Road Apples by Tim Sanders
Sept. 12, 2011

The stories behind the headlines

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We here at the Sanders School of Investigative Journalism and Ballroom Dancing do not just report the news, we study each headline carefully, looking for similarities which might tend to confirm our long-held belief that there are no accidents–everything happens for a reason, and to everything there is a season. Consider, for example, the following headline and accompanying story from the International Business Times, dated Sept. 2, 2011:


“PANTY BOMB: 3,000 PAIRS OF PANTIES DROPPED ON OHIO TOWN

“Citizens of Fairfield, Ohio, awoke on Wednesday to a rare sight; their town covered in 3,000 pairs of panties.

... [Deputy Sheriff Gary] Hummel told the station [KSPR] that it took a few hours to collect all the evidence. Some appeared to be folded the way they come in packaging, while others appeared to have been worn. In one location alone, his crew filled up 10 giant garbage bags full of new and used undies. The underwear apparently came in a variety of colors and patterns.

‘There’s a combination of new and used underwear, which could be some person that has some sort of fetish - that has had them for several years.’ Fairfield County Sheriff Dave Phalien told ABC News. ‘I don’t know how you could accumulate that volume of underwear.’

 Phalien added that there had been no reports of any recent lingerie theft.”


The report included a video of Channel 10 reporter Ashleigh Barry holding a stick at arm’s length with a pair of white panties hanging from the end.

The casual, untrained observer might say that this was just another “Panties from Heaven” story, and assume that, due to a severe panty shortage in Fairfield, God had blessed the little Ohio community with showers of panties in answer to their prayers. And I might have thought so, too. Until, that is, I read the following September 7, 2011 Associated Press story on the AOL website:


“NATHAN MARK HARDY ARRESTED WITH LIVE LOBSTERS IN SHORTS

“D’IBERVILLE, Miss. – A man in southern Mississippi is accused of trying to walk out of a D’Iberville grocery store without paying for food items he’d stuffed into his cargo shorts including live lobsters.

Police Chief Wayne Payne says 35-year-old Nathan Mark Hardy was arrested Saturday after allegedly being caught stuffing food into his cargo shorts - two bags of jumbo shrimp, a pork loin and two live lobsters.

Payne says Hardy, of Biloxi, tried to escape by throwing the pork loin at employees at the local Winn Dixie but fell while running away. He was arrested at the scene.”


“AHA,” I said to myself, “This is not just your average, run-of-the-mill live lobsters in cargo shorts story.”

“Why is that?” you may ask.

Well, it’s not just because the D’Iberville Police Chief’s name was Wayne Payne, and it’s not just because Nathan Mark Hardy chose to throw his pork loin rather than one of his live lobsters or a bag of jumbo shrimp at the Winn Dixie employees, either. If any other reasonable human being were planning a seafood meal, the pork loin would obviously have been the first to go. And there was no mention in that article of what personal human parts those two armored arthropods with huge crusher claws might have gone after down deep in those cargo shorts to make poor Nathan scream, lose his balance and fall over. Who knows what goes through a lobster’s mind when he’s being kidnapped? We can only note the obvious connection between the two news stories–one from Ohio, the other from Mississippi.

The connection is college football. Both incidents occurred during the opening week of the NCAA football season. Fairfield, Ohio is just over 100 miles southwest of Columbus, home of the OSU Buckeyes. And D’Iberville, Mississippi is little more than 200 miles southeast of Starkville, home of the MSU Bulldogs. My friend Jim Pleger mentioned the Fairfield panty story to me in an email. Jim lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and thus is a serious University of Michigan football fan. As such he has no love for the Ohio State team, and suggested that maybe the panties were an “outpouring of grief” over OSU coach Tressel’s resignation. My guess was that if the Lord hadn’t dropped those panties like manna from Heaven, then most likely a bunch of Akron students had conducted a tactical panty raid on the Ohio State Athletic Dormitory, just to throw the Buckeyes off their game plan against Akron. Then they probably drove south to Fairfield and left their panty calling cards there as a diversion. Of course it didn’t work. Even without their panties, the Buckeyes beat the Zips 42 to ... well, zip.

And as to the lobsters in the shorts in Mississippi, my guess would be that college football was involved there, too. Nathan was just stocking up some provisions for a fancy seafood tailgate meal at the upcoming Mississippi State-Auburn game.

Like I said, there are no accidents. Trained investigative journalists learn to dig for the stories behind the headlines. And if we can’t find any, we do what investigative journalists have done for decades. We follow our instincts, interview at least three independent sources, pour ourselves an adult beverage and then make something up. To everything there is a season, and right now it’s college football season.