ChessieWriter

I have a crush. I’ve had it for about two years now. My husband knows about it and oddly is fine with it.

That’s because the object of my crush is the popular Court House Deer statue that stands in front of the Luzerne County Courthouse in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.

A couple of years ago, I was doing research about a man from Luzerne County who, despite growing up dirt-poor in a coal town, somehow managed to become a lawyer when I came across this snippet from a newspaper article:

Said the deer? I forgot all about the lawyer and opened the full article to read it. After being thoroughly entertained by it, I searched for more articles with this talking deer, called the Court House Deer in the article. I found 77 of them written by reporter Ernest Hanson in the late 1880s.

I thought the articles might be entertaining to the Deer’s fellow Wilkes-Barreans, so I transcribed the articles and put them into a book, called “Conversations with the Court House Deer.” While I was working on the book I became so enamored of the Deer that I bought and transported home a concrete lawn ornament deer that now stands on our front lawn (I wrote about it in a previous blog “Deer Fandom and Crazy Serendipity“).

The arrival of the Court House Deer in Wilkes-Barre was announced in a newspaper on July 31, 1867. This has become his birth date, and next month the Deer will be an amazing 157 years old.

I recently visited the Court House Deer with a birthday hat for him to try on. As I perched it on his head, I advised him that he might very well be wearing another one next month for his birthday party, scheduled for Sunday July 28th.

In the Court House Deer articles, you can see that the Deer has a pretty good sense of humor, but that he also considers himself “an outside official of this courthouse of some prominence.” I don’t want him to be startled or, worse yet, offended by the frivolities of the celebration.

But looking at this pic I took of him jauntily wearing the birthday hat, I think he’s going to enjoy being the center of attention on his special day. See you next month, birthday boy!