Let’s remember when Marysville was thrown into chaos by the kidnapping of their wooden policeman, on this day in 1917 (September 2)
Here’s a story that I find hilarious, for some reason.
Per HistoryLink’s Phil Dougherty:
On the night of September 2, 1917, Marysville’s wooden policeman is kidnapped from his post on the corner of State and 3rd streets by several intoxicated revelers. The policeman is ignominiously thrown into the Snohomish River, where he is later found floating with the tide. He is rescued and again placed on duty, but this turns out to be only one of a series of continuing misadventures for Marysville’s wooden cop.
And…
Others appreciated the wooden policeman all too well. On the night of September 2, a carload of revelers, returning from Vancouver, B.C., and fortified with booze, decided to snatch the silent sentinel from his post. They carried him off and dumped him into the Snohomish River on the way to Everett, where a fisherman found him floating with the tide — “a derelict without a rudder,” observed the Globe in its next weekly issue. But the Wooden One survived the ordeal relatively unscathed: The only damage was “the loss of the arrow, his kidnapers (sic) evidently not desiring that he should be able to point the place from whence they come (sic). Moral — nail him down.”
Evidently he was not nailed down, because on October 7 the wooden sentry was again nabbed and spirited away. Fortunately, he was recovered none the worse for wear the next day near East Stanwood. “There is talk now of using a chain to prevent the dummy from being picked up so easily,” reported the Globe the following Friday.
Read the whole thing:
