The Ups & Downs Of December 2007. Part 2: The Ups

Reeling from our missed opportunity with the BBC, (thanks to some clown at Heathrow Airport), we pressed on and distracted ourselves with work. Sifting through the mail one day we came across an unusual letter from a guy called Lyle Christiansen from Minnesota and we immediately recognised him as a previous customer. On opening his letter we found with it a photograph and a photocopy of an article from New York Magazine about the mystery of D.B. Cooper .

This is where things start to get a bit bizarre, as in his letter Lyle explained that he came across our D.B. Cooper's School Of Skydiving t-shirt on our website and felt compelled to buy it because, in his words, he thought it was the best one of it's kind. He also purchased it in memory of his late brother Kenneth who he stated was the real D.B. Cooper.

Now, we've received a lot of weird and wonderful things in the post before, many of which we could never write about, for legal reasons, but this really took us by surprise, especially as it referenced one of our all time favourite unsolved mysteries.
With a fair amount of scepticism we read on and started to digest the accompanying New York Magazine article which Lyle had included with his letter. You can read the whole article for yourself HERE .

To cut a very long story short, it turns out that Lyle's brother Kenneth is now indeed an official suspect in the D.B. Cooper case and aside from the fact that his height and weight may not fit the profile his experience as a sky diver and his past history certainly do. So there you have it on a random rainy Tuesday morning we receive a wonderful letter and photograph from what could be the brother of D.B. Cooper, the only man in American history to carry out a skyjacking and evade capture from the FBI, unless of course you buy into the theory that he died...something we certainly don't!

N.B. As a point of interest Lyle informed us that in the photogrpah, (pictured above), he's wearing one of his brother's wool lined overcoats, which he may have worn for the jump and he has one of his attache cases which he found when his brother passed away.

The Ups & Downs Of Decemer 2007. Part 1: The Downs

Firstly let us officially wish you a Happy New Year and all the very best for the next 12 months and thanks again to all of our customers who kept us busy throughout the run up to Christmas. Last month was definately full of mixed emotions for us here at the State Dept Of Fashion Corrections. This first part will detail the down side of December for us and the next part will deal with the upside.

Picture the scene we're busy printing up shirts for customers three weeks before Christmas when we get a call from a lovely young lady from the BBC, (for our American readers that stands for British Broadcastng Corporation), who tells us that she loves our John Smeaton and Proudly Banjoing Terrorists t-shirts. We thank her and she goes on to tell us that she's currently involved with filming a documentary about John Smeaton, (the Glasgow airport baggage handler who helped to fight off two terrorists intent on blowing the place up), for the BBC entitled An Accidental Hero and that it would be really cool if we could supply her with some free t-shirts. So we agree, after all it's not everyday we get a phonecall from the BBC. She explains that the film crew will be followng Smeaton to New York where he'll be presented with a special CNN Everyday Superhero Award and will meet with stars such as Mary J Blige, Glen Close, Kevin Bacon and Billy Connelly and that she and the rest of the crew would love to hand out our t-shirts to the stars. As you can imagine we get a tad excited about the prospect of our t-shirts being handed out to Hollywood celebs so we agree to supply her with a batch of Smeaton and Banjoing Terrorists t-shirts and we post them out to her two days before the crew are due to fly out to New York. She is overjoyed and promises to phone us when the she returns from the Big Apple.

Four days later and true to her word we get the call, but we realise straight away that something is wrong. She tell's us that they all made it to New York only to discover that Heathrow Airport staff had placed the wrong labels on all of their luggage and that they spent the entire three days with no change of clothes, laptops, camera equipment or, more importantly for us, t-shirts. So there you have it folks, what could have been a massive opportunity for the S.D.F.C turned into a non-event, we had visions of watching LL Cool J flexing his man cannons whilst wearing Proudly Banjoing Terrorists t-shirt. Apparently nobody seems to know where the the t-shirts ended up, so if you settle down to watch the news one night and are surprised to see some kids running around Somalia or Kazakhstan with John Smeaton's face plastered over their chests, you know the story behind their t-shirts.