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During this transition, the name Short was written at the apex of the HPD organization chart from 1964 until the last day of 1973, making this stern-faced, stiff and starchy individual the longest-tenured chief in HPD history and certainly the leadership figure who significantly held in check the careers of the few women who wore the blue.

No Place for Women

One of his unwritten, yet well followed rules required female officers to serve in one of only two divisions, juvenile or the jail.

Female career paths in any other direction were rare. The need for matrons grew when the number of female prisoners in the city jail stair-stepped upward and continued on a steady increase, particularly in the drug-crazed years of the 1970s and 1980s.

The latter duty spawned the need for "matrons" when the number of female prisoners in the city jail stair-stepped upward and continued on a steady increase.

By 1971 HPD policewomen hadn't made much progress since the post-World War I days of their first role model, Eva Jane Bacher, the badge-toting "social worker" so dedicated to the job of helping wayward teenaged girls that she could find room and board with one phone call or a polite knock on a familiar door.

Oscar Holcombe, the newly elected mayor in 1921, used the lamest excuse ever existent in city civil service annals to rid the department of the dedicated Bacher. He dismissed her - as he would have any other female officer had there been any - "for the good of the service."

After Eva Jane Bacher, Houston policewomen came along pretty much by accident. The matrons who maintained the jail and occasionally helped with early-day "pat-downs" earned far less than male police officers.

So, too, did Houston's female school crossing guards of later years, which were under the direction of HPD and paid by the city. Not until 1954 when Jack Heard became chief was history able to record the names of the first four women to officially graduate from the Houston Police Academy.

They were promptly assigned to the Juvenile Division or to the jail. The discouragement didn't always dull the ambitions of a few women who had heeded the call to become Houston police officers.

One such strong-willed individual was Patricia Lykos, a female security officer of Greek extraction at the downtown Foley's and a political science major at the University of Houston.

Lunch before Autopsy

Two off-duty HPD officers working extra jobs at Foley's mentioned to Lykos that the police academy was picking up and seemed to be of a mind to hire a few female wannabe officers. The job paid more than Lykos was earning and she thought she could juggle a police schedule with UH night school. She applied.

She went to City Hall, passed all the tests with flying colors and was instructed to report to the academy in November the day after Veteran's Day 1963. Actually the class had already started. But when the academy officials couldn't fill it with men they admitted four women, including Lykos, a week later. 

"We women did everything the men did except climb the rope," Lykos recalled in an interview for a history of HPD.  The male cadets had a tendency to look down on their female counterparts, who didn't have the same physical strength.

Lykos resented this all-too-common human trait. One day the class was scheduled to view an autopsy for the first time at the Medical Examiner's Office in a real-life experience reminiscent of the opening scene of Quincy, M.E., a network television series (1976-1983) about a crime-fighting medical examiner in Los Angeles portrayed by actor Jack Klugman.

According to the academy's schedule, Lykos and the others would eat lunch before this rather unappetizing field trip.

Lunchtime arrived at the police cafeteria. Spaghetti was on the menu with bright red tomato sauce. A male cadet badgered the four women, who generally sat together. "That looks like guts," he said, quickly getting to be what the women thought was "repulsive or obnoxious about what we were going to see."

Later at the actual autopsy, the "Quincy" of that day pulled back the sheet and made the "X" incision. The obnoxious male cadet turned white as that very sheet, rocked back and forth and fell out in a dead faint. "This is justice in this world," Lykos said through an ironic sneer more than thirty years later.

She was ready even then to prove herself as worthy as any male. Upon graduation she was assigned to the Juvenile Division and worked with older, more seasoned women such as Lou Breedlove and Ma Elder, both of whom had become detectives during World War II when HPD employed females as matrons who eventually stepped into the higher rank of officer without benefit of academy training.

They got their training on the job, just like each one of their predecessors.  

Lykos remembers being conscientious and ambitious. She wanted to rise in the ranks and was not going to be satisfied staying at the officer rank her entire career. She learned to play the cards dealt to her, including her first police car - it wasn't a patrol car; policewomen were not allowed to patrol during this time period.

Female Scene Control

Used by plain clothes officers in Juvenile, it had a bullet hole in the windshield and a hole in the floor board. The front seat was busted and held in place with a brick. "You would hit a pothole," she remembered, "and the front seat gave way to the back seat." The air conditioning system was called "the 4-sixty" - four windows down at 60 miles per hour.

Juvenile had its moments. Working with a male officer named Delano, Lykos was in plain clothes and had been at the scene of a juvenile-related incident when the two officers realized they were near the so-called Pan Am Club, where a knife fight was in progress. Like any conscientious officers, they took the call and quickly arrived at a very bloody scene to take control.

Following the book, Delano and Lykos lined up the customers against the bar and ordered them to throw down their weapons. As Lykos stood by the door, one of the bar patrons sneaked up behind Delano, knife in hand.

Lykos pulled her pistol, cocked it and screamed, "Freeze, asshole!" No caps were busted and the man with the knife learned that Pat Lykos meant business.

