#crime question mark

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Theft of outhouses is engineering coup by Julius Glaug (Times Staff Writer)

Who stole those outhouses? Four outhouses vanished this summer from the Sugarcreek Nature Reserve off Wilmington Pk. near Bellbrook without a trace. "What would anyone want with a four-ton outhouse?" mused Alex Shartle, superintendent of the 550-acre park owned by the Dayton Montgomery County Park District. "Not a trace of outhouses, serial number: M-E-N, has been found by the sheriff's office." Even the concrete slab where the outhouses had rested were gone, the holes carefully filled in and sodded with grass. "At first my staff didn't know what had happened when complaints came in there were no outhouses," explained Mr. Shartle. "The new outhouses we had built last year were gone. Not even the hole where they had been could be found." He said he thought the outhouse thefts might have been some sort of college student prank. "I sort of expected the outhouses to appear on some courthouse lawn or in front of a police station somewhere," he explained. "As far as I know, none did." One outhouse theft was an amazing feat of engineering, according to Mr. Shartle. The outhouse had been at the bottom of a steep hill behind the Kettering Archery Club building at the archery center on Ferry Rd. "An outhouse and concrete slab weighs more than four tons," explained Mr. Shartle. "Yet the outhouse and concrete slab was moved intact several hundred feet up the steep hillside and put inside a truck without a crane." He said that the hole where the outhouse had been was carefully filled in and the site sodded with grass. "It was a real neat feat of engineering," Mr. Shartle said. "My staff and I couldn't find a scrap of wood or even a tire track to verify our theory of how it was done." The thefts required building new outhouses for the 550-acre nature park. Mr. Shartle put two summer employees, Wright State fine arts graduates Robert Aselage and Ric Jones, to work constructing new outhouses on rainy days when outside maintenance work could not be done. Both Mr. Aselage and Mr. Jones will enter the Maryland Institute College of Art next month to begin work toward a master's degree in fine arts. As a result, Sugarcreek Nature Preserve may have the finest and most interesting outhouses in the stsate. Each of the outhouses constructed by Mr. Aselage and Mr. Jones have been decorated inside with landscapes, artistic patterns, and other paintings. "If you have to sit in an outhouse," said Mr. Aselage, "why shouldn't it be interesting, if possible?"

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