John Buchholz celebrates 50 years of working for the City of Oxford

John Buchholz sits at his desk in the city manager suite four days a week. He answers multiple phone calls each day from people in Oxford with questions or complaints about trash and parking, among other issues. Throughout the morning, Buchholz greets and talks with everyone who walks past his desk. 

His business card shows that he is the community outreach specialist in Oxford. It also shows that he is a retired detective sergeant with the city. 

What it doesn’t show is that Buchholz has worked as both a police officer and a city employee for 50 years this summer, making him the longest-serving city employee in Oxford. 

Buchholz grew up in Dayton and knew from an early age that he wanted to be a police officer. He worked as a police cadet for the Randolph Township Police Department while in high school before joining the Air Force and serving two years in Vietnam. 

While still in the service, Buchholz began applying to every small-town police department that he could find in southwest Ohio. He returned to Dayton in 1975 and took a patrol officer position in Oxford on July 15 of that year. 

“I knew nothing about Oxford,” Buchholz said. “I’d never been here, even though I wasn’t that far away. I knew Miami University was here. As it so happened, they’re the first ones that offered me a job, and I took it. In hindsight, it was the best blind dumb luck that I ever had.”

Working as a patrol officer in a small college town proved to be a highlight of his career. Buchholz said he knew cops in big cities like Dayton and Cincinnati who faced repetitive daily tasks every day of the year. In Oxford, he liked the built-in downtimes when Miami students were on break and enjoyed the locality and neighborly love from the people in the city. 

His roles early on involved enforcing traffic laws, patrolling and taking care of general every-day problems. Buchholz was eventually promoted to a patrol sergeant, which required him to still patrol but also manage other patrol officers, and later road sergeant in 1986. 

In 1996, he became a detective sergeant after taking a command officer’s course at the University of Louisville. As a detective sergeant, Buchholz managed investigations and read through criminal reports. 

With each new position, Buchholz said that it took three or four years to become confident enough in his role. 

“I remember sitting there thinking, ‘Can I do this? I wonder if I can do it,’” Buchholz said. “As it turned out, we had some shortages of personnel, and I had no detectives. It was just me for one year, so I learned to do everything really good … But that phenomenon, it takes a couple years to settle into your new position.”

Through his various duties over the years, Buchholz always maintained the same philosophy: treat people the best he can and help as many people as possible.

“Especially in small towns, [people] will have a better quality of life and feel better if they feel good about their police department and know them,” Buchholz said. “I have found over the years in talking to a lot of people [that] people get unnerved when they see the police officers and don’t know who they are.”

Following this commitment required Buchholz to grow and evolve over time. Instead of asking, “What’s the problem here?” at a scene, he started asking, “How can I help you?” At a traffic stop, rather than questioning the driver if they knew why he pulled them over, he starts by explaining clearly their infraction. 

Outside of working in the police department, Buchholz has also been a member of Kiwanis, a service organization, since 1991. For him, community outreach has always been a fundamental task as a police officer. 

When he retired from detective work in 2008, Buchholz quickly moved to a new position as a business liaison officer in the department. In this position, he interacted with local businesses to get a sense of the pressing concerns in the city and see what the police department can do to help. 

One proposition he had early on was to update the emergency call-out list for the police and fire departments. 

“If something happens to your business at 3 a.m., who do we call?” Buchholz said. “You have to call somebody, so I started off by updating or getting contacts for all the businesses, and they were really receptive that somebody actually came by to visit them.”

Doing this allowed Buchholz to meet business owners in town and understand what issues they face, including problems with parking and trash collection. After a few years, the city asked him to continue his work on behalf of the whole city rather than just the police department. 

Police Chief John Jones, who joined the department as a dispatcher in 1998, said Buchholz helped him immensely throughout his career. He remembers Buchholz riding around Uptown on a segway while working as a business liaison.

“He’s become a known figure on that segway Uptown,” Jones said. “That’s where his strengths are: community engagement and getting things done with the business community. If you need something done … he’s a good [person] to talk to and get it done.”

As the community outreach specialist, Buchholz now answers phone calls and meets with Oxford residents to discuss problems and connect them with resources. This part-time role allows him to continue helping the city while having more time to himself. 

Buchholz’s work, both in his current role and from his career with the police, is appreciated by everyone who passes by his desk in the city manager suite, as seen by the numerous toy police cars donated to it. 

With his 50-year milestone on July 15, Buchholz said he will continue to work over the next few years, but he has thought about officially retiring in the near future. He wants to be remembered as a kind and lighthearted person, as well as a hardworking and reliable worker. 

“My goal was always to make sure that whatever I did,” Buchholz said, “be it successful or not successful, that the people were satisfied that me, the city [and] the police did as much as we could do.”