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Vandals slash, steal Arnold 'peace pole'
By RON DeLACY ARNOLD -- Vandals hacked away, toppled and stole a "peace pole" that had stood at White Pines Park off Highway 4 above Arnold. "It boggles my mind that anyone would want to do this," said Doug Scott, president of the Arnold Rotary Club, alternately calling the culprits "yay-hoos," "Neanderthals" and "creeps." It had to be more than one person, he said, because of the size of the monument -- between 16 and 18 feet tall, about a foot thick, solid wood. "May peace prevail on Earth," was inscribed on its four sides in Mewok, Spanish, Japanese and English. Scott said tribal leaders from Jackson helped put together the American Indian phrasing, and that Dorrington millwright Ron Glass built the pole with local pine. The pole was dedicated to world peace. There are something like 10,000 peace poles erected around the world, Scott said. This one, sponsored by the Arnold Rotarians, went up about two years ago. Service club members discovered the chain-saw vandalism over the weekend, and Scott said investigators think it happened about 3 or 4 a.m. Saturday. "Somebody has got to have heard it," he said. The club is offering a $1,000 reward for information leading to a conviction. And Scott is confident that the bad guys will be caught. Glass had planted the monument in a concrete footing, with steel rebar extending about 3 feet from the ground. Several chain-saw scars were found in the rebar area, so it looked as though the vandals kept making cuts until they got above the rebar. About 3 feet of the peace pole, the section with the steel reinforcement, remains at the White Pines site. "It's disgusting," said Dave Webb, another Rotarian. "If nothing else, I hope those people ruined their chain saw." |
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