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Land O'Lakes didn't even exist on the night of June 26, 1948 when 24-year-old Pasco County Constable John Herbert McCabe drove along the two lanes of U.S. 41 in response to a call about some stolen grove heaters.
Nearby Dupree Gardens was in its waning days as a tourist attraction. There were no nudist camps in the county, and Port Richey and New Port Richey were quiet little fishing villages. Cypress was still king in east Pasco, but the citrus economy was growing and the theft of grove equipment was no small crime.
McCabe was driving through Drexel, one of the communities that later merged to market themselves as Land O'Lakes, when his vehicle was involved in a collision with a semitrailer truck that apparently ended his life.
I say, "apparently," because details of McCabe's death are extremely sketchy and hard to come by.
We don't know much - at least not yet - about him. He was a law enforcement officer, either a deputy sheriff or a constable, and he was listed, according to a one-paragraph story in the St. Petersburg Times, as "near death in Tampa Municipal Hospital" after he sustained chest, skull and other injuries in the accident.
McCabe's name is listed on the National Law Enforcement Memorial, and a spokesman for the memorial said McCabe died in an automobile accident and provided the few details available.
The Officer Down Memorial Page, a privately operated Web site honoring police officers who have died in the line of duty, also lists McCabe, but says he died as the result of gunfire, as do records at the Fraternal Order of Police.
McCabe is listed variously as a deputy sheriff, a constable and, by one source, as a "sheriff's constable."
Constables were local law enforcement officers similar to police chiefs but who served in unincorporated areas and were elected. The office was abolished on Jan 1, 1973.
And that's pretty much all we know right now about McCabe.
The West Pasco Historical Society searched copies of the old New Port Richey Press from that era, and found no mention of McCabe's death, but the Times library, after an extensive search, did find the one-paragraph story about the accident.
County records from those days are sketchy, and it was only through information accidentally turned up by an author researching cases in Dade County that we learned a few years back of the deaths of a Pasco Deputy, A.F. Crenshaw, and U.S. Prohibition Agent Jon Van Waters who were apparently gunned down by bootleggers in early October 1922.
And so we have added first Crenshaw and Waters and, now, McCabe to the list of law enforcement officers who have died in the line of duty in Pasco County.
Nobody is keeping score. We gather such information to provide a historical perspective.
On May 19, 1998, Florida Highway Patrol Trooper James B. Crooks was murdered by Hank Earl Carr on the State Road 54 exit ramp off of I-75 in south central Pasco as Carr fled the scene where he had murdered two Tampa Police Department detectives. It was comforting - if that is the right word - to learn that it had been more than 75 years since a law enforcement officer had died in the line of duty in the county.
Hernando County Sheriff's Deputy Lonnie Coburn was murdered just north of the Pasco-Hernando line on Feb. 21, 1978, and state wildlife officer Peggy Park was shot to death on Dec. 13, 1984 on Keystone Road not far south of the Pinellas-Pasco county line. But until the tragic death of Pasco sheriff's Lt. Charles "Bo" Harrison last Sunday, only Crenshaw, Waters, McCabe and Crooks had died on duty in Pasco.
This kind of record-keeping can lead to semantic nit-picking about who was a deputy and who wasn't or who died and who was slain, but those four names are among the many of their brother and sister officers whom we should be remembering.
I thought it was important that we know more about McCabe.
And now we do.