Iowa State Patrol

The Iowa State Patrol was started by Iowa’s first female secretary of state, Ola Babcock Miller, who was a champion for highway safety. Her vision for the Iowa Highway Patrol was a group of well-trained officers who would enforce Iowa’s traffic laws but also, more critical to her, spread the word about the importance of safe driving. In 1935, fifty men were sworn in as officers of the Iowa Highway Safety Patrol. Known thereafter as the First Fifty, they had been selected from a group of more than 3,000 applicants and more than 100 invited for the initial training at Camp Dodge. One member of that group, Buck Cole, proposed the patrol’s motto of Courtesy-Service-Protection, a tradition that has been passed down through the generations to today’s Iowa State Patrol, whose male and female troopers promote Mrs. Miller’s original premise of keeping the driving public safe.