A Scrap Over ‘Eagle Rock Neighborhood Crappers’

To a lot of people who know him, Stephan Early, the immediate past president of the , is a laid-back, motorcycle-riding Shakespeare scholar who has taught English for years at .

But if you’ve never met Early and were to read about him in a May 29 online story in the Boulevard Sentinel newspaper, you’d probably think he’s the Artful Dodger come to life right here in Eagle Rock.

As Sentinel publisher and editor Tom Topping tells it in a story titled “Eagle Rock Neighborhood Crappers?” he was getting ready to run some errands one recent morning when Early walked by with his “giant St. Bernard in tow.” The pooch “stopped in our yard and did his business,” writes Topping. “Early didn’t stop, didn’t turn around and kept on walking.”

Adds Topping: “Again, the dog pooped on the sidewalk in front of the neighbor’s house. Early kept on walking.”

Topping says he was on his morning walk “a few days later” when he saw Early riding his motorbike, “so I asked him about that. He responded in a very aggressive and hostile manner, so much so, I wondered if he was having problems at home or work.”

According to Topping, Early claimed that he always cleans up after his dog and that he had forgotten to bring a bag with him that day. “I came back later and cleaned it up,” Topping quotes Early as telling him.

A few minutes after his encounter with Early, writes Topping, he saw “the dried remnants of the droppings” on the sidewalk by his neighbor’s house. “In our yard, the droppings remain untouched, right where I saw the dog leave them.”

Patch contacted Early to get his side of the story. The incident, says Early, happened on Hartwick Street (south of Hill Drive) last week. Topping “gave me some grief about it,” Early adds, when he ran into him on Tuesday, May 29, the date of Topping’s story, which can be read in its entirety here.

“I was on my way to the hospital and stopped and confronted him,” admits Early, adding: “I apologized. I always bring a bag, I always pick up after myself, and on that day I didn’t bring a bag, so I returned and cleaned up.”

Early owns a (female) Bernese Mountain Dog—not a (male) St. Bernard, as Topping mistakenly has it in his story. According to Early, Nana, as his pet is named, is a therapy dog and she did not poop in Topping’s front yard, probably because she was constipated, although she might have appeared to do so. Nana did defecate on the sidewalk further up the street, admits Early, adding that he came by later and cleaned up the mess.

“I picked up the fecal matter,” Early told Patch categorically. “I didn’t scrub the sidewalk—I don’t think you have to do that—and I don’t know if he [Topping] expected me to do that.”

Patch reached Topping for a comment about Early's version of the incident, especially his assertion that Nana did not poop in Topping's front yard and that Early says he cleaned up the mess on the sidewalk.

"I'm just not going to comment," Topping said over the phone. "I've put it all out there already in my story."