Smith: Rip-offs of copper wire go back at least to Ray Davis and ‘Fat’

A bell rang in Noreen Carvolth’s head upon reading of the four gentlemen busted on suspicion of stripping copper wire from the complexes that formerly housed Sutter Hospital and the Sonoma County Water Agency.

Noreen found and read again a collectible “Wanted” poster that she and her husband, Dr. Richard Carvolth, had framed.

Issued by late Sonoma County Sheriff John Kinder Smith on Jan. 17, 1916, the poster is headlined “Wanted for Grand Larceny.”

It describes two suspected “junk and wire thieves.” Ray Davis, 19, comes off as unremarkable: “5 ft. 5 in, 125 or 130 lbs, very light hair, small features; tough character; ex-inmate Preston School of Industry.”

But it was obvious Sheriff Smith had fun conveying a mental image of the second fugitive: “Richard Cline, alias Dick Cline, alias ‘Fat’.”

“35 yrs old, 5 ft. 4 in., 230 lbs. short heavy build, short legs, walks wobbly like a duck, very noticeable. Last seen wore small sandy moustache, black stiff cap patterned after fashion of fireman or an officer, top woolly cloth, striped bib overalls, short brown overcoat, no other coat or vest.

“Scar on leg below knee caused by burn - electric wire.”

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A WORLD RECORD. Now this.

Randy Ricci is advised that the NASCAR Hall of Fame is interested in the unusual collection that four years ago earned the Santa Rosa swimming pool cleaner an entry in the Guinness Book of World Records.

You may recall the day in May 2014 that Ricci set out along the Start/Finish line at Sonoma Raceway his 324 cereal boxes bearing the likenesses of NASCAR drivers and/or race cars.

Some of the special, unopened boxes of Cheerios and Cocoa Puffs and Golden Grahams and so on were autographed by NASCAR drivers. Some contained toy NASCAR cars.

Ricci, a ’72 graduate of Montgomery High, purchased his first NASCAR cereal box from the former G&G Supermarket in 1990: a Kellogg’s Frosted Mini-Wheats box emblazoned with a picture of a 19-year-old newcomer to the stock car race circuit named Jeff Gordon.

For most of the past four years, the boxes were in storage at the Sonoma track.

Over time some were emptied out and flattened, some nibbled on.

But Ricci has duplicates. He’s confident his cereal boxes remain world-record worthy and will enchant visitors to the NASCAR Hall of Fame in uptown Charlotte, North Carolina.

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IT’S OLD NEWS that many newspapers are hurting, growing thinner and cutting staff as readers and advertisers migrate from print to digital.

The owners of four Sonoma County weeklies are trying something novel to bring in dollars to sustain and expand their coverage: Sonoma West Publishers is selling shares through what it calls print journalism’s first direct public offer.

Publisher Rollie Atkinson got the idea for a public buy-in from the online East Bay newspaper Berkeleyside. Rollie runs Sonoma West Times &?News, The Healdsburg Tribune, The Windsor Times and Cloverdale Reveille.

He hopes to raise as much as $400,000 from investors who are putting up at least $1,000 each. How’s it going so far?

Reports Rollie, “It’s been fantastic, beyond expectations.”

You can reach Staff Writer Chris Smith at 707-521-5211 and chris.smith@pressdemocrat.com.