ALL IN A DAY'S WORK, William Norton might have said.
Like gunfights, drug battles, and getting assaulted by an angry pit bull named Bullet.
William Norton was a cop. And although a lot of officers could go through a career and rarely draw their guns or be seriously injured on duty, William was often where the action was.
One of his more dangerous jobs was when he helped narcotics cops bust a Jamaican drug ring by posing as a crooked cop and accepting protection money. The district attorney's office hailed him as a hero.
William Norton, who was a patrol officer out of the 19th District, in West Philadelphia, for 16 years and an Army veteran, died Friday of a heart attack. He was 62 and lived in Drexel Hill.
William suffered a number of serious illnesses in recent years, including two triple heart bypasses, a kidney transplant and amputation of both legs.
He had a long history of seizures as the result of suffering a skull fracture while quelling a domestic dispute in 1994. The injury forced him to retire a year later.
But William was a tough guy - called "Scrap Iron" by colleagues on the force - and he never gave in to his afflictions.
"He was a fighter," said his daughter Tameka Fidler, herself a former cop. "Every morning he got up and turned on his music. He learned to use prosthetics and he would turn on his favorites, David Ruffin, the soul singer, or the Isley Brothers."
William loved to tell stories of his days as a cop. And he had some stories to relate.
In 1989, he pretended to be a crooked cop and started taking bribe money from drug dealers. As the Daily News' Dave Racher wrote, William could have "added $2,000 a week to his take-home pay, plus all the cocaine he could snort."
But William took the dealers' money, nearly $5,000 in all, and the only thing he gave them was a ticket to jail.
Assistant District Attorney Thomas Perricone, who prosecuted the dealers, said that William "showed a lot of courage. He could have decided to look the other way. He was concerned about stemming the flow of drugs in the community."
One September day in 1988, William and his partner, Samuel Blue, chased a man from a street disturbance into a house in West Philadelphia.
When the door opened, the pit bull Bullet sprang for the officers. He knocked William down and bit Blue on the arm, before being wounded by a third officer.
In May 1982, William, his partner, Andre Blaylock, and other officers were involved in a melee in West Philadelphia in which a man who was terrorizing employees in a carpet store was shot to death and six cops were wounded.
When cops confronted the man, Jerome Gant, 24, he swung a 2-by-4 piece of lumber at them, then grabbed an officer's service revolver and opened fire, wounding the six officers.
William, Blaylock and Highway Patrolman Neil Carr fired at the man, killing him. Morton B. Solomon, then the police commissioner, said that the officers tried to use as little force as possible.
"It appears the officers acted in a professional manner under an extremely difficult circumstance," Solomon said.
Early on the morning of Sept. 25, 1984, William and a partner, Michael Doyle, questioned two men on Locust Avenue near Bloyd Street because they were acting suspiciously.
The men said that they lived in a house there, and the officers escorted them in. They were immediately assailed by a powerful odor that told them only one thing - someone was cooking meth. The woman of the house was charged with drug offenses.
William Norton was born in Philadelphia to Irene Norton and William Trustee. He graduated from Benjamin Franklin High School in 1966 and joined the Army. He served eight years, mostly as a military policeman in the Philippines.
He joined the Police Department after his discharge. He married Evelyn Norton in 1991.
After retiring, William worked for a time in school security before his health failed.
Besides his wife and daughter, he is survived by three other daughters, Krishawna Bullard, Britney Stone and Dominque Norton; a sister, Sharlene Brown; two brothers, Robert and Ricardo Norton; and eight grandchildren.
Services: 11 a.m. tomorrow at Lansdowne Baptist Church, 17 E. Lacrosse Ave., Lansdowne. Friends may call at 9 a.m. Burial with full military honors will be held at 2:30 p.m. in Washington Crossing National Cemetery, in Newtown.
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