ODDLY ENOUGH

ODDLY ENOUGH

Scientology founder built trails on Mount Rainier

TACOMA, WASH.

Four years of research and the discovery of a wooden sign have uncovered a historical link between Tacoma, the first trails at Mount Rainier and L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of the Church of Scientology.

The story starts and ends with Carl Fabiani, a former National Park Service employee who retired in 2010 after 45 years working at Mount Rainier.

Fabiani found a wooden sign about seven years ago while doing trail maintenance work just off the Wonderland Trail loop near Longmire. The sign mentioned something about Eagle Scouts, he recalled recently.

“I was very surprised to find a trail sign at that particular location,” Fabiani said.

The sign turned out to be a key in the narrative that Issaquah resident Chris Finn has pieced together in the past four years.

Finn’s research focused on a group of Eagle Scouts responsible for building and repairing trails in August 1925. The trails were some of the first trails built for the National Park Service.

“This was the first time the Scouts were actually doing a community-service type activity for free for the park service,” Finn said.

The hand-selected group of Eagle Scouts, which included boys from Tacoma, Seattle, Everett and Bellingham, built two new trails and repaired more than a mile of old ones.

Finn is a volunteer with Friends of L. Ron Hubbard Foundation, and he told The News Tribune that his research started with notes written by the founder of Scientology alluding to trail work during his time as a Tacoma Scout.

Hubbard was one of the 13 Scouts responsible for those first trails. He was a member of the regional Boy Scouts of America Pacific Harbors Council.

City considers taking ban on spitting off of the books

GRAND RAPIDS, Mich.

A ban on spitting in public in Grand Rapids could soon be off the books.

The Grand Rapids Press reported that the City Commission planned to consider deleting the word “expectorate” from a list of prohibited public acts that includes urination and defecation.

City Attorney Catherine Mish wrote in a memo that language was added to the code in an era when the use of chewing tobacco was prevalent and spittoons were common. She says the code’s language “did not disappear as quickly as the spittoon.”

Mish says she contacted local health officials, who told her spitting doesn’t pose as much of a threat as it might have in the past.

Mish has been scouring city code to find archaic rules, including one recently on being willfully annoying.

Associated Press