CLEARWATER, FL – In the charming backwater town of Clearwater, tourism has always been a major component of local business and development.
If one were to pry open one’s eyes with a groan, regretting the previous evening’s ill-advised clubbing foray to Ybor City…if one were to pull aside the motel room drapes with a squawk of surprise as the sunlight floods the room…yes, if one were to wake in Clearwater on an average, hellishly muggy summer moring, and gaze out of one’s window, one would see:
Old men in tattered sleeveless t-shirts and board shorts walking barefoot along the molten pavement. Blue-shirted adherents of the Church of Scientology flocking dreamily to and fro through the intersections, going about whatever mysterious business the cult is engaged in presently. Food trucks hawk flat-grilled Cuban sandwiches and strong Cuban cafe-au-lait. Bright sarongs are for sale, along with straw fedoras and guyabaras. Flotillas of elderly women in opaque, jet-black visors ride motoried wheelchairs up and down the crowded streets.
These cultural snapshots are only one reason that Alonzo Vallejo, Vice Principal at Holy Moses Boys’ School in nearby Town ‘N’ Country, FL, put together his 6th-Grade Class Field Trip to Clearwater’s beaches. Mr. Vallejo took the students to rent metal detectors, and soon they were off; marching up and down the beach, whirring, clicking headsets on, listening for metal in the sand.
“Kids found a bunch of stuff. We took a pretty good stroll and were about to wrap it up. We’d been really looking forward to hitting the market for souveniers afterward,” Vallejo sighs. “I suppose you could say that the problems really started when Rudolph Scheissekopf, our exchange student, got really excited. He’d found something, all right.
“We booked it over to Rudy and helped him clear the dirt away, and I’ll be g**sh dar**d if Rudy hadn’t uncovered a prosthetic leg.”
Indeed, soon the students’ metal detectors began to light up. Rudy had made his initial find in a low hollow on the beach, relatively protected from wind and surf. The sand was dry and loose, and easy to dig through. By the time Mr. Vallejo borrowed a students’ cell phone to call the police, his students had dug up no fewer than forty-three artificial limbs, two artificial hearts, a variety of dental work (bridges, fillings, etc.) and one single human bone – a femur partially healed from a bad break but held together by several screws and wires in places.
In what has since been dubbed the “Plucker Freak Case,” police investigations have produced no leads and, as of yet, no answers. To Vallejo, the media’s obsession with the Plucker Freak mystery is of little concern. He still shakes his head when he remembers the childrens’ reaction to the morbid find.
“They got real quiet,” he says, “Real quiet. Nobody was in shock, and nobody cried. Pretty proud of how my students held up, actually. It’s not very often that we go on field trips, and for something like this…well, wrong place wrong time, I guess.” Vallejo smiles. “Next field trip, we’re going Ren Fair, definitely.”
One other field trip is still pending at Town ‘N’ Country – shop teacher Hart Bonepak’s Class Trip to this year’s Knob Creek Machine Gun Shoot in West Point, KY.
