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Mark Freeman Commentary Over years, readers come up with best stuff Say what you want about Monica Lewinsky, Milli Vanilli and anyone who thinks Pete Rose is a sympathetic victim of media insensitivity -- they are all proof that the '90s have definitely created more than their fair share of media-made misfits. When it comes to news of the weird and weirder, Oregon's outdoors have certainly kept pace with the rest of America in supplying bizarre fodder for outdoor columns over the past decade. And as the sun sets Friday on the 1990s, media dirt-wads across the globe are taking reasonably precious newsprint space and creating all sorts of "10 Best" lists for the decade. Like, 10 Best Movies of the '90s, or 10 Worst, or 10 Most Influential People or Athletes, as well as the Top 10 Stories for the Decade. What most of these list-gatherers won't tell you is that reader responses to stories are usually more interesting and readable than the actual stories themselves. In short, you readers come up with better material than we do. And to prove it, here is a new twist on the Top 10 lists. These are the Top 10 Reader Responses to Outdoor Stories of the 1990s, as told by yours truly in this space weekly since 1989. Some of these responses are from people who made the news, some from their friends, their sympathizers or pure strangers. But in each case, the responses struck more to the core of the story than the story itself. From certified letters demanding I stop poking fun at someone to voice-mail rantings over desecration of Britain's blue-blood inbreds, readers have upstaged the writer time after time after time. So here are the best reader reactions from the past decade, in descending order: 10. Don't Go Fishing, Just Go -- In a June 22, 1990 column, I ran a contest to see if I should go steelhead fishing on the morning of my July 14 wedding to my wife, Susan. Readers voted a resounding no, but none voted so caustically as Roberta Cervantes of Medford. Cervantes likened my "wonderful" idea to all sorts of dumb things selfish husbands do to take their wives for granted. "Well, Mark, if you're so self-centered and cold-hearted to WANT to go fishing on your wedding day, you fit right in with this `wonderful' group of jerks I've just mentioned," Cervantes wrote in a letter. "But if you GO fishing on your wedding day, I hope Susan doesn't wait when you're late, 'cuz you will be." 9. A Knockout of an Idea -- In a Jan. 30, 1997 column, I recommended an alternative to statewide initiative votes for settling the debate on whether hound-hunting for cougars should be banned in Oregon. My idea: Take Sally Mackler, who is one of the backers of the anti-hound Bear and Cougar Coalition, and Cheryle York, who is a hound-hunting activist from Prospect, and put them together in a boxing ring. Whoever KOs the other gets to make hound-hunting policies. And we could put the fight on pay-per-view and use the profits for cougar-management programs. Mackler telephoned the next day, with the following message: "I thought that was funny," a serious-sounding Mackler dead-panned. "You probably don't think of me as someone with a sense of humor. But I have one. That's all." 8. Beach Blanket Bambi -- Jackson County Expo manager Chris Borovansky found love on the sands in Hawaii and it has four legs and plenty of spots. While vacationing with friend Ed Mayer in Hawaii during December 1994, Borovansky spied a whitetail deer fawn caught in ocean currents about 50 yards off the beach. He and Mayer swam out to rescue the fawn and carried it to shore, where Borovansky attempted to resuscitate the deer. As shocked sunbathers and snickering police watched, Borovansky pressed his mouth to the deer's mouth and blew breath after breath into the lifeless fawn's lungs. The deer even vomited once in Borovansky's mouth, and it took several Bloody Marys to kill that taste. Alas, the deer died. But Borovansky's heroics, highlighted in a Dec. 23, 1994 column, drew him lots of ribbing from friends who thought he was nuts, yet it smoothed some ruffles between him and some business adversaries. "Yes, I gave mouth-to-mouth to a deer," Borovansky said. "I have never looked at a deer the same way again. And as long as my friend Ed Mayer is around, that story will never die. "(But) if there's photos, nobody's going to see them -- if I have anything to do with it." 7. More Naughty than Nice -- A man dressed in a Santa suit allegedly tried to treat himself to some extra venison by poaching a deer Halloween night in the Coos County hills on Halloween in 1992. But that treat turned out to be a big trick when Mr. Claus was caught shooting not at a live deer, but at the Oregon State Police's stuffed deer decoy used to catch illegal hunters. Sgt. Steve Ross, who has since been promoted to lieutenant in Medford, knew he had a good case against defendant Claus, but he feared some repercussions come Dec. 25. "It's definitely one of those unique ones," Ross said of the Kringle Caper on Nov. 12, 1992. "And we've had some concerns of what effects this would have on us for Christmas." 6. Timing is everything -- Back in 1995, before Donald Scott Dungey became Southern Oregon's most notorious big-game poacher, Dungey was the attorney general's office's most notorious alleged big-game hunting guide scammer. In 1994, the attorney general's office filed a civil suit against Dungey, claiming he bilked out-of-state hunters out of money for big-game hunting trips he never intended to provide. Dungey denied the accusations, but settled out of court in 1995, agreeing to shut down his guiding business and pay the state $15,000. He returned to renegade guiding, eventually getting convicted on federal poaching charges and serving most of 1999 in federal prison. When first interviewed about the 1994 civil case, Dungey denied any wrong-doing, then asked if the Mail Tribune was interested in doing a feature story on the West Coast's only husband-wife bass-fishing team. When he said he was half of that team, and was told no such story would be forthcoming, Dungey said: "I could use some good publicity." 