Overall Picture: Oregon campers catch and hogtie Peeping Richard
Overall Picture: Oregon campers catch and hogtie Peeping Richard
By: Bill Mead, Tehachapi News Columnist
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Posted by editor Tue Nov 30, 1999 00:00:00 PST
Viewed 536 times
0 responses 0 comments I hope you're paying attention when I tell you the most interesting news isn't found in the New York Times or on the Fox News channel. For my money, the really neat stuff comes off the pages of community newspapers around the country. That's why I regularly check local papers on the Internet. If I hadn't done that last week I couldn't warn you to be on the lookout for a fast-moving guy with a posthole digger and a worried look on his face.
This poor wretch was described in the Curry Coastal Pilot, published in Brookings, Ore., as the unidentified cause of 40,000 people losing phone service when he tried to place a fence post right over a critical telephone transmission line serving the Southern Oregon and Northern California coasts. Since the authorities knew right where the misguided hole had been bored and could easily determine who owned the property, I can't buy that “unidentified” baloney. My take on this major news break is that the authorities were trying to save the knucklehead from a lynching. That I can buy.
The Brookings fence post digger was a victim of circumstances but according to Oregon's Beaverton Valley Times, Peeping Richard deserved the vigilante justice he got. Richard, who turned out to be a portly man of 65 years, was hiding in the bushes ogling females using a campground latrine when he was detected and apprehended by male campers. Rather than saddle anybody with the tedium of keeping an eye on Richard while everybody waited for the police to haul him off, they tied poor Richard firmly to a tree.
But that wasn't the worst part. While Richard was tied up, probably in great discomfort, he endured tongue-lashings from the female campers, according to the Times story. In the midst of this torment, Richard proceeded to make things worse. He told the ladies that he had been a peeper for the past 15 years and he thought of it simply as a hobby. Whatever happened to stamp collecting?
Things didn't go much better for some other Oregonians in Lake Oswego who found themselves mixed up in dueling weddings. Their hometown paper, the Lake Oswego review, reported that the two weddings took place at the same time in neighboring houses. One wedding party complained to police that their music was being drowned out by music from next door. The article indicated that the cops made some kind of diplomatic arrangement and both weddings went on peacefully.
Ending musical wars seems to be one of the lesser talents of the Lake Oswego police department. One of its local detectives became a popular hero a short time ago when he doggedly went through old unsolved case files and sent some blood-stained evidence to the state lab for DNA testing. The results fingered a 49-year-old local man who is now facing charges for killing an elderly couple 27 years ago.
Back in Beaverton Valley, the Times gave a lot of space to actress Sarah Jessica Parker's visit to a local store to promote her line of perfume. Whoever wrote the story fell under Sarah's spell, emphasizing that her beauty and charm moved a lot of perfume out the door.
I can't imagine that Peeping Richard knew the gorgeous Sarah was coming to Oregon or he wouldn't have wasted his time skulking through the bushes to get his jollies. Why didn't he get a legal eyeful of Sarah instead? I don't know why the Times didn't explore that angle. Readers hate loose ends.
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