Joe Nixon knew it was time to retire from his nearly four-decade career as a police officer in Arnold, but knowing didn’t make doing it any easier.

“The night I left, I cried the whole way home,” he said. “I knew I wasn’t coming back.”

Nixon, 60, of Lower Burrell worked as a police officer in Arnold for more than 38 years. He retired in June.

Aches, pains and cellphones told him it was time.

“Your body starts telling you you’re not a kid anymore. You work doubles, and the next day you’re more worn out than you used to be,” he said. “And you start finding technology harder and harder to keep up with.”

Nixon started in Arnold in late February 1984. He had been there just over six years when current police Chief Eric Doutt started in June 1990. They were promoted to the rank of sergeant at the same time in 1995.

“I aspire to be a Joe Nixon when I come to work,” Doutt said. “He mentored me.”

Doutt described Nixon as hardworking, thorough, fair and consistent. He was the department’s longest tenured and most experienced officer.

“He was the epitome of what a policeman should be,” Doutt said. “If his mother was illegally parked, I think he would have written her a parking ticket. That’s the way Joe was, by the book.

“In my eyes, he’s the standard of what I want here. Losing him is going to be tough to overcome.”

Arnold Mayor Joe Bia said Nixon was a staple of the city’s police department.

“I really hated to see him go,” Bia said. “He embodied the officer that has experienced it all and then some. He will be greatly missed.”

A 1979 Burrell High School graduate, Nixon said his parents urged him to go to college. He attended Allegheny College in Meadville for a year before hurting his knee playing football. He transferred to the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg, graduating in 1983 with a double major in administration of justice and political science.

Nixon was looking for a job for a year before getting hired in Arnold. He wanted to get into the state police but knew that could mean getting transferred across the state.

“I like to stay close to home,” he said. “I didn’t want to move away.”

Nixon lived in Arnold from 1984 until 2003 and is a life member of the Arnold No. 1 fire department, in which he was active from 1986 to about 2002.

Growing up, television shows such as “Kojak” sparked Nixon’s interest in police work. While he enjoyed political science classes in college, he ended up disliking politics — a reason he never wanted to be chief.

Helping people is what Nixon liked the most about his job.

“I’m seeing policing losing that community orientation, that public service part of policing where a lady needs to cross a street or she needs her furnace lit or there’s an animal in her house or she lost her dog, simple calls like that,” he said. “I’m somebody that’s for the underdog and people trying to get by. I see policing moving away from that. I really don’t like it.”

Among the proudest moments of Nixon’s long career is his role in arresting a suspected serial rapist of elderly women in 1992. Nixon and Officer Thomas Cimino found the man hiding in a nearby yard after he went into a 62-year-old woman’s bedroom, tried to molest her and injured an 84-year-old woman as he fled.

The man later plead guilty to burglary, indecent assault and simple assault and was sentenced to four to eight years in prison.

“I was glad he was caught,” Nixon said.

The worst was in October 2011 when his friend, Lower Burrell Officer Derek Kotecki, was ambushed and killed.

“That one still hurts a lot,” Nixon said.

He barely knew New Kensington Officer Brian Shaw, but when Shaw was killed on duty in November 2017, “it brought all that pain back,” he said.

Nixon and his wife, Alexis, will celebrate their 28th anniversary in September. He said his job was harder on her than him.

“She had to spend a lot of time by herself,” he said. “I worked a lot of midnights. I worked a lot of 4 to 12s. A lot of times I left her at dinners when I had to rush back to work. I missed a lot of family functions.”

Nixon said his wife knew how much he liked his work but, “She’s glad I’m done,” he said.

Although retired, Nixon isn’t done working. Days after leaving Arnold, he started working full time as a police officer at UPMC St. Margaret hospital near Aspinwall.

“I couldn’t sit at home,” he said. “I got to be doing something.”

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