Growing up outside Boston, Robert McFetridge would listen to the police scanner his father, a Millis selectman, had at home. The traffic on the scanner sparked an interest in becoming a dispatcher when the family moved to Maine.

McFetridge served as a dispatcher for the town of Pittsfield in 1978, at the age of 16. By 1980, he was a summer patrol officer on the beat in Pittsfield’s Manson Park, where under-age drinking was occurring.

“My job was to walk around and police the park and catch the kids drinking, which was kind of funny because I was probably younger than most of them.”

Those early experiences in law enforcement took a sudden, terrible turn in an incident that began when McFetridge tried to prevent a suicidal man from driving to a bridge.

“I’m 18 and I don’t have a lot of experience, and back then even full-time officers didn’t get a lot of training on how to deal with people who were having a crisis. So I talked to him as best I could.”

McFetridge called for other officers, and got behind the car the man was driving in an attempt to stop the man from acting on his suicidal statements.

“I figured, he’s not going to run me over. Well, that wasn’t a smart move.”

The car pushed into McFetridge, the first of numerous brushes with vehicles he would have over his career. But the worst was still to come from the incident. A long chase ensued, ending when the car the man was driving ran into a roadblock authorities set up in Newport. Maine State Trooper Thomas Merry died after pushing another officer out of harm’s way, McFetridge said.

Merry’s death was extremely hard for the teen-aged McFetridge to deal with, but it shaped his view of the importance of training, and his approach to situations from then on.

McFetridge, 53, retired Nov. 5, 2014 as a detective for the Lincoln County Sheriff’s Office. He started there 11 years earlier as a patrol deputy. It was the last of several law enforcement and firefighter positions he held in Wiscasset, Boothbay Harbor and elsewhere in Maine.

Some of his most satisfying work was in Stonington, where he felt he made a difference in the community; and in drug awareness programs he taught at schools in Wiscasset, Nobleboro and Waldoboro.

As a sheriff’s detective, McFetridge spent a great deal of time investigating alleged elder abuse cases. Those are stressful to work on for a number of reasons, he said.

The victims may have some level of dementia, or be embarrassed or otherwise reluctant to speak about what has occurred; and even a case that results in a conviction doesn’t necessarily mean an end to the victim’s financial and other problems that resulted from the abuse, he said.

“It can get you down, because even when you have a win, you really don’t.”

The good part was knowing that the victims were no longer in those abusive situations, he said.

Volunteering in efforts against elder abuse or domestic violence is something McFetridge said he may consider.

“But that’s down the road. I’ve been on fast-forward for so long, right now I’m just trying to learn how to relax.”

He has no bucket list; however, two months into retirement, he has been chipping away at a large “honey-do” list. And he still listens to police scanners. It’s a hobby, although he’s finding it’s not always easy to hear the calls and not be responding to them now.

He doesn’t miss doing traffic control around accident scenes in the cold. But he knows all the officers at the departments he listens to. He helped train many of those officers.

McFetridge has neither encouraged nor discouraged his and wife Juanita McFetridge’s three daughters from going into public safety.

The couple’s eldest, Amanda McFetridge, a dispatcher at Bangor Police Department, is considering business management; second daughter Brandie McFetridge is an emergency medical technician at Boothbay Region Ambulance Service and has begun studying to be a nurse; and youngest daughter Mikayla McFetridge, studying marine sciences at University of Maine, has expressed an interest in the Warden’s Service, her father said.

All three are well-informed of the hazards of a career in public safety, including ones their father experienced on-duty.

“I’ve never tried to hide any of that stuff,” he said. “I’ve been struck and dragged by vehicles several times in my career.”

The sheriff’s department decorated McFetridge with a purple star after a 2004 incident on Westport Island, when an injured man he was trying to help shut McFetridge’s arm in a vehicle’s door and dragged him.

Whether or not any of his daughters choose a long career in public safety as he did, he could not be any prouder of them, he said. “As far as children go, I don’t think there’s a parent that could ask for any better.”