Call it a cop cliché, but John Tobin, a retired Norristown police officer, has a thing for doughnuts.
That’s how his wife Beth Anne became the first to know that he was going to be the grand marshal of the 23rd annual St. Patrick’s Day parade in Conshohocken on March 12.
“As one of the guys who started this whole thing, I had my way of doing things,” says Tobin, who is credited as the member of Ancient Order of Hibernians Division 1 who talked Norristown Mayor Jack Salomone into allowing the AOH to sponsor the parade, which then marched down Main Street in the county seat. “Our way was, you called up the person and talked to them and made sure they were happy with being selected, and you made sure they were going to be there.”
That wasn’t the protocol this time. Committee chair Jim Gallagher, also a former police officer, knew about Tobin’s habit of dropping by Dunkin’ Donuts every morning. “Jimmy sent my brother-in-law out to make sure I was there,” Tobin recalls. “Then they called my wife and told her. They tricked me.”
Tobin didn’t find out himself until they announced his name a couple of days later, at the division’s annual Appreciation Night in December. “I was getting set to congratulate whoever the winner was … and then they called my name.”
If anyone knows how things are usually done around AOH Division 1, it would be lifelong Norristown resident John F. Tobin. He’s been around the AOH for a long time, much honored locally, as well as at the county and state level.
The division began in 1989. One day he was having a conversation with another Norristown cop, early member Jay Murray, and the subject came up. “I think they had had their first meeting, and I went to the second or third meeting and joined. I was the 33rd member. Jim Cahill was the president then, and we hit it off really well, and I became vice president a year or so later.”
Like most new organizations, AOH Division 1 had humble beginnings, hosting its meetings in a local firehouse, social clubs and the upstairs of a bar.
The division quickly outgrew its makeshift meeting places. “Our membership grew so rapidly, we started what we called a ‘Founders Club’ and I believe it was 60 members who each put up a thousand dollars to get started.” That’s how the division came to own and reside in its headquarters on Jefferson Street in Swedesburg.
To belong to the AOH, of course, you have to have some Irish heritage. This Tobin has, courtesy of his maternal grandmother Elizabeth Mullin Allebach, whose mother was a Moran and whose grandmother on her father’s side was Cecilia Farrell—who migrated from Mayo to New York in 1853, and came to reside in Philadelphia.
That kind of pedigree could be ample motivation for a lot of guys to join the Ancient Order of Hibernians, but more powerful was a different kind of “family” connection—the friends in law enforcement that Tobin will only ever think of as brothers. Of the first 15 or 20 members, at least half a dozen were fellow law enforcement officers.
Tobin knew them well. He joined the Norristown force in 1973, was injured in an accident shortly before his retirement in 1993, and then went on to become a private investigator, working for defense attorneys.
“Most of the defense attorneys I worked for were former assistant district attorneys,” Tobin recalls. “We had worked together putting people in jail, and then we worked together representing people. I did six homicide cases.”
In his post-force role, he enjoyed a good deal of success. Mixed feelings? A bit, he says. But, he adds, “You have a job to do. Just like a policeman, you do it to the best of your ability, you answer questions honestly, and you take the information that’s given to you. I did the same doing defense work. I had much more success locking people up than I did getting them out, though. Every one of my homicide cases got life.”
Tobin also did a lot to keep kids on the straight and narrow. He played a large role in forming boys and girls basketball, baseball and softball teams for the Police Athletic League.
Tobin takes obvious pride in having done a good job in his chosen career. But he fairly beams when he talks about his family. He has a son, Jeffrey, an Air Force master sergeant, whose wife Claudia is also a master sergeant. Jeffrey has done several overseas tours, including Iraq, Afghanistan, Qatar and Kuwait. His daughter Jennifer works in business. She and her husband Geoffrey have 4-1/2-year-old twins. “They’re a handful,” he laughs.
When parade day rolls around, his son and daughter-in-law won’t be able to make it. They’re stationed in Germany. But he expects the rest of the brood to accompany him down Fayette Street. He hopes to give his grandsons a day to remember.
“A lot of people have no idea what an honor it is if you’re not affiliated with the AOH,” Tobin says, “but I know a lot of people, people I knew when the parade was in Norristown, and people who have been going to the parade in Conshohocken. They’ll be along the sidelines. I’ll be very proud. Hopefully my grandsons will remember it, and how proud I was.”
