Police arrested the man who stole the Jackie Robinson statue in Wichita, Kansas. It was stolen for the metal.
My dad worked at General Electric for 46 years. The plant specialized in wire and cable. Up until the mid 1970s, if my dad needed to replace a power cord on a toaster or a lamp, he could just take a piece of cord from work. I’m not sure if there were rules against it or not, but I suspect as long as employees didn’t abuse it, management didn’t care.
That changed when the price of copper skyrocketed. No one could take an inch of copper out of the plant. At the same time, theft of copper from buildings went way up. It’s a sad side-effect of inflation.
Didn’t the pieces of the statue end up in a garbage can on fire? If it were copper wire, and they were burning the wrap off that might make sense…
That’s a good question. I think the statue came from a mold. My guess is that the outrage over the theft was such that they couldn’t sell it, so they tried to destroy the evidence.