While a Marine, he married his high school sweetheart, Dee Allsup, and the couple settled in Ontario, California, upon his discharge in 1957. He took a job at nearby Kaiser Steel Mill and continued to attend college part-time, majoring in literature, "the only courses I was any good in," he says. He hoped to become an English teacher but decided against it while in his senior year. Instead, in 1960 he joined the Los Angeles Police Department. He did manage to continue his formal education, however, eventually earning both a B.A. and an M.A. in English from California State College, Los Angeles.
Wambaugh joined the police force, he claimed, because he had "nothing better to do." As he told Steven V. Roberts, "I needed a job. And the pay was pretty good. Also, I strongly suspect there was something in me from the time I was a child, admiring my father's badge and so forth." Whatever his reasons, he enjoyed police work. "I could live life more intensely as a cop," he said. "In a single night I sometimes learned things that a man could not expect to learn in a month, or a year.
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