The first step along her path was taken when Getz-Wright was a senior at South High School and, as president of the Key Club, was required to attend a Kiwanis Club meeting in St. John’s Evangelical Lutheran Church.
Knowing she was already accepted to a park ranger program at Hocking Technical College, her club adviser, Mike Crumley, nonetheless encouraged her to talk to the speaker that day, then Springfield Post Commander Lt. (later Col.) Paul McClellan.
“My mother (Shirley Campbell) about had a heart attack,” Getz-Wright said.
But after talking with McClellan, her mother and family were nothing but supportive in helping her get into the program. Her stepfather taught her how to change a tire, a younger brother agreed to serve as the 90-pound weight she was required to carry up an incline, and on Dec. 15, 1986, she started on the job at the Springfield Highway Patrol Post that was just as helpful.
“At 18 and coming into this job, I had a lot of big brothers,” she said. “Those guys were always encouraging. They kind of raised me.”
To help bolster her fitness, “they would take me out running,” she said, even when she hated it.
The day one of those big brothers left her a distance from the old post on U.S. 40 in a snowstorm so strong that she ran backwards to the post, “my ‘moms,’” the post dispatchers, let that big brother know he’d gone too far.
She considers her three years in dispatching an important part of the training and one that prepared her for the Patrol’s culture and for the six months she spent at the Patrol Academy once she reached 21.
Graduating “was probably the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” she said.
The mental and physical strain at times so exhausted her that she’d arrive home and tell her mother: “I’m not doing this.”
So was getting used to the attention to detail the Patrol requires.
She’ll never forget the morning she wrongly inserted the tape for “Taps” into the tape machine for the daily raising of the flag. After the first note sounded, instructor Fred Goldstein “was on a sprint to me. By the time he was done chastising me, just know I would never make that mistake again.”
“Graduation day was ‘wow,’” she said. “They gave us our uniforms: Stetsons and grays and blacks. That’s all you wanted was that Stetson.”
Then came three months spent with Frank Faulder, her trainer for the standard three months at the Bellefontaine Post.
“He was an incredible coach,” Getz-Wright said.
When she made a mistake, “he’d look at me and say ‘you little pot licker’ or ‘you little stinker,’ ” she recalled, all in a teaching, encouraging spirit.
It took “about two years” of cycling through the road patrol job until she’d mastered most of the procedures, rules and legal questions. A year later, in 1992, she was assigned to what then was called the Traffic and Drug Interdiction Team.
“It was my favorite part of my career,” she said, largely because of the two dogs she worked with: German shepherds Ilko, her drug dog (whose name is a rearrangement of the word kilo) and Ali, a sweet tempered animal who sniffed out drugs and bombs.
It felt like “going to work with your best friend every day,” she said – a friend who is smart, focused.
Like the other people she worked with on those details, the friendships with the dogs were all the stronger because of the high pressure experiences she had with them.
“You don’t want to miss drugs,” the trooper said, “but you can’t miss a bomb” because “someone could lose their life that I work with every day.”
In 1999, she had her first stint with the Office of Investigations, which handles all crimes on state-owned or leased property, protection of visiting dignitaries and sometimes the governor. Then in 2004, she was assigned to work with the Joint Terrorism Task Force in Dayton, “which I can’t tell you anything about.”
In 2007, she returned to work as an explosives canine handler, in 2011 returned to investigations, and then last October became involved in the fight against human trafficking.
Members of that unit “are very passionate about what they do, because the objective, in the end is to get these girls and boys out of the lives that they’re living. And it’s so many agencies and people coming together to help these children … and young adults.”
“They could take up to a year, two years, just to take a case to the prosecutor,” she said.
Still, she enjoyed the experience, “because my brain was working again. And that’s why I think my resume looks like it does. What I chose made my career interesting. I’ve gotten to experience so much.”
Sgt. David Bever, who was briefly Getz-Wright’s sergeant in a stint at the Springfield Post and later worked with her in drug interdiction and bomb detection, suggested two other reasons Getz-Wright has been able to sustain such a lengthy career.
One is her day-to-day commitment.
“We would have training exercises (with the dogs), and she would never hesitate to put on the bite suit, put on the (bite) sleeve. Whatever was required, she would step up and do the job. I couldn’t have asked for a better partner.”
A second was the source of her motivation, he said, something that was made clear to her when he joined her in the bomb dog work, entered the office at the Ohio Statehouse and saw Getz-Wright’s display of Honor Flight photos.
He soon learned that she not only accompanied World War II Veterans to Washington on exhausting day-long visits to the World War II Memorial, but paid for all her own air fare, as escorts were required to do.
“I thought that really spoke highly of her character that she would do this,” a reason he will emcee her retirement ceremony.
Getz-Wright’s supervisor, Lt. Chad Miller, agreed. Not only is she a “very good team player and someone you look forward to working with,” he said, “I think she enjoys serving and helping people.”
As her career comes to a close, Getz-Wright is more circumspect about the dangers of the job.
At 21, “you’re invincible,” she said. “No matter what you come up against, you’re always very confident it’s going to be OK. I knew I could do my job. I just knew it at the time.”
“Now, looking back, because I’ve seen troopers and law enforcement officers all over the country (fall),” that sense of invincibility has faded. The death last year of one of her academy classmates on an interstate near Cleveland was a reminder of the constant danger.
“Knock on wood,” she said during an interview last week, “I still have five working days (left).”
Although Getz-Wright isn’t sure what she’ll be doing in her retirement, she knows it will involve animals.
One reason is the great experience she had working with Ilko and Ali, she said. Another is the way in which animals differ from some of the people she pursued during her careers.
“Animals,” she said, “always love to see you coming.”
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