Gail Reich retires after 36 years with OCSD

After retiring on Nov. 30, Gail Reich was honored last week with a plaque recognizing her 36 years of service to the Ozark County Sheriff’s Department. The plaque was presented by Sheriff Darrin Reed and former sheriff Steve Bartlett during a reception at Prosecuting Attorney John Garrabrant’s office, where Gail’s daughter Sheila Dilts works.
Gail first started working for Sheriff Herman Pierce on Jan. 1, 1982. The sheriff’s office and the jail were on the second floor of the Ozark County Courthouse then, and Gail started her sheriff’s office career as a dispatcher working the 4 p.m. to midnight shift.
“Back then, about the only equipment we had for the dispatcher was a car radio with a little microphone and some big speakers,” Gail recalled. There were only two deputies then, Paul Pirch and Loyd Hambelton, and they used their own cars and were paid mileage, she said. Ronnie Beavers worked as a part-time deputy.
Now the department employs seven full-time deputies plus additional part-time and reserve officers, jailers, bailiffs and transport officers.
After Gail went off duty at midnight, calls were routed to Pierce’s home phone until the morning dispatcher came in, she said. “We didn’t have near the volume of calls back then as we do now,” she said.
Although her first title was “dispatcher,” her job included several more duties, including doing the prisoners’ laundry in a washer and dryer in the courthouse basement. That was in the days before the courthouse elevator was installed.
Back then, the courthouse jail included a stove and refrigerator, “and the prisoners cooked their own meals,” Gail said. “Herman would go buy groceries – enough to fit in the little freezer. They would cook chicken, pork chops, hamburgers, beans and cornbread – whatever they wanted.”
For a while, Gail worked a second job, running her brothers’ (Gier and John Turner’s) pawn shop during the day and then going to work at the courthouse that evening.
Later, she switched to working days. “One morning, I came to work, and the prisoner was hollering, ‘Fire!’” she said.
Herman and the deputies were having breakfast across the street at Skeeter’s Cafe, she said, and sheriff’s office employees couldn’t open the jail door until the sheriff or a deputy got there. But that was before cell phones and hand-carried radios, and Skeeter’s didn’t have a phone, so there was no way to contact them.
“They were sitting there eating breakfast and saw the fire department going in and out of the courthouse, and they came running to see what was going on,” Gail said. The prisoner had set the fire, she said. No one was injured.
In her long career, Gail worked for six sheriffs: Herman Pierce, Max Vaughan, James Shaw, Steve Bartlett, Raymond Pace and Darrin Reed. Pierce served several terms; all of the others served two terms, except Shaw, who served one.
Shaw initiated full-time dispatcher coverage. Gail left the department for a while during Shaw’s tenure; she worked in a Theodosia income tax office and got a cosmetology license. But before she could put it to use in a beauty shop, Shaw hired her back, and she picked up where she left off.
 Gail grew up in Thornfield, one of Ancil and Alene Turner’s three daughters and two sons. Gail’s siblings are John and Gier Turner, and sisters Jamie Wyman and the late Sue Bennett. When Gail was 9, the family moved to Kansas City, where Gail graduated from high school and later drove a schoolbus.
In 1978, she and her three kids moved back to Thornfield, where she drove a schoolbus for the Thornfield School and also worked on a government program for a while before joining the sheriff’s department.
In 1997, the sheriff’s office and jail moved out of the courthouse and into the new building it now occupies on County Road 806 (formerly Highway 160/5 on the west side of Gainesville). In 2000, Gail became the administrative assistant, taking on the job of managing the department – making schedules, seeing that the building was maintained and the department’s vehicles were serviced as needed. For Gail, the job also including “cleaning up messes, searching women prisoners, working in drug court, doing the pay vouchers and just doing whatever had to be done,” she said.
Steve Bartlett said last week that Gail had been “a very loyal employee who did excellent work.”
Reed called Gail “my right arm.” He told the Times, “She knew every aspect of the office, from her job to dispatching and jailer. She has trained her replacement, Curtis Ledbetter.” On a Facebook post, Reed added, “What a valuable asset she has been for this office.”  
Ten years ago Gail moved into Gainesville and now is serving her third two-year term as mayor. She also serves as secretary at her home church, the Southern Baptist Church in Thornfield.
Her mother, siblings and children – twins Sheila Dilts (and husband Mark) and Shelly Roberts (and husband Gary) and son Shane Funk and wife Shelly Clayton – live nearby. Gail also has six grandchildren and two great-grandsons.
Thinking of the family that surrounds hers and reflecting on her long career at the sheriff’s office, Gail, 73, said last week, “I’ve been blessed to always have a job and to have made the friends I have and to go to work with them all those years. I’ve been blessed beyond belief.”