Scene of the crime: Murray MacGregor’s, above, and the pilfered Mr. Oinkers, below. (Click to enlarge)
By JOHN T. WARD
Call it the case of the pilfered pig.
Sometime last week, someone climbed up on a dining room chair at Murray MacGregor’s Publik House in Rumson and removed a mounted wild boar’s head from a wall.
And out the door it went, wee wee wee wee all the way home, apparently.
Never to be seen again? Time will tell. At the moment, the restaurant’s new owners, Kathy and Mike Maguire, are more amused, not angry, Kathy tells redbankgreen. They haven’t even bothered calling the cops.
But there is a surveillance system in the restaurant that may have caught the pignapping on videotape. And if they feel inclined to hunt down the poacher, they may take the time to review it, she says.
“I just think it’s funny, and that it was taken as a joke,” she says. “It’s got to be a joke, because it’s the ugliest thing you’d ever want to see.”
The “thing” weighs about 10 pounds, says Kathy, who bought the restaurant with her husband in October. Mike hunted the boar on a trip to Texas more than a decade ago, had it stuffed, and hung it in the family’s home in Hazlet, where their five kids referred to it as Mr. Oinkers.
It’s unclear exactly when Mr. Oinkers vanished. It’s presence was last noted by “the Romeos” the Rumson Old Men Eating Out club at their regular meeting last Monday, and it’s absence was noted on Saturday, Kathy says.
Kathy says there’s a reward of a free drink to whomever brings it back, even the person who took it.
