Leonard Baldy
police officer (1927-1960)
Leonard Frank Baldy (February 15, 1927 – May 2, 1960) was a Chicago Police Department officer who became the city's first helicopter traffic reporter. His sometimes comical look at Chicago's traffic problems made him a household name. His peers gave him the nickname "Flying Officer Leonard Baldy". He died in a fiery crash on May 2, 1960, when his helicopter threw a rotor blade and crashed in a railroad yard near Milwaukee Avenue and Hubbard Street.
A native of Chicago, he graduated from Lane Technical College Preparatory High School (also known as Lane Tech) and was a World War II veteran who served as a Signalman on USS Markab. Baldy gained early recognition in his police career for being the first patrolman in the United States to experiment with and use the, now famous, radar gun to detect the speed of vehicles (April 1954). He also wrote the first ticket in the world for speeding using a radar device. As a patrolman in the mid-'50s he appeared in a television commercial directing traffic.
He became the most visible department spokesperson when he provided lectures and taught classes to civic groups, organizations, and educational institutions on the topic of traffic safety. He provided the first helicopter traffic report over WGN radio in November 1958.
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This entry incorporates text from “Leonard Baldy” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.