BIG BEAR: We hadn’t heard much yet this spring about encounters with bears until this week, when Cora Roupe of Aiken dropped by with some pictures of a large visitor to her carport.

She heard some noises from outside a few nights ago but didn’t think much about it. Then she noticed that the lid was off a galvanized trash can where she keeps corn for her chickens. A significant amount of corn was missing, too.

She put up a trail camera that caught this photo of the bear with its head in the galvanized can, eating the chickens’ corn. 

She wasn’t surprised that the camera caught a bear in the act, but this one was much bigger than she expected.

“I saw that and I said, ‘Holy cow,’” Cora said.

She said she’s in the process of making a different plan for storing the corn somewhere the bear can’t get into it and, more importantly, where she’s less likely to run into the bear.

— 

PLANE PICTURE: Retired Bradford High teacher Drew Ivancic ran across this photo when he was sorting through an accumulation of things that he had collected over the years.

The photo is of a group of high school students posing with the PA28-180 Piper Cherokee owned by the Flying Colts airplane club in front of a hangar at Bradford Regional Airport.

Drew said that each spring for about 10 years, he would invite interested students to wash and polish the plane. In exchange, he’d take them for a sightseeing tour over Bradford and fly over each of their homes.

Exactly when this picture was taken, Drew wasn’t sure. He checked his pilot logbook and found that the last time he had a group polish the plane was in May 1996.

 If this was from one of the last such outings, the high schoolers in the photo would be well into their 30s by now.

Drew couldn’t put a name with any of the faces, but he thought the subjects   might get a kick out of seeing how they looked half their lifetimes ago.