Longtime federal court security officer hardly the retiring kind [The Tribune-Democrat, Johnstown, Pa.]

Feb. 24—JOHNSTOWN, Pa. — After 60-plus years and counting in the law enforcement business, Art Watts is getting ready to retire from one of his careers and focus his full attention on another.

Watts, 86, will retire on March 3 from his job as a court security officer at the Johnstown federal courthouse. He started that job 28 years ago — after he completed a 32-year career with the Richland Township Police Department, retiring with the rank of captain, and spent a couple years running security operations at The Johnstown Galleria during its 1990s heyday.

When he retires, he'll turn his full attention to his position as president of Corporate Security Services Inc., a private investigation and security guard firm that he co-founded in 1992. He said the company has around 100 employees, including about 70 full-timers. It provides security to industrial facilities in the Johnstown area and also handles matters such as insurance fraud probes, background checks, asset verification and process-serving.

"I'm not the kind of guy that can sleep in," Watts said during an interview on Tuesday near his station at the federal courthouse, located in the Penn Traffic Building on Washington Street downtown. Still, he said: "I'm looking forward to, if I want to sleep in for an hour or so, I can do it, and I don't have to get up and go to work."

The Richland Township native began working for his hometown police department in 1959. His career included a 20-year tenure as a captain for the department and a stint as a field supervisor for the Cambria County Drug Task Force, all as the township grew over the decades from a quiet agricultural area into the busy commercial district it is today.

He gave a long interview in April 1992 to The Tribune-Democrat reporters Bill Jones and Bill Blair about the drug-related challenges that were then facing Cambria County law enforcement agencies. Crack cocaine was then the drug of choice for local addicts, he explained; he'd heard that "ice," or crystal methamphetamine, was moving into the area, but local police officers hadn't encountered it yet.

A few months after that interview, an August 1992 clipping from The Tribune-Democrat's archives carried the news that Watts, then 55, had resigned from the Richland Township force to become the head of security at The Johnstown Galleria, which at the time was still several months away from opening.

He explained on Tuesday that he had been thinking about retiring at that time, but then he got a call from an official at mall-building company Zamias Services recruiting him for the Galleria job.

"He was looking for somebody to set up their security for the Galleria, so I set that up," Watts recalled. "Two years later, this job came open, so I came down here."

That was when Watts started his current job as a court security officer in 1995, just a couple years after the Johnstown division of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania was first created. He and his co-workers screen defendants entering the court system, as well as anyone arriving for public civil or criminal court proceedings, and they patrol the bulding "to make sure that the doors that are supposed to be locked are locked," he said.

"The difference between working here and the police department is the stress isn't here that you have in the police department," he said.

He also spent some time handling security for the National Drug Intelligence Center, the national clearinghouse that provided information on the domestic drug trade to law enforcement agencies and policymakers around the U.S. and that shared the Penn Traffic Building with the federal courthouse until it was defunded and shut down in 2012.

"I've worked in this building for almost 28 years now," he said.

After March 3, Watts will focus on helping run Corporate Security Services, whose website lists clients including North American Hoganas facilities in Hollsopple and Moxham, Conemaugh Generating Station near New Florence and Keystone Generating Station in Armstrong County, First National Bank, Sheetz stores, area hotels, college dormitories and 1st Summit Arena @ Cambria County War Memorial in downtown Johnstown.

The company also provides security at events, including Johnstown's music festivals, Portage Area Summerfest, the Thunder in the Valley motorcycle rally, the Showcase for Commerce defense industry expo and high school sports events.

A big challenge Watts and his firm are facing is the struggle to hire employees that companies of all kinds have reported in the past couple years.

"It's terrible," he said. "I've never seen it this bad. Before the pandemic, we had guys that would call — we had, like, 35 part-time guys, and they would call to see if we had any work. Now, I don't know where they fell off the end of the earth, or what happened to them, but they're gone."

His job duties as company president include a little bit of everything, although he also plans to rely on his supervisors to handle some of the day-to-day work, he said.

"Whenever you have people working for you, there's always something going on," he said.

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