Joseph Wambaugh, the novelist who revolutionized how police were portrayed in fiction, died Feb. 28 at age 88.

And Wambaugh, who lived most of his life in Southern California, got some of his schooling in and around Ontario. That’s also where he met his wife.

First, a quick summary. Wambaugh wrote bestsellers such as “The New Centurions,” “The Choirboys” and “The Onion Field” and co-created the 1970s TV dramas “Police Story” and “The Blue Knight,” all drawing on his 14 years with the LAPD. His cops were multidimensional people, with a range of personalities and motivations, not “Adam-12” stereotypes.

As his New York Times obituary put it: “Mr. Wambaugh was blunt about the hidden costs of the job: broken marriages, nervous breakdowns, suicides.”

Or as Wambaugh told me in a 2006 interview: “My innovation was to write about how the job acts on the cop, instead of how the cop acts on the job. See, I reversed it.”

When we met, Wambaugh had just written his first LAPD novel in years, “Hollywood Station.” The circumstances of our interview were memorable. I’ll come back to that in a minute.

Let me give you the local stuff first.

Wambaugh was born Jan. 22, 1937 in East Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. When his uncle in Ontario died, Wambaugh’s family came out here in 1951 for the funeral and decided to stay, settling in Fontana.

Joe was 14, ready for his sophomore year of high school.

“There was no high school in Fontana in those days,” Wambaugh told me. “I was bused to Chaffey,” the high school in Ontario that served much of the region.

Most of his teenage memories were of Ontario and Upland: the Euclid Avenue malt shop Wag’s, the A Street eateries The Hot Dog Show and McDonald’s BBQ, and a Foothill Boulevard ice cream stand in Upland.

He tried to remember the name. I offered: “Yum Yum Frosty Freeze?” He chuckled and said that was right.

Chaffey High intimidated him. His Pennsylvania high school had 300 students. At Chaffey, his class alone had 800. He was a year younger than his classmates.

“I was a hopeless student. I couldn’t wait to get out,” Wambaugh said.

(In 1981 the alumni association named him “Tiger of the Year,” obviously not from any scholastic achievements.)

There was one lasting benefit. He met Dee Allsup, an Ontario girl, at Chaffey. They wed in 1955, a year after he graduated. She survives him, as do two children.

At 17, with his parents’ permission, he joined the Marine Corps. “I was too young to work and too lazy to study,” he told me. But his 20-plus years stateside made studying look better.

He took night classes while in the Marines and used his GI Bill money to attend Chaffey Junior College from 1957-58. The college shared a campus with the high school.

A love of reading “was my only saving grace as a kid,” he told me, and Chaffey literature teacher Richard Killen inspired him to major in English. He took a full load of classes and attended summer school while working at Kaiser Steel in Fontana.

After earning his associate’s degree at Chaffey in one year, graduating in 1958, he got his bachelor’s in 1960 from Cal State L.A. He was 23.

While he’d planned to teach, he heard cops made more money. He passed the LAPD test and joined the force in 1960. He walked a beat, was among the hundreds of officers who responded to the Watts riots and was promoted to detective in the Hollywood Station in 1968.

His first novel, “The New Centurions,” was published in 1971 to acclaim. While he tried to balance police work and writing, his growing fame made that untenable.

His bosses were displeased with his take on the LAPD. Suspects who recognized him from TV asked for his autograph. He left in 1974 to write fulltime. He published 16 novels and five nonfiction books.

At one point he lived in Riverside County’s Rancho Mirage. I’m intrigued by the summary of his 1985 non-LAPD novel “The Secrets of Harry Bright,” said to be a scabrous look at the Palm Springs country club set.

While he paved the way for “Hill Street Blues,” “NYPD Blue” and “Training Day,” Wambaugh said police work isn’t as grim or violent as Hollywood likes to show. He tried to reflect the habits and quirks of his cop characters and the sometimes-comical situations they encountered.

As he told me of “Hollywood Station”: “I wrote this one to make the specific point that police work, good police work, is the most fun you’ll ever have in your life.”

Now, about how our interview came about.

When “Hollywood Station” was released, I contacted his publicist, saying I’d like to interview Wambaugh about his Ontario years and asked if he’d be doing promotion around L.A.

She invited me to his only L.A. event, at a theater in Westwood, and arranged to give me time with him beforehand at 4 p.m. Fine with me — but then Wambaugh intervened.

He hated to see me drive that far. So he offered to meet me in Pasadena, which I accepted.

The afternoon of his big L.A. event, Wambaugh had a driver take him to Vroman’s Books at 3 p.m., under the excuse that after we talked he would autograph a few store copies of “Hollywood Station.”

Due to traffic, he ran a little late. To get back to Westwood in time, he only had 10 minutes to talk. Yikes!

The first question came from him: “Did your paper used to be the Daily Report?” It did. That’s the Ontario newspaper he would have encountered in the 1950s.

He was friendly, although the time crunch made it a stressful interview, with me firing off questions and scribbling furiously. Then he signed those books for the store before heading across the L.A. basin to Westwood in rush-hour traffic.

All to accommodate a journalist from what was once his hometown paper.

Wambaugh offered to autograph my beat-up paperback of “The Choirboys,” but I declined, since it was falling apart and in fact did fall apart before I finished it. So he grabbed a copy of “Hollywood Station,” signed it to me and handed it over with a grin.

I still have it.

He wrote: “David, Thanks! Joe Wambaugh, Chaffey H.S. 1954.”

David Allen cops to writing Sunday, Wednesday and Friday. Email dallen@scng.com, phone 909-483-9339, and follow davidallencolumnist on Facebook, @davidallen909 on X or @davidallen909.bsky.social on Bluesky.