Environment: The Kane County Pimpernel

It was just another Friday morning in the handsome executive offices of a large East Chicago aluminum company. Sharon, the receptionist, glanced up from her switchboard to see “a nice-looking man, about 35, dressed in slacks, a lightweight jacket and sports shirt.” He was carrying a bucket—but then, as Sharon explained, “people come in all the time with samples to analyze.”

The visitor handed her an envelope. “Would you please see that the president gets this?” he asked. Then he stepped back and announced: “Here’s a gift for all of you from the Aurora area.” Across the gleaming black slate lobby floor sloshed the contents of his bucket: a bouillabaisse of river muck and the carcasses of fish, a rat and a bird. The Fox, mysterious Scarlet Pimpernel of pollution, had struck again. His note explained all. A long doggerel rewrite of Coleridge’s Kubla Khan, it ended with the lines: “We have begged you for mercy, and our hearts are sad, our brother./So I leave you with this greeting, Sir, from one slob to another! [signed] Fox.” A grim fox’s visage was drawn in the o.

Unlikely Zealot. For the past two years, the Fox has been the scourge of those he considers polluters in Illinois’ Kane County, west of Chicago. He has plugged offending sewers, capped spewing chimneys, left ripe skunks on the suburban doorsteps of company executives. At the scene of every caper, he leaves a note explaining that the particular victim is getting back a bit of his own for defiling the environment.

The Fox is an unlikely zealot. Though he would not reveal his identity, he talked over the telephone last week with TIME Correspondent Sam Iker about his crusade. Apparently a quiet-spoken Kane County Republican, the Fox explained that he is an enthusiastic fisherman and hunter who remembers when Kane County was unspoiled. “I do a lot of walking,” he said. “I got tired of watching the smoke and the filth and the little streams dying one by one. A man ought to be able to drink from a stream when he’s thirsty or take his son out fishing. Finally, I decided to do something—the courts weren’t doing anything to these polluters except granting continuance after continuance.”

Deciding to call himself the Fox after the county’s Fox River, he struck first at a major soap company that was pouring pollutants into a tributary called Mill Creek. The Fox dumped a truckload of rocks, straw and logs into the factory’s sewage outlet to block it, then repeated his imaginative vandalism twice in ensuing weeks. The last time he was nearly captured by company security guards who had staked out the area.

Rotted Roof. Next the Fox and several friends began hanging enormous signs from barns and highway overpasses accusing various companies of polluting. One night the Fox decided to plug the chimney of an Aurora aluminum processing plant. He nearly fell through the factory roof, which he claims had been rotted by corrosive fumes. He hit the company once more, by crawling into the plant’s septic tank and plugging the inlet.

Kane County police believe that the Fox may be more than one man—possibly, says Detective Sergeant Robert Kollwelter, “a group of antipollution nuts.” In fact, the Fox admits that he needs the help of family and friends for some of his heavier jobs. “They’re all good working people,” says he, “not long-haired hippies.” For as long as he and his accomplices can evade the law, the Fox intends to continue his nocturnal raids. Says he: “I’m just out to stop things that are illegal in the first place.”