35th Anniversary: They So Deserved It

Just at the point when most people had forgotten about that stupid thing you’d done in the previous 12 months, Cleveland Magazine was always there to remind everyone. January issues in the 1970s and early ’80s always brought our annual “Awards for the Undeserving.” Here were a few of our favorites through the years:

We present this award in a most solemn manner for it is our only posthumous presentation. It goes to the 600-pound pig who sacrificed himself at the height of the meat shortage by getting on Interstate 71 and running headlong into an automobile driven by Harry J. Vandevelde. “It was like hitting a submarine,” Mr. Vandevelde told reporters. His car was demolished. But the pig was D.O.A.
— 1974

Blowin’ in the Wind Award to the hard-workin’ people at Republic Steel who torched 7,800 pounds of marijuana in Open Hearth No. 1. The dope had been abandoned in an overturned truck on I-90.
— 1982

The body of a 55-year-old executive, who suffered a heart attack on the Rapid and died, lay unclaimed in the Cuyahoga County morgue for two days because Cleveland police refused to spend 40 cents on a long distance call to notify authorities in Avon Lake, where the executive lived.
— 1978

The Tribe was so exciting (yawn) last season it’s hard to single out a favorite moment. But if backed into a corner, we’d have to say it was when pitcher Dennis Eckersley commented on Minnesota’s Rod Carew, with whom he has feuded through two seasons. “I hate his guts,” opined Eck. “But in a professional way.”
— 1977