2009 filled with weird, wacky happenings in area

Kenneth Hart/The Independent

As is the case most years, 2009 had no storage of quirky, offbeat and downright weird news stories that captured our attention.

And, as is our custom on New Year’s Day, we’d now like to treat you, Gentle Reader, to a review of a few of the events of the year just ended that made us go “hmmm.”

We’ll start off with the ignominious end to one of the longest-running news oddities in recent memory.

Dropping the rock

The long-running soap opera surrounding an 8-ton sandstone boulder that was dredged from the bottom of the Ohio River in 2007 came to an ignominious end in July — sort of.

At the request of the prosecutor, Greenup Circuit Judge Bob Conley dismissed a felony charge against Steven R. Shaffer, the Ironton resident who led the expedition to remove the rock.

The charge — which could have resulted in Shaffer being sentenced to up to five years in prison had he been convicted — was dropped because Greenup Commonwealth’s Attorney Clifford Duvall said he couldn’t conclusively prove that the rock extracted from the river by Shaffer and his cohorts was the same Indian Head Rock that is registered as a protected antiquity in Kentucky.

A federal civil suit over the boulder’s removal filed against Shaffer and others by Kentucky Attorney General Jack Conway remains active, however.

Millionaire mom

Mark Hatfield did something really nice for his mom, Mary, on Mother’s Day.

He made her a multimultimultimillionaire.

There was only one small problem —she’d have to move to Africa for her money to be worth anything at all. And, even then, it wouldn’t be worth much.

Mark Hatfield brought home some Zimbabwean currency — which was printed with denominations ranging from “Fifty Trillion Dollars” to “500 Million Dollars” as a souvenir for his mother. Mark Hatfield has spent the past several years working as a missionary in Africa.

The people of Zimbabwe have been the victims of some of the highest inflation rates in history since World War II. Eventually, the government decided to simply erase nine zeroes from the country’s exchange rate to try and get a handle on the situation. Cash transactions in Zimbabwean currency typically revolve around “Quadrillions” or “Quads.”

Confederate cash

In another story involving nonnegotiable currency, a local pastor found a couple of Confederate bills tucked amid the pages of a Bible.

The $100 and $20 notes, both dated 1862, were discovered by Clell Lucas in a Bible he found in an old house at Rush that he tore down.

Twitter trial

A television news reporter’s use of a relatively new social-networking technology caused a mild stir in a Carter County courtroom in March.

Carter Circuit Judge Rebecca Phillips temporarily halted the trial of Patricia Renee Valandingham after she learned that longtime WSAZ-TV reporter Randy Yohe was using Twitter to send updates about the case.

It was not so much the tweeting itself the judge objected to, but the fact that she wasn’t told about it beforehand. She said she was primarily concerned that the messages could have been received by jurors or witnesses.

In the end, the jurors all said they hadn’t seen the tweets and Yohe was allowed to Twitter away.

The trial itself was one of the more bizarre ones in recent memory, too. Valandingham, a former employee of the Olive Hill McDonald’s restaurant, was convicted of criminal conspiracy to commit murder for her role in a 2008 plot to kill her husband by placing rat poison on his McChicken sandwich.

At his wife’s sentencing, Brent Valandingham, the intended victim of the plot, said he and his wife still loved one another and that he believed she never intended to cause him harm.

Football homecoming

This one didn’t involve a queen, a dance or a game, but an actual football.

A 1943 Tomcat football was returned to Ashland from the Pacific Northwest in March.

The ball was sent to Ashland School Superintendent Steve Gilmore by Wilson O’Neal, a collector who lives in Tacoma, Wash. O’Neal spotted the vintage ball at a sale and was drawn by the mystery of it. He determined that it was the game ball from a 1943 contest between Ashland and Huntington High.

While the mystery of how the ball traveled some 3,000 miles from Ashland was never completely solved, it was eventually realized that it probably made its way to Washington through Gerald Jarvis, an end on the ’43 Tomcat team who caught a pass for the only touchdown in Ashland’s 7-2 win over HHS.

After finding out about the ball, Gilmore contacted O’Neal, who agreed to sell it to the school district for what he paid for it, $35.

Sliced sycamore

Talk about making lemonade out of lemons. Or, study aids out of logs, as the case may be.

On Valentine’s Day, the combination of high winds and soggy soil brought down a white oak tree that had towered over Chuck Woolery Boulevard for years. When it fell, it took down a nearby sycamore with it. Park workers were unable to save either tree, and both had to be cut.

Unable to bear the prospect of the grand old trees winding up in someone’s fireplace, members of the Ashland Tree Board contacted all 10 schools in Ashland and asked them if they’d like to have chunks of them to use as study aids.

All 10 schools jumped at the chance and wound up taking slices of the sycamore. Ashland Community and Technical college biology professor Charles Howes latches onto a section of the oak for a similar purpose.

By counting the rings, Howes determined the oak was 230 years old.

KENNETH HART can be reached at khart@dailyindependent.com or (606) 326-2654.

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