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"Looks good,"
says Larry Robinson, who
sells The Baltimore Sun newspapers at a corner of East Fayette. He's talking
about "Offisher Finly."
The fish, which was on duty outside the Baltimore City Police
Headquarters, "is alright," Robinson adds. "At
first, I wanted to make it an official fish, and have it be Baltimore Mayor Martin
O'Malley," says Noelle Zeltzman, the fish's designer. "Then I
thought a police officer would be cuter." It
helped that her
son-in-law is a police officer. "He
went to the used cop store" and got the props used to decorate the
fish, Zeltzman says. Offisher
Finly sports a vest,
hat and baton. It was a hit with the police department. "The
police commissioner [Edward Norris] came to my house with a hat and some pins
for [the fish's] lapel that said 'central district,' " Zeltzman says. But
at one point, Offisher Finly needed protection, after parts of it were stolen.
"They stole his gun, handcuffs and his pins," says Zeltzman. "Then they put him on closed-circuit
television"--to make sure it didn't happen again.
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