Butters the Wild Turkey, 2019 - 2021, RIP

This is Butters outside our front door, early January, 2021

Butters, the wild turkey, has died; he never learned how to navigate traffic. A neighbour tells me he looked out of his living room window one day and saw three wild turkeys. So this isn't the end, just a chapter. In the local history of Covid there will be a chapter on Butters, he was a celebrity on social media, he brought people together; I would see crowds looking at Butters and talking, people loved that bird. He brought us together and then he was gone. He was everywhere, one day in Montreal West, the next day outside of Police Station Nine, he was famous in Loyola Park, he had a following wherever he went, and then he'd be back on our street sitting in a tree sixty feet up in a snow storm. But he wasn't too bright, the only reason he didn't walk on the road was that there was no food there. Butters had also become a peeping turkey, looking in people's windows. Butters, gone but not forgotten; he gave so much and expected so little.

Our last meeting, 28 January 2013

I made this video almost eight years ago, it shows when all four of us (Susan, John, Paul and myself) from our office at Champlain College in St. Lambert met together for an office reunion. The video is Paul recounting his latest travels, as he used to do every September when we returned to work. Those were the good old days! 

 

 

April 2020, at Strathearn Park

16 April 2020

 

April 2020, our dystopian calendar

 01 April 2020

More on Percy Leggett

Excerpt of an article by Paul Wilson, published in the Hamilton Spectator, 12 March 2016.

Percy Leggett — 1892 – 1965

With a reputation for hurling bricks through liquor store windows in various communities in Ontario, Percy Leggett rolled into Hamilton in the late 1950s calling himself the country's oldest beatnik. Through the '60s he was well-known in the community, walking the city in shorts in all seasons, telling people that his care-free lifestyle and non-conformity would allow him to live to be 100. "When I got my pension I resigned from the human race," he used to say." Clothes confine...let the air get at you, massage you. "

He was frequently featured in The Spectator in articles, photos and even cartoons on the editorial page. He became the talk of the town after a well-publicized dustup between Percy and the Over Sixty Club that kicked him out because his shorts were too revealing. Then one summer day in 1965 he decided Hamilton was too hot, smog-ridden and full of conformists. So he gathered up his stuff in a cart and headed northward. But sadly, in June 1965, he was hit and killed by a station wagon just outside of Orillia. He was 74 years of age, more than a quarter century short of his centenarian goal – but a non-conformist right to the end.

Source of photo of Percy Leggett: