Counting his judge's robe, James Box has worn a uniform for most of his life. Today is the day the uniform comes off.

Box, who has spent all but four of his 75 years in Payson, took off his first uniform when he left the U.S. Army in the mid-1950s. After several years working at Geneva Steel and as a custodian for the Payson School District, he thought it was time to try something new, so he signed up as a reserve officer for the police department.

"I got antsy, I guess, and felt like there's something I should be doing. The opportunity came, so I grabbed it," Box said.

After two years, Box parlayed that reserve officer's position into a full-time job at the Payson Police Department.

Most of his three-decade career there was spent as Payson's police chief.

As he neared his retirement at the police department, Box was asked to fill a two-year vacancy as a city court judge, a tenure that ended up lasting 14 years. Box learned quickly that there's a big difference between sitting on the bench and standing in front of it.

"Policemen sometimes are in the habit of telling people, 'Go tell it to the judge,' and I've probably done that several hundred times in my career. And then, all of a sudden, I found myself being in a position to essentially make the last decision," he said.

Defining success for a judge can be difficult, Box said. He was often tempted to measure success by whether the defendants he saw ended up in his courtroom again. It was frustrating, he said, to think of a defendant as a success story after not seeing him for a while, only to learn the defendant had moved out of town.

But Payson is a small town, and Box often knows who's staying out of trouble. The most difficult cases he saw in his career were usually domestic violence situations where the husband went through a long, drawn-out rehabilitation process. Box said he feels good when he continues to see the defendants around town years after they last appeared in his court.

"I have to make the assumption that somewhere somebody did something right with them, and hopefully I was a part of it. I see a lot of success," he said.

His career has had its low points as well, Box said. Possibly the worst moment of his life came while he was working at the police department.

Dispatch called Box to tell him about an accident in which a 12-year-old boy was hit by a car and killed. Before he could head out to the scene, he learned that the boy was his son, Kevin.

"There's no way to describe that," Box said.

Box's wife, Phyllis, died five years ago. But he still maintains close ties with his four surviving children and 11 grandchildren, and looks forward to spending more time with them in retirement. Some of his grandchildren are great baseball and softball players, he said, and he's the type of grandfather who enjoys sitting around at an all-day tournament while he watches them play. He once attended a tournament in St. George for one of his grandchildren where the games ran so late that the trophies weren't handed out until 2:30 a.m. He looks forward to having more time for things like that.

"There's a zillion things to do," Box said. "I've never, never wondered what I was going to do today or tomorrow."

In addition to his family, Box has many hobbies he plans to devote his time to. While many retirees spend their days on the golf course, Box prefers to spend his time in his greenhouse, where he grows things such as cactus, banana trees and Mexican fan palms. He raises koi in a small pond, and raises birds at his house.

"I'm becoming overrun with canaries. I bought some very fruitful birds just recently," Box said.

And in retirement, Box may not even have to hang up his robe. He is looking into a program in which active senior judges fill in for judges who are sick, on vacation or otherwise away from the bench. Box feels that he has done a lot of good work on the bench, but he knows he would enjoy doing at least a little more.

"I look at it and say, 'For the time you've been here, have you been successful?' " Box said. "And my answer would be, 'I was.' "

• Jeremy Duda can be reached at 344-2561 or This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it