His friends wonder if he's bitter. They wonder if he regrets not...well, doing more to campaign for re-election. They wonder if he's disappointed in them.

He is not. He does not. And, no.

It will take more than a lost election, even one marked by a campaign with assaults on his proud, 24-year tenure as Wake County sheriff, to stir bitterness in John Haywood Baker Jr. He has, after all, refused all his life to surrender to what could have been all-consuming anger over injustices against him, injustices he spent a career battling.

He grew up in the old Oberlin Community in Raleigh. On the way to what was then the black high school in town, he would pass white schools, and wonder about that. He wondered, too, about why, years later, he couldn't go in the popular S&W cafeteria in downtown Raleigh and eat. ("All I wanted was to eat, and then leave.") He wondered about the separate rest rooms and water fountains for whites and blacks all over town.

"I didn't understand it then," John Baker says, "and I still don't."

He was lucky, and he knows it. His parents. Yes, he was much-blessed there. They demanded he be honest, true to himself. They held him to a high standard. Today, he gives them the credit for the values that have guided him all his life. "Coming up in that home," he says, "that's what had a lot to do with my getting in this type of work. I had that foundation of discipline -- that was John and Louise Baker."

As a youngster, he rode in the patrol car with the man he still refers to as his "Daddy." Officer John Baker Sr. served over 40 years with the Raleigh Police Department. His son sat in the back of the car as his father drove the neighborhoods. He saw him pull over to the curb, speak firmly but politely to people. With respect. Always.

Happy times, sad times, people. Experiences. They shape a man. John Baker Jr.'s parents wanted him to go to college. He graduated from N.C. Central University. He was a star football player -- a big star, good enough to play 12 seasons in the National Football League.

But there was much life after that. He came home. He worked for then-U.S. Sen. Robert Morgan, served on the state Parole Commission. In 1978, he ran for sheriff of Wake County and won. He knew he had a lot of work to do. People told him things weren't good.

"I was told I should get rid of people," he remembers now, "and some people left because they didn't want to work for me. But I didn't fire a single soul." He acknowledges that sometimes through the years thereafter, he didn't fire people when maybe it would have been easier. "But," he says, "I can't forget that people have families, mortgages, groceries." Indeed, he worries about his own staff now, with the man who defeated him Nov. 5, the new sheriff, Donnie Harrison, taking over. The Sheriff's Office is a political one, after all.

His employees have appreciated his humanity. They are unfailingly loyal. His assistant, Trish Sanford, has worked with him for 34 years, before and during his years as sheriff. The officers have seen the big man's big heart. And they've seen his toughness. Not long after taking office, Baker was called downtown. A jail inmate had grabbed a female officer. He demanded to see Baker. Baker talked to him, then made his move. "I dove over the officer and knocked the guy against the wall," he recalls. "I yelled at her, 'Get the hell out of here!' But everybody froze. I guess it kind of shocked people, seeing this 6-foot-7, 280-pound man flying through the air..."

It's only one of the stories. There are others still to be lived. For him, there will be still more life after this, just as there was more after pro football. He is a young 67. He is a proud man. There have been rewards.

"As I move around the city," he says, "I have people calling out to me, 'Big John, if it weren't for you, I'd be in Central Prison. Or I'd be in the cemetery.' I've had Mammas and Daddies come to me, say they wanted me to talk to their kids, kids getting in trouble. I'd have 'em in here, and I'd say, 'There's no happy ending if you continue on this path. You have to go to school. You have to do what your parents say. You have no other choice.'

"You see, there's got to be more to this job than locking people up. You have to instill in young people there's a better life than crime. If you can do that, everybody's better off. That's what the job is all about."

Twenty-four years after his first election, we're all better off because we trusted John Baker to do the job.