Lou’s View – August 14, 2014
Night of the Raccoons
by Lou Bernard
When I was a kid, we had a pet raccoon. We’d found him, abandoned by his mother, in the chimney of one of our old cabins on the farm. We named him Smokey (get it?) and kept him for a few years.
I remember Smokey as a fun little guy, always looking for someone to play with. He used to make a chattering noise as he played with my sister, and he’d sometimes climb into the wastebasket in search of food. We would walk by the wastebasket and hear him growling, his striped tail sticking out, as he dug for orange peels or something, throwing garbage all over the floor.
Now, imagine for a moment. Imagine that sort of mess multiplied by a factor of six. Imagine it in a small building, overnight, say the local post office. Imagine several raccoons, unknown to anyone, trashing the post office all night….Wouldn’t that be GREAT?
I mean awful. Wouldn’t it be awful if raccoons trashed the post office? Well, imagine no more, because in 1936, this actually happened. I swear.
Now, I want to make it very clear that I’m telling you everything I know here. There are a lot of unanswered questions in this one, but it’s such a great story I have to tell it anyway. I just wanted to assure everyone that, by the end of it, I’ll be just as confused as you are.
It was April 5, 1936. Henry Cree of Woolrich was expecting a package. A box had come into the McElhattan post office for him, containing six live raccoons.
Seriously. I’ll repeat that: Henry Cree had, for some reason, ordered six live raccoons in a box. Seriously—This was in the newspaper. The newspaper said,”A consignment of one half dozen coons for Henry Cree, of this place, arrived at the McElhattan station the other evening.” Henry Cree was a hardware store owner—He was half-owner of Dickey Hardware on East Main Street, which he’d purchased in 1924. I don’t know….What possible reason could he have had for ordering SIX LIVE RACCOONS?!!? Why would anyone DO that? It’s like a fraternity prank!!!!!
Sorry. I lost it there for a moment. Back to the story. The box arrived in McElhattan, at the station run by George Kontz, the station agent. Kontz, like any good public servant, stuck the box in his office and decided to deal with it the next day, and went home. This was a solution that satisfied everyone except the raccoons.
Oh, yeah, did I mention? Raccoons are great at escaping from things. We had a cage for Smokey, but he used to get out all the time. Which is the same thing that these raccoons did—First one chewed through the box, and then the others followed, and they proceeded to trash the whole office as if it were personal.
The article said,”In the night the coons gnawed their way out and the next morning Mr. Kontz found his office supplies well chewed and distributed about the room.”
Any sentence that begins with “In the night the coons gnawed….” Has got to be simultaneously hysterical and terrifying.
In the morning, Kontz came in to discover the sort of chaos that six previously captive raccoons can wreak. Office supplies everywhere, papers shredded, and raccoons all over the office. I can only imagine what sort of a morning this is—The closest I’ve ever come is about a year ago, when my office floor was infested with some sort of weird ants.
Kontz enlisted the help of Bob Lindsey, local mail driver, who helped round up and recapture the raccoons (presumably after a good laugh, but I’m guessing on that part.) The two of them spent their morning capturing the six raccoons and taking them out to the hills of Woolrich, where they were released. So, not only did Cree not give any reason for purchasing six raccoons, he never even got them. I can only assume Cree was secretly some sort of mad scientist attempting to make a human/raccoon hybrid.
So the raccoons were released, and it’s a safe assumption that they lived and bred in Woolrich. If you happen to live out that way, and a raccoon should stroll up to you and express a strange interest in your pens and pencils, hand them over. It’s best to be safe.
