Good ol' boy network

As a relative newcomer (only 13 years) to Woodstock and McHenry County and as an outsider when it comes to being included, I still have not learned whom to trust and just who is a member of whose clique. But I am learning.

A reader this week sent along some juicy tidbits and some very helpful background information. And an email this evening from a different reader mentioned some of the same names!

Reading and re-reading the long letter has helped me to begin to connect the dots, meaning "who knows whom" and just where the inside tracks are. Now, of course, everybody knows who everybody else is around the County Bar Association, but the connections are murky to those not in the system.

The letter, as have other letters to me from different people, made a reference to a couple here in the County who got, in the words of some, roughed up back in February 2008. And not just roughed up, but injured. And injured to the point that hospitalization was necessary. And arrested for resisting arrest. How else do you explain how their injuries occurred?

I met this couple last fall, after some tips came my way through the grapevine. And I've stayed in touch with them. I've respected their attorney's wishes and am holding off on writing their whole story. It is important, though, that their arrest never made it to the newspapers. But their story will most likely make it to the papers, and in a big way. I don't worry about "scoops".

This same letter included some "courthouse rumors" and mentioned Wisconsin. That brought to mind the woes of South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford and a line in an Associated Press article about him this morning. The line? "Cornered at the Atlanta airport by a reporter from The State newspaper (of Columbia, S.C.), Sanford revealed Wednesday morning that he had gone to Argentina for a seven-day trip."

Any doubt that the reporter got a tip and knew when to be at the Atlanta airport, four hours from home? Maybe with a little tip like that, I'd be spending some time in Wisconsin, camera, pad and recorder at the ready!