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Well, not actually busted. He was stopped for erratic driving in O’Fallon, Missouri. He tried, with limited success, to recite the alphabet from E to N. With even less success, he tried to walk the line. An officer said Hall failed a field breathalyzer.

The O’Fallon officer who stopped him, Nathan Dye, recorded everything on his body cam. Eventually, Dye’s supervisor called the O’Fallon chief, John Neske. Fully cognizant that everything was being recorded, Neske said he would give Hall a ride home.

The story broke a month and a half later when this newspaper published the video and audio from the body cam.

That very day, I had lunch with an old friend, who is a retired city cop. We ate at the reopened Beffa’s on Olive Street. The original establishment had a speakeasy feel to it. No signs. You either knew about it or you didn’t. It was buffet style with a bar to the side. Prices weren’t listed and you paid whatever Mike Beffa thought you should pay.

I sometimes ate with priests or cops, and it aggravated me that I paid more for the very same meals. I once complained to Mike Beffa. He shrugged. “We respect the badge and the collar,� he said. Not so much the pen, was left unspoken.

The new Beffa’s has menus and listed prices.

I’m trying to be outraged about the Hazelwood chief getting a pass, I said to my friend.

Don’t bother, he said. Hall is a very good guy, and Neske’s dad was a city cop, so he remembers when professional courtesy was a thing, my friend said.

As he recalls the old days, my friend said he gave lots of people a break. He said he’d stop a guy, judge him to be impaired and then take him to the station and tell the guy to call his wife for a ride home.

The wife would be furious. The husband would start to say something, and she’d say, “I don’t want to hear anything from you. I don’t even want to look at you.�

My friend laughed as he told the story. I laughed, too.

Drunken driving is a very serious matter. I understand that. But I also understand that the courts often don’t treat it as such. John Hoffmann, a former police officer who writes an online newsletter, , regularly writes about “justice” in the municipal courts in Chesterfield and Town and Country. Drunken driving defendants who can afford lawyers routinely walk away with no points and no permanent record.

But let me return to the notion of professional courtesy. As my friend said, it used to be a thing. If it outrages you, I have good news: It’s dying out. Body cams are a part of that as far as the police are concerned, but attitudes have changed, too.

Professions that didn’t offer a lot of money used to offer other stuff. For a cop, it was a ride home if you were stopped for erratic driving. Here at the newspaper we had a professional courtesy thing, too.

Everybody who worked for the paper got an obituary. It would not necessarily be long, but we would mark the passing of our own.

We certainly would have noted the death of Suzanne Topham-Tarrant. She was a copy editor and news editor. She died on June 17. She was 74 and had two grown kids and a granddaughter. Suzanne was fully engaged with the world. She was amused or bemused — she would have known the right word — with the craziness in the newsroom and in the general world, as well. She loved to chat. She also had a thing about weather. She kept up to date on weather conditions around the world.

Maybe she got that from her late father. He was a navigator on a bomber in the Pacific during World War II and was awarded a Distinguished Flying Cross with an oak cluster.

A week after Suzanne died, Shawn Candela died. He was a page designer. He had worked at a number of newspapers. He was quiet and professional. Also, a very good athlete. He was single and had no children. He loved animals. He rescued cats. In an online remembrance, former Post-Dispatch reporter Robert Patrick recalled Shawn “sitting on his porch while cats and occasionally other animals wandered in and out of his house.� Shawn was 60. He is survived by a brother and sister.

Lastly, on June 29, Sally Bixby Defty died. She was 89 and a legend. She died in Ticonderoga near Bolton Landing, a hamlet on Lake George in the Adirondacks of upstate New York. She loved that place.

You could argue that her roots were in Michigan. That is where her grandfather, William Keeney Bixby, grew up. After graduating from high school, he moved to Texas and got a job as a baggage handler for a railroad. He was later hired by the Missouri Pacific Railroad and moved to St. Louis, where he became president of the American Railcar and Foundry Co.

He was one of the chief financiers for Charles Lindbergh’s transcontinental flight.

He also built a home on “Millionaires’ Row� on the shores of Lake George.

Sally spent her summers there. She graduated from Vassar with a degree in art history. Her engagement to Eric Defty of London made the New York Times.

But the refined life was somehow not a fit for Sally. In 1965, she was hired by the Post-Dispatch as a reporter on the women’s section. She was a force of nature. She was soon a city desk reporter. By 1976, she was the executive city editor. She gave up the title and returned to reporting. She had a good touch for light stuff, but she was not lifted to that. She almost won a Pulitzer Prize for a series on arson-for-hire.

She was a role model and a mentor.

“She led with skill and grace, and always seems amazed that others considered her a role model,� said former Post-Dispatch editor Margaret Freivogel in an obituary in the Post-Star, a paper that covers Bolton Landing. “In addition to her achievements, I remember her wry sense of humor. She once said someone told her the key to success was good posture. She practiced it.�

Sally left the paper in 1995. She lived in Germany and then built a house in Bolton Landing.

She volunteered at a museum there. She was, I’m quite sure, a force of nature again. That was her way. And that is why her death in Bolton Landing, but not here.

Life is a little more rigid these days. To rate an obit, a person has to have been well-known. No more professional courtesy. In the same sense, my lunch pal wouldn’t be able to give an impaired driver a ride to the station and then call his wife. And certainly, one police chief could not give another a ride home.

Maybe that makes the world a better place.

At the new Beffa’s, my friend paid the same for his sandwich as I paid for mine. I felt kind of bad about it.