Sep 18, 2005

Police news, circa 1974

Posted by Mary |

As part of my indexing work at UAF, I've been working on the 1974 issues of the Pioneer All-Alaska Weekly. I came across this in the police blotter and, well, I just found it interesting.

25 bears?

An Anchorage man reported taking seven bears in defense of life. The man said he and a companion had shot the seven bears at Dot Lake where he said 25 bears had attacked him. He said he didn't know whether or not he wounded any bears.
Troopers investigated, reporting they searched the area and found no sign of bears - that they found only some empty rifle casings and some trees had been shot up.
The troopers concluded the men were either having flash backs or were on some kind of drug trips.


Ah, Fairbanks during the pipeline heyday.

1 comments:

Anonymous said...

Oh, my, now that's a nice AAW police blotter entry.

I wrote quite a few of the AAW police blotters in the late 80s. My favorite was the one about the guys who held up the International Newsstand (a porn shop with a lot of papers) with crossbows and escaped on snowmachines. Brilliant that.

Did you find the little book that Tom Snapp published, that's a collection of the wilder blotter tales? It's worth tracking down.

BTW, do you know what happened to Tom Snapp's AAW clippings/notes archive? It was huge, perhaps better than the morgue at the News-Miner. Also, Snapp was working for years on a novelization of AK political corruption that included lots of stuff that he knew about but hadn't published in the paper.

IIRC, Andy Williams bought the paper and then sold it to John Lindauer. Lord knows that Lindauer made of the archive.

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