When I was in 6th grade I saw an advertisement in an outdoor magazine for a course in taxidermy. It was a mail order course and the company would send a new lesson when the previous lesson had been completed. The whole course cost ten dollars and consisted of maybe 25 lessons. I didn’t have the money so they allowed me to send one dollar per month until the tuition was paid. I had problems raising the money on a couple of occasions and was sometimes late with the payment. This would cause a letter to arrive threatening me with prison, excommunication, castration, and other dastardly consequences. I finally paid off the bill without damage to my body or loss of any organs.
My mother provided a room off of the kitchen for me to ply my trade. One nice thing about growing up in a small family with a large house and a liberal mother was having a room for each of my endeavors – one each for taxidermy, photography, telescope- making, etc.
As you can see from the photo, I became rather proficient and ended up with quite a menagerie over the years. Many of the animals were shot by hunters but some were killed by accident, perhaps hit by a car or by flying into the side of a building. Mom was rather lenient about different kinds of animals coming into the house. People brought in hawks, owls, ducks, geese, large fish, foxes, deer heads, deer hides, as well as small birds and mammals. The only time I remember having trouble is when my buddy Kenny showed up in the driveway with a skunk – Mom met him at the door.
40 lb Sturgeon mounted for Leon Sabin, a Randolph business man
I did mount many specimens for other people, mostly deer heads and pheasants. I could mount a pheasant in about 6 hours and I charged six dollars for each. The money from mounting pheasants helped put me through college. In 1951 tuition at Kent State was $40 per quarter. I lived at home and commuted to school, so my expenses were minimal.
On one occasion someone brought in a large heron that had been killed by a trigger-happy hunter. The locals called these birds “shitepokes”. I didn’t have time to mount it then but I wanted to save it since getting one of those strange-looking critters was quite unusual. I skinned, preserved, and dried it so I could soften it up later and finish it when I had more time.
Well, I never found the time. So here I was with a long-necked-large-billed strange medieval-looking animal on my hands. I asked my idea man Kenny what we could do with it. He thought we should take it to a movie. It was stiff enough that it could sit in a seat with its long neck and long bill sticking up above the seats and would be a rather unusual sight to the average theater-goer.
Thinking that was a good idea, I gently folded up the shitepoke, being careful not to damage the feathers. I put it into the large pocket of my trusty hunting jacket and we headed for Lowe’s theater in Akron.
The theater was almost empty since it was early afternoon. We set up the shitepoke on a seat in the middle of the theater and then sat in the back to watch the reaction of the movie fans. I must admit it looked rather cute just sitting there by its lonesome self with its long neck sticking up, intensely staring at the screen.
We watched for awhile as several people came into that row. After a scream or two they would back out very quickly and move to another location, every now and then glancing in the bird’s direction. After awhile we decided we’d had enough fun and didn’t want to stretch our luck any further, so we gathered up the shitepoke, took it into the men’s john, sat it on a toilet seat and quickly left the theater.
I have often wondered if the lady who cleans the toilets quit her job the next day.