DAY 17 - Back to the Drawing Board, Who's Makin' Them Tracks?

 

My Dad was a very thoughtful, soft spoken person. He didn't always say much. I think that was just his nature -- but it was his nature combined with a whole lotta’ life experiences. So, when I called from college one fall night in 1978 to say that I was coming home for the weekend, I was truly surprised when Dad asked to talk to me on the phone.

He wanted me to know that a Bigfoot had been sighted just west of us near the town of Minerva (Ohio), not 12 miles from our home on State Route 30. The sighting had made first the local news, then the AP wire, and finally the national news.

That might sound funny, but you'd have to know my Dad and where we grew up. Dad was pretty much a no-nonsense kinda' guy and our Canton Township home (actually, not far from East Canton) was in a pretty quiet part of the county. So, having him laugh and talk about this - that was special. I was always a bit of a smart-alec as a college kid and hearing his voice as we talked made an impression on me. Dad was having fun!

The Minerva Bigfoot sighting drew national attention again in the late spring of 2015 when Ohio native Seth Breedlove and the Small Town Monsters group released a documentary covering the event and the national attention that surrounded it. Called Minerva Monster, the documentary became a top seller on Amazon. I interviewed Seth Breedlove in October 2017. The interview is posted at here.

BTW - This illustration combines a cartoon drawing of a Bigfoot track with the centerpiece of the Bigfoot plaque that guards the door to my home office. The title is actually a loose (ahem) quote of something I once heard Canadian Bigfoot researcher Rene Dahinden (August 22, 1930 - April 18, 2001) say in a documentary. Dahinden was famously frustrated with the whole Bigfoot scene, especially with the authentication of (reported) Bigfoot tracks.