Caturday felid: Kitteh is mayor of Alaskan town

UPDATE: A reader pointed out, and the Alaska Dispatch seems to verify, that this story is an elaborate hoax: Stubbs wasn’t really elected mayor at all.  Well, maybe.  But it’s still cool, as he does holds court at the store and sips catnip-flavored water from a wine glass. Now if that part is phony, I give up.

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About two years ago, in Alaska to lecture, I drove up to Talkeetna, a small town near Denali National Park, site of Mt. McKinley, the highest mountain in North America. Talkeetna is the jumping-off spot for climbers and visitors to Mount McKinley, since you can hire small planes to either take you to the base camp or get an eagle’s-eye view of Mt. McKinley. I did the latter, with the bonus of landing on a glacier to deposit two climbers (see the link for photos, which include the airport cat).

Several readers have recently informed me that, as reported here by CNN, the mayor of Talkeetna is not a human, but a cat—a ginger tom named Stubbs.  And he’s been mayor for 15 years, holding court from Talkeetna’s general store. (I visited that store and at the time was tragically unaware of Stubb’s presence).  The CNN piece is hilarious:

For 15 years, Stubbs the cat has held the top office in Talkeetna, Alaska. And his approval ratings have never been higher.

“He doesn’t raise our taxes — we have no sales tax. He doesn’t interfere with business. He’s honest,” said Lauri Stec, manager of Nagley’s General Store, which doubles as the mayor’s office.

Stubbs may be the only mayor in the country who rose to office as an infant.

“He was in a box full of kittens in the front of the store, and (the owners) were giving them away,” Stec said. She picked “Stubbs” because he had no tail.

Talkeetna doesn’t need a human mayor because it’s so tiny: just one street with a few businesses, really, and the airstrip. Nevertheless, Stubbs runs a tight ship:

“All throughout the day I have to take care of the mayor. He’s very demanding,” said Skye Farrar, a clerk at Nagley’s. “He meowed and meowed and meowed and demanded to be picked up and put on the counter. And he demanded to be taken away from the tourists. Then he had his long, afternoon nap.”

In addition, the mayor will only drink water from a wine glass that has catnip in it, Stec added. [This is shown in the video below!]

But most everyone is willing to put up with the mayor’s high-maintenance lifestyle, especially because he’s a big tourist attraction for the community of about 800 human beings.

Here’s a video report on Stubbs, and, as you might expect, he has a Facebook page: