Dean And I And The Coon

I began attending Union High School in Lisbon, New York in September 1950.  I entered the 9^th grade, a freshman, at 12 years of age.  Shortly thereafter, I met Dean James Cox, who was a year behind me in school, but very nearly the same age as I.  For the next five years we spent a lot of time together, especially on Sunday afternoons.

Nearly every Sunday afternoon I would ride my Schwinn the two miles or so to his home, and we would spend the afternoon attempting to find out how many different sorts of mischief two precocious teens can get into.  Had we kept a diary, it could have been used for a how-to book in ways to make parents turn prematurely gray haired.

During the 1800s a part of living had developed in the northern reaches of our great country whereby lots of rural folks made maple sugar each spring to supplement their income.  A short description of this might be, drain sap from a maple tree, cook sap until it turns into syrup, save same.  In order to facilitate this endeavor a foundry had designed, and produced a large iron kettle with which to cook the sap.  It was suspended over an outdoor wood-burning fire to create the heat necessary for boiling.  By the 1900s newer, faster, better methods of reducing the sap to syrup had been developed, and the large kettles main use had disappeared.  Many of them were then used as water holders for livestock drinking purposes as the dairy industry developed.  By the 1950s even this use had been superceded, and many of the old iron kettles were left to rust into oblivion.  Such was the case with one found at Dean’s parent’s farm/greenhouse operation.

One fine summer Sunday afternoon Dean and I spotted a raccoon ambling about their farm near to a wooded area.  For whatever reason an old animal live trap was stored in an outbuilding.  Those two facts supported the germ of an idea that the coon would make a good pet.  We baited the trap with corn, and left it near to where we had spotted the coon, to retreat to the barn where we could watch it.  As if scripted in Hollywood, within minutes we had us a coon in the trap.  Carefully we moved his abode up near the buildings where the old abandoned syrup kettle happened to reside.  We decided that might make a suitable home for our pet.

Unceremoniously we dumped Mr. Coon into the kettle and immediately placed an old iron grate over the top, weighted down by a couple of big boulders conveniently found nearby.  We dropped in some corn, it seemed he liked that, and also poured some water into a pan within his comfortable home.  Then, as he was excited, we left him alone while we found other good things to do.  Possibly a half hour later we returned to find he still didn’t like us.  Dean then went off and returned with a fence post maul.  As he approached the kettle the coon started to fuss so Dean struck the kettle with the maul.  It sounded about like an old time gong.  (Can you imagine being inside that thing?)  All afternoon this procedure continued.  We’d go near the kettle, the coon would rush at us, one of us would ring the gong, Mr. Coon would go into orbit, and then settle back down shaking his head.

Late in the afternoon, Dean’s father asked what we were doing.  When we told him we were taming a coon, he made us turn it loose, but as we removed the grate, Dean just had to give him one last parting shot of the gong.  Within four seconds or so Mr. Coon was back in the woods again.  I’ve no idea how he explained to the other coons in the woods what he’d done for the afternoon.