Jim Klauba grew up listening to the wild street tales of his father and great-uncle, both Chicago cops. Klauba, now 28 and a Cook County sheriff’s deputy, says he joined the force for the stories: “I was working construction, and at the end of the day what could I tell somebody? ‘Hey, I put up that wall really fast today’?”
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In 1996 Klauba joined the county’s Special Operations Response Team, or SORT, based at 26th and California. “We handle everything: riots inside the jail, weapons and narcotics searches, chasing AWOLs from electronic monitoring.” While always providing grist for a good yarn, the danger got Klauba thinking about what could happen to him on the job. Then he heard about the Hundred Club of Cook County, a private civilians-only charitable organization that provides financial assistance to spouses and children of law-enforcement personnel and firefighters killed in the line of duty.
“[In policing] exciting things hit and you come out of it–you can tell the story,” Klauba says. “It’s kind of like that with martial arts. It’s an edge when you do a competition and complete it….The exhibition is a terrific cause and will surely be the safest place to be on that evening.”
