After 33 years with the Santa Clara County Sheriff
’s Office, Capt. Earl Pennington is planning to enjoy his
retirement.
After 33 years with the Santa Clara County Sheriff’s Office, Capt. Earl Pennington is planning to enjoy his retirement.
“I’m planning to become a ski bum for a little while, and also do some traveling,” he said.
But, he said, there was not a time when he didn’t enjoy his work.
“I always said, when I get up in the morning and don’t look forward to work, when I don’t have fun everyday, then it’s time to retire,” he said. “Well, I was still having fun. Every day there’s something new, something I learn. I really enjoyed going to work everyday. But I just didn’t make sense economically not to retire.”
Five administrators retired from the Sheriff’s Office in December; there were 40 retirements during 2002.
A San Jose native who grew up in Cupertino, Pennington moved to Morgan Hill in 1973. He and his wife, Deborah, have two children: Michael, who works with the Santa Clara County Department of Corrections, and Karin, a certified athletic trainer who lives in San Leandro with her husband, Stephen, and is the mother of Pennington’s 18-month-old granddaughter Michelle.
During his career, Pennington became involved with many organizations, including the California Homicide Investigators Association, the California Robbery Investigators Association, the International Homicide Association and the FBI National Academy Association.
Pennington is a graduate of the FBI Academy. In 2000, he took an 11-week course designed for police administrators focusing on leadership and management.
With so many years of experience behind him, Pennington said the advice he would offer to rookie officers hasn’t changed over the years: “Do the best you can in every situation. If circumstances are such that something goes wrong, or doesn’t work out the way you thought, you will still be able to say to yourself that you did your best.”
It was a family friend that led him into a career in law enforcement after college.
“And I always new I was in the right place,” he said. “The first time I arrested someone, the feeling that I was protecting the public, that was important to me. I knew I was doing the right thing.”
Pennington said the only time he was intimidated by his job was the first time he ever had to work at the main jail.
“I remember that so clearly; I had never seen the inside of the jail before,” he said. “These were the hard core criminals, and there were probably 500 of them, with nine of us on duty each shift. It really opened my eyes.”
Pennington said he made an effort not to bring his work home to his family, in an emotional sense.
“It’s difficult, because probably 1 percent of what you see is good, and probably 99 percent is bad,” he said.