5. Leap-Frogging to Conclusions -- On April 28, 1992, a Mail Tribune story recounted how trout anglers at Howard Prairie Lake had exceptionally good luck fishing in drought-plagued low water during the opening of the spring fishing season. The story included a picture of Mike Szpak of Medford, standing on a Howard Prairie dock with a cigar in his mouth and holding his rod, tackle and cooler. The picture ran on the Associated Press's western wires, and was reprinted in two Mail Tribune spring fishing guides until Szpak telephoned the Mail Tribune in 1995. "Would you quit printing that picture of me?" he croaked. "It makes me look like a @#%&*@! bullfrog." 4. Sticking His Neck Out -- Annual "Turkey Awards" have been doled out each Thanksgiving to people for the noble or ignominious things they did to the outdoors that particular year. Good deeds earned succulent turkey breasts or thighs; dumb deeds earned gristle or other parts of a flipped bird. In the November 1995 installment, a Shady Cove convenience-store owner was awarded the neck -- the culinary equivalent of giving someone a wedgy -- for his summer-long whining that Jackson County sheriff's deputies were "over-enforcing" the state law banning drunken boating. The store owner argued that drinking and boating are a "tradition" and that families can't have fun rafting on the river if drunken boating laws are enforced. After the column, the recipient sent a registered letter to the Mail Tribune, saying the award defamed him and caused him financial losses for which he might sue. Then he demanded the paper right the wrong and "retract the neck." The neck stayed where it belonged. 3. Oh, Deer -- When asked by the Mail Tribune in May 1996 to supply a good example of someone who has benefited from its fledgling Oregon Outdoor Women seminars, the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife offered Thelma Becker, 72, of Brookings. Becker used to hunt with her husband, but he skinned and boned all the deer she had shot in 50 years of hunting together. Widowed in 1995, she enrolled in the Outdoor Women's big-game hunting seminar to learn how to field-dress deer, and her feisty wit made her the darling of the seminar. It turned out Becker could have benefited from paying more attention to the ethics part of the course than the field-dressing. On the second to last night of the 1995 coast buck season, Becker shot a buck on private land -- after hours and from the roadway while the animal was illuminated by her truck's headlights, police records indicate. She pleaded guilty to a Class A misdemeanor of illegally taking a blacktail deer with the aid of a light, paid a $200 fine and lost her hunting privileges for two years. Police also confiscated the deer before Becker could field-dress it. "So I didn't get to practice what I learned," Becker said. "Maybe next time." 2. Picture Imperfect -- Les Jones and Tammy Sabin of Medford learned, in September 1994, that a picture can be worth more than 1,000 words -- and sometimes it's worth $900 in angling citations. In April 1993, Jones and Sabin were illegally fishing at the base of Umpqua Falls when a ranger took a picture of Jones holding a 30-inch steelhead caught there. The ranger didn't know fishing was illegal at the fall's base, until he showed that photo to Oregon State Police Senior Trooper Steve Callaway. With only a photo but no name, Callaway tried for several months to get the mysterious man in the photo identified. He asked Oregon newspapers to print it, and only the Mail Tribune did. A reader tipped Callaway to Jones and Sabin's identity but thought they were living in California. Callaway checked utilities records and found the pair had moved to Medford from Madras and had gotten electricity hooked up to their new home just a few days before Callaway called. Callaway cited the pair for several angling violations, the bails totaling $900. When asked for his response, Jones was pounding nails into a fence at his house as he learned exactly how it was that the police found him and Sabin. "If we were still living in Madras and you didn't print that picture, they'd be looking for me for 10 years," Jones said. But Jones' anger waned without hammering any newspaper columnists. The couple, who never had a picture of that 30-inch steelhead, asked for -- and received -- a copy of the photo run by the Mail Tribune. "For how much that picture cost us," Sabin said, "we better get one." 1. They're Cute AND Smart -- The best reader retort of the '90s came last February, after a column about why it's hard to tell my young son his dog was missing. I wrote that my inbred-purebred chocolate Lab is both weird looking and dumb as a rock, prompting my statement that my dog and the British royal family are "classic examples of why cousins should not breed." That generated a terse telephone message, saved all these months, from a reader who identified herself only as "from Medford," saying she hoped I could find my dog but wanted to take issue with my kissing-cousins comment. Assuming the worst from the offspring of cousins, the caller said, was rude and untrue. The caller said she has two cousins who not only married but "had two very beautiful children, and they were smart, too." Well, maybe. But what's so great about a family tree that's nothing but a trunk? Stay tuned this next decade, and maybe we'll find out. (Staff writer Mark Freeman covers the outdoors for the Mail Tribune. Call him at 776-4470, or e-mail him at: [email protected] ) Outdoor Journal main page Mail Tribune Copyright � The Mail Tribune 1999, Medford, Oregon USA