Sue Podzycki. (Courtesy photo.)

Sue Podzycki has listened to police and fire radios for nearly as long as she can remember. Her father, Jack Burdick, was Harvard’s fire chief for 27 years, and for many of those years the Burdick house on Depot Road was the town’s emergency command center. Sue’s mother, Dora, had three scanners in the house so she wouldn’t miss hearing a call, and from 1952 to 1978 she was one of several women who handled first fire, and then police and ambulance calls, too, from their homes. Sue learned dispatching by osmosis and often filled in for her mother when Jack and Dora went away on vacation. She was one of four full-time dispatchers hired in 1978 when the command center moved into Town Hall, so she’s been at it for 30 years or more, outlasting 10 or 11 police chiefs.

“I stopped counting at nine,” she says.

But at the end of July, she’s retiring from the job, and she clearly relishes the prospect.

Sue grew up in Harvard when it was a much smaller, close-knit community. Emergency services were a lot more informal then than they are now: the police chief’s house was police headquarters, and the chief, for many years, was pretty much it as far as law enforcement went. Firefighting operations were similarly informal, and, of course, entirely volunteer. Even when the dispatch center moved to the old police station in the back of Town Hall, the place had a family feel. Jack was the fire chief, Dora was head dispatcher, working the 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. shift, and then Sue took over from 3 to 11 p.m. The night dispatcher worked from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m., but there were no police officers on duty after 3 a.m. If they were needed, officers would respond from their homes; back then, everybody—policemen and firemen alike—lived in town.

So that’s one big change Sue has seen over the years. Now, only two Harvard police officers live in town; the chief, two sergeants, and four of the six officers make their homes elsewhere. Sue concedes that something is lost when a town’s law enforcement personnel are no longer neighbors, with kids in the schools, but on balance she thinks it’s a good thing. It used to be awkward when someone was arrested and brought into the station and she knew them, or their parents, or their children, for that matter.

“And it’s hard on the kids,” she says, having their father (or mother) be a local cop.

But the embarrassment of encountering familiar faces in police custody is no longer a factor for Sue, not since the new Public Safety Building opened eight years ago. In the old station, arrestees were typically brought in past the dispatcher and chained to a bench in the next room for lack of a more secure place to put them. Now, she says, “we don’t even see them” except on video monitors in the downstairs cell area.

Far and away the biggest change in dispatching over the years has been the advent of technology. Years ago, dispatchers worked with separate phones and radios for fire, police, and ambulance calls, but now it’s all computerized. And a dispatcher answering a call can tell where that call is coming from, even when it’s made from a cell phone. Sue remembers a tense time years ago when a teenage girl babysitting on Bolton Road had a medical emergency and called the station for help. The girl had no idea what the address was, and Sue had to ask her to look for some mail so she’d know where to send the cruiser and ambulance. That kind of thing wouldn’t happen today, and neither would calls that used to flood the station on a snowy morning asking if the schools were closed; now the schools have their own early-alert system. People used to call, too, when the power was out to ask why the town had shut their water off. Now, it seems, they either know that their well pumps are electric, or it doesn’t occur to them that the dispatch center would know the answer.

A dispatcher’s job, like a police officer’s or a firefighter’s, consists of long periods of routine activity broken by sudden bursts of adrenalin-fueled, often chaotic effort that would shake anyone’s nerves. When bad things happen, they happen quickly, and sometimes violently, and although Harvard is a quiet town, bad things happen here, too. Most motor vehicle accidents result in minor injuries—if there are any injuries at all—but sometimes an accident, or fire, requires police, fire, and ambulance response, backup from other towns, and occasionally a Life Flight helicopter from Worcester or Boston. Sue recalls one particularly gruesome accident on Route 2 when a tractor trailer jackknifed and hit a car carrying four people. A woman was decapitated and others were killed, too. It’s the dispatcher on duty—in this case Sue—who coordinates the response to such tragedies, knowing all the while that lives depend on it. The same thing is true in any medical emergency, or fire call, or police call for domestic violence, or report of a prowler or housebreak, or even a seemingly routine motor vehicle stop. All of these calls have the potential for sudden tragedy, and the dispatcher has to be alert to that possibility and ready with a calm and efficient response. It’s a hard job, and there’s no glamour in it, and little financial reward.

After working the day shift for many years, and then the evening shift, Sue has been a night dispatcher for nearly a decade. It was her choice, she says, because she was finding the day work too stressful. Dora had died in 1985 and Jack was getting older and needed help during the day, so night work allowed Sue to be there when he needed her. The job itself is much busier late at night than it used to be—more OUI arrests, more accidents, and more medical emergencies. Although there are fewer calls on the night shift than there are during the day, the calls tend to be more serious, Sue says. And when things are quiet, she fills the time entering citations and accident reports into the computer. Is it hard to sleep during the day when she’s off duty? Not at all. By her own account she collapses in the late afternoon, after a busy day taking care of her nearly 2-year-old granddaughter Jackalyn—a blue-eyed cutie named after Sue’s dad—while her daughter Holly is at work.

And that’s what Sue plans to do after her dispatching days are over, too. She’s going camping this summer with Jackalyn and her parents, and is otherwise preparing to just relax a little. Sue’s four children have settled fairly close by: sons John and Scott Nogler both live in Leominster and are both firefighters, John in Lexington and Scott here in Harvard, where he serves as deputy chief. Daughter Heidi lives in New Hampshire, and Holly is in Shirley. There are also 11 grandchildren and two great-grandchildren in the picture, and they all try to get together a couple of times a year, Sue says.

Asked if there are plans for a big retirement party this summer, Sue just laughs.

“My dad was so proud of all the stuff they had for him when he retired,” she says, “but I don’t really care about that.”

She would appreciate recognition from her peers, though, and a feeling that townspeople appreciate the work that she and the other dispatchers do. She knows better than most how proficient and helpful Harvard’s police, firefighters, and EMTs are, but she gets irritated sometimes that people often write letters to the newspapers thanking them, but “nobody ever mentions the dispatcher who took the call and made it all happen.”

Some years ago, an old-timer named Arthur Bigelow did write “the nicest letter” mentioning the help Sue had given him, and she’s never forgotten it. When she watched the horror unfold at the World Trade Center on 9/11, all she could think of was the dispatchers in New York that day, and what they must have been going through.

“They’re heroes, too,” she says,” but nobody talks about that.”