Veteran won’t surrender to vandals

For the seventh time this year, Ted Poull said, the political signs outside his Town of Saukville home were vandalized this weekend.

However, this time the vandals drove up onto his lawn to damage the six signs, including a large wooden one bedecked with a photo of Poull’s Army uniform that declares “Veterans for Biden,” he said.

“There’s tire marks everywhere,” Poull said. “There must have been two vehicles. They ripped the big sign off the post, drove over the signs and ripped them up.

“It just irritates me.”

The vandals apparently struck Sunday evening. Poull said he and his brother-in-law were walking outside after the Green Bay Packers game about 9 p.m. when they saw the damage.

“We said, ‘Holy cow, everything’s all ripped up,’” Poull said.

Despite the fact Poull lives on Shady Lane, a quiet road — “I have more wild turkeys that cross the road than people,” he said — his political signs have been drawing attention from people on both sides of the spectrum.

“I never had that before,” Poull said. “I had some people drive by on bikes, they stopped and congratulated me. Then you have others who stop and curse at me when all I’m doing is going to pick up my mail.

“Last week, a young guy in a big pickup truck backed up and told me how stupid I was because look at all Trump’s done for veterans,” he said, adding he told the man that most of those actions have been in the works since 2013, before Trump was president.

Although Poull’s situation may be unique in the number of times people have come to his rural home to damage the signs, he’s only one of many people who have reported damage to political signs — supporting both Democratic and Republican candidates — this year.

But Poull, who put the message “I won’t back down” atop his large sign after the last round of vandalism, said he’s found something encouraging in the damage.

People heading to the polls for in-person voting on Tuesday who drove past his house stopped after seeing the damage to tell him they would help put the signs back up if he needed help, Poull said.

“I’m going to put them back up again,” he vowed.