Wasting time on YouTube and came up on a video of the Goat Man and it got me rolling down memory lane. Old timers from East Tennessee and North Georgia will remember him.
His name was Charles McCartney. No one around where I grew up knew him by anything other than the Goat Man. The Knoxville News Sentinel would chronicle his progress if he was headed our way, and folks would go out to gawk at him when he was camped nearby.
I would tell people over the years that it looked like he hitched some goats to a pile of scrap at the junk yard. The best pictures found on the web are taken from some old slides. There are a few more here. These images may disappear from the web someday if these small website owners decide that the cost of server space isn’t worth it.
I remember asking a girl after mass one Sunday if she wanted to go with me to see the Goat Man as he was camping nearby. I remember being embarrassed when she asked him “How do you clean your teeth?”. I need not have worried as he calmly fielded all questions from the curious.
I only wish that I would have gotten one of those postcards he was selling. You can see him in one of the pictures rooting around in a garbage can where he kept his postcard inventory.
Wow this is really interesting. I like looking at these pictures and imagining what was going on and what the people were thinking.
If anyone is up for a picture hunt there were two things that caught my eye (photos in the first link) . One was a “Jesus Saves” sign and one was a “Playboy bunny head on a postcard” Or at least that’s what I think it is.