Adele Ferguson - St. Patrick’s Day brings memories of Mustang heist

SO ANOTHER St. Patrick’s Day has come and gone, a time of sad memory for me.

It was on the day after St. Patrick’s Day 1971 that somebody stole my 1970 candy apple red Mustang with white upholstery and 8,000 miles on it from where it was parked behind two State Patrol cars next to the Legislative Building. There was a green derby in the back seat I’d gotten at Sen. Martin Durkan’s St. Patrick’s Day bash the night before. The Legislature was, of course, in session and I had driven from my hotel to the Capitol Campus early in the morning to my usual parking place, locked the car up, the steering wheel and the doors, and gone inside to work.

When I came back out in the late afternoon, the car was gone. I telephoned the Olympia police who told me to report it to the State Patrol. The Patrol told me since the theft was on the Capitol Campus, it was up to the police to handle it.

I called the police back and they wanted to know why the patrol wasn’t taking care of it. What does it matter, I said, this is taking so long my car is probably in Oregon by now. They reluctantly agreed to take the report but said they wouldn’t put it out to their officers until I came to the station and signed it. Being without wheels, I had to locate a good Samaritan and get a ride. I figured by now my car could be entering California.

ONE HOUR LATER, the police reported my registration certificate had been picked up by a jogger on the side of the road near the Mushroom Patch, wherever that was, so it was confirmed the car had been stolen. The cops said they even knew who had taken it. A group of youngsters from a county juvenile home were being treated to a tour of the Legislative Building and one of them took a powder. Said suspect was last seen in the vicinity of my car about noon. She also was reported seen later that day in a red Mustang by a police officer who knew her but didn’t yet know my car had been stolen.

Said suspect was nowhere to be found until returning home four days later sans automobile. When a friend of the suspect came forth to say he had picked her up in Olympia in his own car that day, the sheriff’s office, after searching every back road in the county (they said), wrote finis to my case.

When 30 days had passed without my car’s recovery, I had to negotiate a settlement. Remember, said my advisers, be mean. Insurance companies don’t understand anything but mean. I had always found my agent delightful but it was not he who would be doing the negotiating. It is the adjuster who takes the heat between the company which wants to save money and the customer who is aggrieved.

WE MET, the adjuster and I, and he asked if I had been checking into values. Well, I said, I talked with Uncle Karl. “Who is Uncle Karl?” he asked. Karl Herrman, the state insurance commissioner, I said, who else would you talk to about insurance?

“He’s your uncle?” asked the adjuster. No, I said, I just call him that. I’ve known him about ten years. He asked about my car and I asked him what my settlement should be. “What did he say?” asked the adjuster. I told him. “I’ll meet you Monday for the settlement,” he said. It turned out to be most acceptable.

That was that. They never found my car. It stayed on the record books for five years and then was purged as gone forever. I still think the guys in the garage where I parked it during the night got it by making duplicate keys and coming down to the campus for it that morning. They knew my schedule so they had all day to go far in it.

Funny thing. That day one of the TV guys told me I’d left my lights on. I knew I hadn’t so I didn’t check. Too bad. I might have discovered the loss while the car was in flight.

(Adele Ferguson can be reached at P.O. Box 69. Hansville, Wa, 98340.)