Luscher Farm chicken coop dedication honors efforts of Riccardo Spaccarelli

By Cliff Newell

The Lake Oswego Review, Jan 7, 2010, Updated Jan 14, 2010

Lake Oswego Review / VERN UYETAKE

Riccardo Spaccarelli holds a chicken in the Luscher Farm coop. Friends of Luscher Farm honored him last month by dedicating a sign on the wall of the coop.

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Usually it is things like ships, statues and buildings that receive dedication ceremonies.

But the chicken coop at Luscher Farm was deemed suitable for this honor by the Friends of Luscher Farm.

After all, without the chicken coop there might no longer be a Luscher Farm. And for the chicken coop, Lake Oswego must thank Riccardo Spaccarelli.

“We wanted to dedicate the sign as a way to thank Riccardo for all he’s done,” said Laura Masterson, director of 47th Avenue Farm. “It is also a way for people, when they come to the farm, to learn more about what the Friends of Luscher Farm group is doing.”

So recently, a friends group – Spaccarelli, his daughter Maria Morrison, Kathe Worsley, Tom Scheile, Russell Jones, and Masterson – showed up in cold, drizzling weather to dedicate the sign.

Also in full attendance were the chickens and all of the other birds who live in the coop, and they handled the frigid weather much better than the humans.

But the beautiful sign was worth the effort. On it, Spaccarelli explains the history of the chicken coop. There is also a photo of Spaccarelli, his dog Buck, and his old pal Rudie Luscher, the late former owner of the farm.

“There was no Rudie Luscher signage around here,” Spaccarelli said. “We needed to have some. Rudie sold this farm to the city and made the project possible. He started a precedent.”

The Riccardo-Rudie friendship began one day in the early 1990s when Spaccarelli was out running with his dogs near the hills of Luscher Farm.

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