn't look right, they'll call."

Calls are about snow, bad weather, or just hard times.

"They want to see somebody and talk to them," he said. "What ever they needed, we found ways to get that done for them."