Eventually she worked midnights to 8 in the morning and headed straight to day classes at UH at the end of her shift unless she had to work overtime or go to court, which earned her an extra $5 per appearance. Overtime or "comp time" was kept informally. Different divisions had different bookkeeping methods.

In her division, "If you were transferred, you lost all of it. Was that the case in every division throughout HPD? I think it was. We were always so short-handed we never even got to take our overtime. One of our fellow officers was pregnant and all of us (the women) were willing to donate our overtime to her.

"But they wouldn't let us, so we took turns working her shift. We would work our days off because she had more seniority. She had better days off. I had Tuesdays and Wednesday. Each shift took care of its own people, day, evening and night. We took turns for five or six weeks. I worked maybe three days over that period for her. Everybody did it."

Lykos got her degree from UH and started law school at South Texas College of Law in downtown Houston. She ran through the same schedule, working nights and going to school during the day - one of the very few South Texas law students allowed to do so.

No Female Sergeant

Her businesslike approach to policing got enough attention to earn her an invitation to a rare social occasion, a dinner party at the quasi-rural home of Chief Short and his more egregious wife, Hazel, on the south side of Houston. Lykos was becoming well known throughout the department for having designed the first computer program for cars designated as stolen for the Auto Theft Division sometime in late 1960s. It was quite a feat despite the fact that Herman Short hated technology and computers.

The officer was still young and very nervous at the dinner party, comforted only by Hazel Short, who took great pains to make everyone feel at ease. The party and the computer achievement ensured that the chief would know Officer Lykos' full name good and proper.

Sure enough, one work day soon after the party the name Pat Lykos stood out like a throbbing pain in Chief Short's side. She had finished No. 1 on the sergeant's exam when few women were ever encouraged or allowed to take this promotional test.

Short called her, by name, into his office on the third floor of 61 Riesner. Lykos remembers thinking that she would have no recourse - the man was in total control, for this was in the days before anti-discrimination decrees came down from Washington, DC.

"Pat," the chief said, looking straight into her eyes, "It's a shame you are a woman because you've got some potential. But I'm not going to have a female sergeant."

"Chief, why not?"

"Because a woman can't do the physical things on the streets that men can."

She told him she wanted to be a sergeant anyway. She pointed out to him that he had a male sergeant with a prosthetic leg.

"I can't skip over you," he said.

Lykos thought he could if he wanted to. She asserted - as far as any woman could assert anything to Herman Short - that she was on the peg and qualified to hold the rank.

"Are you insane?" the police chief said. "You'll be 80 years old before you get out of law school. I'll put you on days for a month, evenings for a month and nights for a month."

"Chief, I'll make you a good sergeant."

But Short wouldn't budge. "Unless you take your name off that list," he said, "I'm going to freeze the list and no one will get promoted."

The Frozen List

The list was good for one year and this was early in the year. A freeze meant all the officers below her No. 1 ranking would not get promoted.

"Take your name off the list and then take the detective exam," the man in the big chair said. "We need women detectives. If you get on the list, I'll promote you to detective."

Chief Short then gave the dark-haired officer with an unflinchingly determined look on her face a patronizing pat on the shoulder.

"You'll find that this is so much better for you," he said, and showed her the door.

Lykos knew Louie Welch, the Houston mayor at the time and a long-time political hero of hers she admired for developing a plan to put Houston's ambulance service under the city's purview instead of allowing every private ambulance around make emergency runs every night and day.

She could have gone to Welch and raised a stink. But she didn't want to play this likely trump card; it would have put the mayor in an awkward position. "And I wasn't about to do that to Mayor Welch," Lykos said years later. "I never wanted to use political influence to get a promotion like this. I knew I had no future in the Houston Police Department. 

Like a few before her and a few too many after her, Pat Lykos took her name off the sergeant's promotion list. She bore down on her law school studies and soon earned her degree from South Texas College of Law. A law practice took her to greater heights than finishing first on the sergeant's exam.

Harris County commissioners appointed her judge of the newly created County Court at Law No. 10 on Jan. 1, 1980. She had to stand for election and defeated five opponents and, while serving her four-year term, Governor Bill Clements appointed her judge of the 180^th Criminal District Court, where she won election in 1982, 1986 and 1990. She left the bench in 1994 and ran a gallant but unsuccessful race for Texas attorney general. 

After her fateful meeting with Short and the removal of her name from the top peg, the promotional flood gates opened for any number of new male sergeants, many of whom were close friends of Old Number One who never forgot what she did for them.

She took the detective's exam and once again finished high enough on the list to see the chief follow through with his promise to promote her.

"I got promoted," Lykos said years later, "and turned in my resignation. It was my way of sending a message to them. I loved being an officer. I knew I had no future and wanted to send a message.

"I got a number of letters and phone calls. People were shocked. I wasn't quite out of law school yet. I never talked to Herman Short after I resigned. Never again."

As we all know, in 2009 Lykos became the first female district attorney in Harris County.