Until yesterday.

His uniformed force – nearly all 111 save for a few absences – hit the elevated stage and rows of fold-out metal seats outside headquarters yesterday to capture their image for posterity. They slipped on white gloves. They adjusted their dress-hat visors. Some even smiled.  “We only do this once every 50 years,” Sabagh said.

Peter Miscia, a patrolman who serves as the commander of Montclair’s nascent honor guard, was the afternoon’s master of ceremonies for a noticeably more diverse police force.  “Fall in. Fall in,” Miscia yelled as the 3 p.m. event unfolded outside the circa 1913 corner headquarters.  “Don’t argue with him. He’s got a gun,” one of the unarmed officers softly shot back.  Miscia, who as part of the honor guard also had a sword hanging from his belt, was looking forward to the end of this assignment. “It’s like trying to organize a bunch of grumpy mice,” he said.

Photographer Phil Cantor, who otherwise snaps pictures of beaming white-gowned ladies tossing bouquets, approached Sabagh with the idea of a group portrait. Cantor said he has a fondness for those old shots of doughboys in their military garb. “I was always fascinated by those giant battalion photos from World War I,” said Cantor, who runs a photography studio on busy Bloomfield Avenue.

A few passers-by stopped and gawked. “The troops,” one woman said as she walked by with an arm-full of library books.

The main lens was a Fuji 6×17 Panorama, a loaner from the camera-maker that retails, he said, for $5,000. “This is the monster,” he said.  This shoot had logistical challenges all its own.  “See how the ground slopes? We’re putting all the tall guys on that end,” Cantor said while pointing to the lower side of Valley Road. “Just to even it out.”

It was a quite a change of pace for Cantor, fresh from a weekend shoot taking individual shots of children on a T-ball team.

“I’m going to give you a 1, 2, 3 – fire,” Cantor yelled out to the supervisors and officers.  A voice emerged from the ranks. “Oh, don’t say that.”  Before the first shutter even clicked, Cantor sat on a metal folding chair in front of the ranks giving instructions.  “Don’t sit so far back in your chairs. Come slightly forward. One leg forward,” he said.

Unlike the portraits of old, this one shows off the equipment: three Harley-Davidson Road Kings and a showroom-fresh 2007 Dodge Charger that idles using only four of its six cylinders for fuel efficiency. Not that Sabagh doesn’t appreciate the vintage variety.  “They had station wagons, stick-shifts, which was great,” Sabagh said of his counterparts a half-century ago. “They had character.”  As for the motorcycle cops, they still had a vintage look. They packed their gun belts and lifted their left legs atop the yellow painted curb, giving a good view of their black knee-high boots.

It was something of a power trip for Cantor, positioned with his three tripod-held cameras atop an 8-by-8 platform surrounded by yellow tape reading “POLICE LINE. DO NOT CROSS.”

In a post-shoot gathering, the old 1946 photograph sparked a quick ancestry-like hunt to identify the chief in the picture. Everyone could point him out. But naming him was another matter.  “The older records. Every chief filed things differently,” Sabagh said of the lack of information as he searched some files.  Soon, Deputy Chief Roger Terry, the department’s most senior member with 34 years on duty, rang up former Police Chief Edward Giblin, who retired long ago. The unidentified chief from 1946, it turns out, was Tim Fleming, he said.

As officers left with their dress blues on hangers after the voluntary call-up, Sabagh checked up on any crime stats during an hour when coverage was provided by police from Verona, Glen Ridge, the Essex County Sheriff’s Department and Montclair State University.  An initial report is that a visiting officer had to shoot an injured deer felled by a vehicle.

“It figures. We have coverage for one hour, and a gun is discharged,” he said. But in seconds, he learns that wasn’t the case. No gun was fired. The deer was DOA.

That left only one other notable police response, apparently.  “A juvenile throwing rocks at a school bus,” he said.