It Wasn’t A Yard Tool
We don’t shoot lawn mowers in Florida, that’s reserved for Louisiana governors and people from the upper Midwest.
However we do occasionally have to use firearms in our yards.
I have to say that anyone who lived in Levy County, Florida should know better than to go outside when a fox shows up during the middle of the day. I assume they felt that it couldn’t be a fox, because no fox in its right mind hangs around where there are people.
Fortunately when the fox attacked the woman, her husband had a .22 caliber rifle handy to put 6 rounds in the fox and kill it. Unfortunately, he fired 7 times, but a .22 is easy to dig out, and the pain from getting shot in the leg is nothing compared to the pain of the rabies shots, because foxes with rabies aren’t in their right minds, and will attack people.
8 comments
“Weep no mower, my lady…”
Bad, Steve, but Foster wrote a song about Levy County too, as the Suwanee River runs through it.
Should have shot first, gone out to see later.
Which Louisiana governor shot a lawnmower? Or did I miss the news of Governor Bobby “Honorary Redneck” Jindal accidentally shooting his lawnmower because he mistook it for a deer? (Hey, they don’t have deer in India, y’know!).
— Badtux the Mischievous Penguin
I’ve heard that Huey Long gained a bit of fame doing it, but that was before your time.
I’ve read the reputable histories of Huey Long (i.e., those by scholars, not by anti-Long aristocrats) and never seen that story, Bryan, so my guess is that it’s apocryphal, like the story of George Washington and the cherry tree. There’s a lot of such stories that went around about the Longs, they made a lot of enemies amongst the rich and powerful of Louisiana during their time. Without interviewable witnesses or historical documentation as to their authenticity, it’s hard to ascribe any validity to them.
Lending more authority to the notion that it’s apocryphal is the fact that power lawnmowers were extremely rare in Louisiana prior to WWII. Urban dwellers used small reel-type lawnmowers because they lived on small lots with a couple of small strips of lawn at most. Rural dwellers did not have lawns, they raked and scraped their yards and let the mules, cows and goats take care of grass and weeds on parts of their land that they weren’t farming. The State of Louisiana undoubtedly had purchased some power equipment to handle the grounds of Huey’s new Capitol Building and LSU, but Huey would have never gone anywhere near that equipment — it would have been operated by the landscapers in the employ of the State.
Besides, if anybody would have shot a lawnmower, it would have been Earl Long. Huey was very controlled. Earl… not so much. And by the time Earl came to prominence after WWII, power lawnmowers were more popular and Earl had his “Pea Patch” in Winnfield when he wasn’t being Governor.
So anyhow, your notion of a Louisiana governor shooting a lawnmower definitely piqued my curiousity, but if one did, it almost certainly wasn’t Huey because I cannot imagine anybody shooting a reel-type push mower — which is all that Huey would have personally possessed in that era, since he lived either in rental housing (which had small or non-existent lawns in those eras) or in places like the State House that had their own landscapers. Remember, Huey died in 1935…
– Badtux the Louisiana Penguin
My bad, it must have been Earl, because he was governor when we first came to Florida, and my Mother and her friends tell the story. My Mother would have been in elementary school in New York when Huey was governor. Of course the story would have traveled by shrimp boat, because that was about the only way anything came from the West in those days.
Does Jindal, being a Republican, plan to improve both his golf game and his lawn by using a “par more”?
That is on the verge of qualifying as one of “Today’s Disasters”, Steve.
It think the joke ran:
I heard he had a paramour.
Shoot, he doesn’t even have a lawn.