Plot thickens in Collingswood plaque caper

A new cast member has been added to the municipal melodrama about Collingswood's peripatetic plaque.

Joseph Dinella, a longtime critic of borough Mayor Jim Maley, claims to have discovered the bronze tablet honoring TV actor and semi-native son Michael Landon on his porch.

The recent movements of the plaque, which was paid for by donations and installed near a playground built by Landon's widow, Cindy, in 1999, have fans of the late "Little House on the Prairie" star up in arms.

As I write in today's column, the borough removed the plaque and its two-foot concrete marker from the "Little Treehouse on the Prairie" playground in Knight Park last November.

The marker and plaque were taken to a borough public works facility. There, a person or persons unknown, for reasons unknown, detached the plaque (which features Landon's hirsute likeness) from its base.

Perhaps the detacher(s) intended that the 20-pound piece of bronze be scrapped -- or sought to save it from such a fate.

"The plaque was left on my porch…(and) turned over to the local weekly newspaper, The Retrospect," Dinella writes in an email, adding that "police have questioned me" about the incident.

Maley, whom press reports quoted initially as seeming somewhat nonchalant about the future of the plaque, insists the borough had no plans to throw it away and will find it a new home.

"How the plaque was taken from the borough facility is the sujbect of a police investigation," the mayor tells me.

Stay tuned…