Middle-aged man robs Menlo Park bank

With all due respect to The Almanac, I find this article saturated with age bias. What is wrong with a 50 year old man with gray hair robbing a bank? Is that profession only open to young men with thick black hair or shaved heads?

This is bigotry of the worst form. We live in tough times. Perhaps our philosopher of income transfer has unpaid bills. Can't a slender, stubbled, glasses wearing person pursue his dream of an exciting and adventurous life? Is this not what has made our Nation the exemplar of individual freedom and entrepeneurship? Are we now reduced to lumping all baseball cap, light colored dress shirt wearers into one overgeneralized cohort? Such biases are unacceptable.

Please note that during his actions of revenue exchange, he caused no undue disturbance. To the contrary, he was not even missed until after his departure.

Furthermore, obviously an ecologically sensitive person, he chose to conduct his financial transactions on foot.

And, despire entreaties to do so by the National Rifle Association, he rejected their harsh methods and carried, or at least displayed, no weaponry. I consider that noble and politically courageous.

Finally, we are told twice in this article that he was estimated to be around 40 or 50 years of age. Did no one ask him his age? How do we know? Perhaps he was a young looking 65. Perhaps he had smoked too much in his youth and was a mere 35. Age discrimination in the media is reprehensible.

So, I ask, please put your age biases aside and permit all of us, regardless of age, to rob the banks of our choice.

Not sure about the above entreaty, but I am curious about the article's lack of detail: no height or other description beyond "old fart"?

Where's the surveillance photo?

Police say there is no photo available for now.

"Hear, hear" for Martin Engel for several reasons, his compassion and a sense of humor not the least of them.

When The Man is hit up for an unapproved bit of borrowing, a transaction executed with nothing more than a sentence or two on a piece of paper, and no one is the worse off, it is always worth celebrating.

I don't envy the bank robber the circumstances that drove him to his crime, but I do wish I had his moxie. But then, the moxie probably comes with the courage to act, so that would leave me out.

And now he is on the run. Maybe he has the presence of mind to handle it without it hurting himself or anyone else. I hope so.

Aside from the omission of height, this seems to be a pretty routine type of description for robberies. At least he wasn't referred to as a
"grandfather", which would certainly have been the case if the robber had been a woman. Female suspects are invariably described as a "grandmother" or "mother of x-number of children".