xxxNews Of The Weirdxxx

Bizarre but true stories about real people collected by syndicated columnist Chuck Shepherd.

In January, Rev. Clarence June Love, 83, pastor of the Assemblies of Jesus church in Bristol, Tenn., ejected sisters Reba Storey, 46, and Mary Steele, 64, from a service, rebuking them as possessed by demons because they were wearing blue jeans (in that Pentecostals believe that women should not wear pants). (Said Storey, “I’m glad I serve a God who can work through my pants.”) The sisters were trying to visit with their 88-year-old mother, who allegedly was being kept away from them by a third sister, who is also Rev. Love’s girlfriend. A few days later, a local judge urged the family to work things out.

A 47-year-old man was crushed to death in Albany, Ga., when the tree he was cutting down fell on top of him (December).

Harvard University this year hired a recent graduate as a full-time promoter and coordinator of social activities, apparently because so many at the school are too busy to relax. According to Associate Dean Judith Kidd, “(T)he kids work very, very hard here. And they worked very, very hard … to get here. They arrived needing help having fun.” (By contrast, two weeks later, a police raid in Durham, N.C., turned up 200 noisy Duke University students, many of them bikini-clad women, wrestling in a plastic pool of baby oil in the basement of a fraternity house, apparently inspired by a scene from the movie “Old School.”)

In Vancouver, Wash., in January, Cuitlahvac Renteria-Martinez, 26, was arrested for jumping into an idling 18-wheeler and taking off. However, the rig had a global positioning system that made it easy to track Renteria-Martinez, and he was quickly arrested. He later admitted to police that he had taken a swig out of what he thought was the driver’s coffee cup but learned too late that it was actually the driver’s tobacco spit-cup.
Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 18737, Tampa, Fla. 33679 or [email protected]
Copyright © 2001 by Chuck Shepherd

NEWS OF THE WEIRD