The Cop With the Cigar

After 37 years, Ed Holster is hanging up his radar gun by Jordan Schwartz

Ed Holster paces the quaint living room of his Richfield Village apartment. Finally taking a seat on the couch, he lights up his first cigarette — a habit he picked up while serving his country in Vietnam.

Holster’s fiancee, Linda Portaro, chides him for his poor manners as she slides the glass down on the screen door and turns on the ceiling fan.

Linda tells Ed she’s going to listen in on the discussion about his life, just in case the two of them ever wind up on a game show.

“What’s my favorite Christmas song?” he quizzes her.

Portaro doesn’t miss a beat before correctly responding, “The Little Drummer Boy.”

It’s been a busy several months for Holster, who got engaged in July to a woman he once stopped for speeding, turned 60 in October, and retired on Dec. 31 after 37 years with the Clifton Police Department.

Cigarettes Saved His Life

Edward F. Holster, Sr. was born Oct. 18, 1948 at Passaic General Hospital to the late David and Otillie Holster.

His father was a truck driver, while his mother stayed at their Paulison Ave. home and took care of the five children.

Ed attended School 15 and Christopher Columbus before graduating Clifton High in 1967.

A year later, in May 1968, he was drafted into the Army. After training in New Jersey, Oklahoma and California, Holster was flown out to Vietnam that October. It was his first time on a plane.

“I was never away from home,” said the veteran. “If I was 10 miles away from Clifton, that was a big deal.”

For the following 12 months, Specialist Holster was a foot soldier with the 1st Infantry Division, trudging through the muddy front lines of the Vietnamese jungle.

“That was scary when you first got there,” he said, “but you realize you have a year to go so that fear goes away quickly.”

Then in his early twenties, Holster became a chain smoker because the tobacco companies would send packs of cigarettes, cigars, and chew to the men overseas.

“It was so brutally hot that the sweat on your fingers would break the cigarettes in half,” he remembered before telling the story of his first close call during the war.

One time, Holster’s outfit found itself under heavy fire in a rice paddy. As the sun went down, the fighting decreased, but the enemy was still out there.

U.S. soldiers lit flares, which turned night into day and gave the Clifton boy a chance to relax for a moment with a drag off his cigarette. Hiding behind a paddy dike, Holster leaned over to get his fix. Just then, a clump of dirt shot into his face, and as he looked up, he realized a bullet had grazed the top of the dike.

“If I didn’t go for the cigarettes, I would’ve been hit,” he explained.

Holster’s second brush with death came near the end of his tour. With his company under sporadic fire, the specialist took a quick breather against a log. He removed his helmet and something slammed him in the head.

“They always say you never hear the bullet that kills you,” said Holster. “It started to burn and so I accepted the fact that this was it.” The young man’s life literally flashed before his eyes and the last image he saw was his teary-eyed, seven-year-old niece running down an alley to say goodbye to her uncle as he left for Southeast Asia.

But Holster wasn’t dead.

The bullet that singed his scalp was simply a live round that fell from a friendly helicopter above. While he was bleeding, the wound wasn’t serious and soon after, the soldier was on his way back to the States.

Finding Love in the Fast Lane

In late 1969, Holster returned home a changed man. “You learn to appreciate little things like sleeping in a clean bed and being able to take a shower,” he said.

But returning to civilian life also meant Holster would have to find a job, and so he became a door-to-door salesman selling women’s hair brushes and brooms.

It didn’t take long for the lifelong Cliftonite to realize he wasn’t going to be able to make a living out of that line of work, so he took the fire and police tests.

Holster passed the CPD exam and became an officer in October 1971. He started in patrol at age 23 and was on rotating shifts for 17 years. The cop responded to car accidents, murders and suicides, but his time in the Army prepared him for what he had to deal with on a daily basis.

“I saw people badly injured but it didn’t bother me,” he explained. “You’re not thinking about what you see, but what you have to do.”

Holster enjoyed his job but the odd hours put a strain on his family life, and in 1988, he and his wife of 14 years, Margaret, got a divorce. The couple had four children and so it was very difficult for their father not to see them all the time.

Soon after the separation, Holster, who earned a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice from William Paterson College, got transferred to the traffic division.

The police officer loved two things about the new position: the steadier hours and pulling people over. “Speed is a big factor in accidents,” said Holster, who has seen the damage over-zealous drivers can cause. “Cars get ripped apart like cardboard.”

Everyone wonders how fast they need to be going before those flashing lights come on behind them. In Holster’s world, it’s 16 miles per hour over the speed limit.

“Drivers ask me to give them a break, and I tell them, ‘I gave you a break at five, 10 and 15 over,’” he said. “I don’t give tickets away, people earn them.”

And no one is immune.

“Sometimes a good-looking girl walks into court and the guys say to me, ‘You gave her a ticket?’”
One of those women was Holster’s future wife.

In 1993, Ed stopped Linda for speeding on Allwood Rd. She told him she was taking her kids to the doctor, but admitted a decade later that she was actually on her way to McCrory’s in Styertowne to pick up cupcake pans.

Linda says it took 11 years for her to stop hating him.

“Ed is the most disliked police officer in Clifton,” she said. “If you don’t know him, you’re not from around here. He’s the radar cop, the one with the big cigar.”

Portaro’s feelings toward Holster began to change when she saw him walking out of Foodies one day in March 2004. He was a friend of a friend and Linda became attracted to the big guy in the police uniform.

“I started making myself available over at Brookside Gardens where he hung out,” she said. “I’d bring food because I was trying to impress him.”

It worked and the couple began dating that July. They were engaged this past summer.

Beating Cancer and Moving On

In August 2004, Holster learned he had prostate cancer.

“When you get into the doctor’s office and he tells you that, you hear what he says, but you don’t comprehend it right away,” he said. “Then it hits you like a sledge hammer.”

Holster had his prostate removed the following month and for the next three weeks, he recovered at Linda’s.

“I would leave him on the porch to get some fresh air and told him not to move until I came back from the store,” she remembered. “I came home and he was inside because a squirrel was attacking him. From then on, I left him with peanuts.”

The cancer hasn’t returned since the surgery and Ed says he’s just a year away from receiving a clean bill of health. But where will Holster be in 12 months? He doesn’t really know. After more than 37 years on the force, the officer retired from the CPD on Dec. 31.

Like the other veterans saying goodbye to the department these days, Holster knows what his pension and benefits will be. But with the current strains on the city’s budget, Ed doesn’t know if he would be as secure had he stayed another year or two.

“People in Clifton have an excellent police department,” said the recent retiree. “The only reason Clifton is still like it is is because of the department and you get what you pay for.”

But don’t think you can start speeding around town now that Ed Sr. is gone; there’s still another Edward Holster patrolling the streets. Junior, 34, joined the CPD seven years ago and plans on keeping the family tradition alive.

Just without the cigar.