Lou’s View

By Lou Bernard

I have a home office, where I do most of my research. The walls are lined with books. I have copies of almost all the major books about Clinton County’s history. I have copies of most of the Historic Resource Survey Forms. And I have boxes full of files I’ve accumulated over the years, with old newspaper articles and photocopies of documents.

In spite of all this, I still get questions I can’t exactly answer, because people insist on asking me things that not one sane person has thought to ask in almost three hundred years of recorded history.

I’ve been asked if Beatrix Potter is from Mill Hall. (No.) I’ve been asked where to find a mural with a man in a truck rescuing people from the 1936 flood. (Doesn’t exist.) I’ve been asked if Lock Haven has some sort of “sister city” founded by the same guy out in Minnesota. (Iowa, yes. But not Minnesota.)

Another one that I get a lot is about Chuck Norris.

There appears to be a rumor that Chuck Norris came to Lock Haven, got drunk and rowdy, and got arrested here. I have been asked about this one repeatedly over the years, and I’ve never found any documentation to back it up.

I have a tendency to hear stuff like this and say,”If this had really happened, I’d know it by now.” And I am familiar with most of the interesting things that have happened in Clinton County, but often I check to make absolutely sure. So I’ve been through the archives, and checked the old newspapers, and I have never found any proof of Chuck Norris ever visiting Lock Haven, let alone getting arrested here. (If Chuck Norris had been drinking at the Fallon, the Fallon would have gotten a hangover.)

So, okay, it seems that Chuck Norris never got arrested in Lock Haven, which doesn’t exactly shock me. It’s just a rumor. (An untrue rumor—I’ve also had people say to me,”I’ve heard a rumor that the Queen of Spain had a mansion here,” which drives me absolutely nuts. That is not a rumor, that’s documented fact. To me, that sounds an awful lot like “I heard a rumor that some guy named Lincoln was president.”)

Every once in a while, I get lucky. Often, I have to research these things, but once in a while, the answers fall into my lap. After about thirteen years of getting asked about Chuck Norris, someone finally came to me and explained how this got started.

On one of my tours, a nice older guy told me about a memory he had. He remembered a mentally ill man who used to live in one of our local hotels. Now, ordinarily, anytime someone comes up to tell me about a mentally ill guy, I want to run, but this explained a lot. Back a few years ago, this mentally ill man—I never got his name; I’m not sure my source remembered—Rented a room in one of our local hotels, and claimed to be cousins with Chuck Norris.

This is how the rumor got started. This man, who again was imagining the whole thing, claimed to be related to Chuck Norris, and somehow over the years, it became a story about Chuck Norris in Lock Haven. I’m told the mentally ill man was the sort who often got into fights and got arrested, which explains the rest of the story.

So we can write this one off as not true—Chuck Norris was never in Lock Haven. I considered talking to City Council and proposing that we name a street after him anyway, but there’s no way we can do that. Because, unlike a street, nobody crosses Chuck Norris.