Holiday story worth your time
Like with any other major holiday, St. Patrick's Day stories in the nation's newspapers are a mixed bag. Mostly, that bag is full of junk. St. Patrick's Day at school, at the nursing home, at the local pub and Irish historical society office. But in yesterday's Washington Post, Foreign Service writer Mary Jordan has a winner, all about the wacky and growing cult of clover.
Ed Martin, a retiree in Alaska, hopes to soon become the world record holder for collecting real four-leaf clovers. Martin, 73, who operated heavy machinery, said he tooled around the United States in a motor home for years picking the clovers to give away.
"I always got a smile," he said in a telephone interview. Several years ago, Martin decided to get serious about collecting, and he said he now has about 80,000 four-leaves pressed into plastic sheeting. Officials in his small Alaskan town of Soldotna are preparing the paperwork to nominate him for a Guinness world record.
The current record holder is a Pennsylvania prison inmate, George Kaminski. While serving time on a kidnapping conviction for the past 25 years, Kaminski has gathered 72,927 four-leaf clovers. He found them, one at a time, hidden in the grass of prison yards.
Meet these people and the guy in Mexico City who sells them out of his station wagon.
