The ADVANCE ALASKA Network © 1997 KEVIN McGEHEE September 30, 1997

This afternoon, as I drove to a friend's house in the Riverview area to put up a Pete Kelly yard sign he had requested, I noticed that one of his neighbors had a Hank Hove yard sign.

I also noticed that it had been vandalized. Someone had apparently attempted to yank the sign off the stake, and had succeeded only in unfastening one side of the sign and messing it up pretty badly. Not so badly that one couldn't tell at a glance that it was a Hove sign, but pretty badly.

Having my staple gun with me, I decided on an impulse to do what I could to restore the sign to a better semblance of original condition. The side of the sign that had come loose was reinforced with an old "on strike" picket sign, and apparently the installers had used short staples that couldn't go all the way through the double-sheet of plastic and still grip the wood properly. My gun has nice, long staples, so I had no problem securing the sign better than before.

Having done what I could, short of replacing the sign completely (for which I lacked the materials), I returned to my original chore of installing my friend's Pete Kelly sign. My nice, long staples punched so deeply through the stake I had brought, that I could see tiny, twin bumps in the surface of the other side of the sign -- where the business ends of the staples started to emerge.

Now that's workmanship.

As I was busy at this chore, the resident of the home where I had repaired the Hank Hove sign pulled out of his driveway and drove off after giving me and my Kelly sign a gimlet-eyed stare. I decided he was merely surprised that someone working for the other side would actually try to *repair* his sign, let alone refrain from finishing the vandalism.

Little did I know.

Many hours later as I returned home, I found that my own campaign signs -- three of them, one for Pete, one for Mike Prax, and one for Royce Chapman -- had been knocked down. The stake for one of the signs was actually broken off, and there was evidence the same had been attempted on the other two.

The night before, I had learned that the borough's illicit thought police had been at large, *invading private property* to damage or steal Pete Kelly signs. And we're not just talking yard signs here -- at 17-Mile Chena Hot Springs Road, a BIG sign was actually stolen from private property. Not just taken down, as DOT might have done had the sign been too close to the road, but taken away where the landowner couldn't find it again.

It was with this information in mind that I had given in to my impulse to repair the Hove sign over by Riverview. If a few SS wanabe's choose to be thuggish and try to silence political speech with which they disagree, that's their problem. There's no need for people who don't support Hank Hove to sink to the level of those who do.

Yet after having been seen performing a simple act of common courtesy and decency, I come home to find my signs torn down. Would I repair that Hove sign again? Yes.

If I wanted to make the borough more polarized and hateful, I wouldn't be supporting Pete Kelly in the first place.