What do you think of this fact?
Some towns elect a mayor. Talkeetna in Alaska got a cat with no tail, and kept him in office for about 20 years.
A kitten from a box
Lauri Stec, manager of Nagley’s General Store, told CNN that he was in a box full of kittens in front of the store, and the owners were giving them away. She picked the name Stubbs because he had no tail. Before long, the general store was the place to go if you wanted to see the mayor.
Talkeetna has about 900 residents and one small catch. It is only a historic district, so it has no real mayor at all. CBS News puts it plainly: there is no human mayor in the town. The title was honorary, and Stubbs wore it.
The election that never happened
The legend says locals were so unimpressed by the human candidates that they wrote the cat in on their ballots, and he won. Great story. Culture Trip calls it false: with no real mayor, there was never an election. NPR corrected the write-in story the same way in 2012. CBS News still described it as a write-in win in 1998, which shows how well the legend stuck.
What is documented is his routine. According to Stec, he would only drink water from a wine glass with catnip in it. Culture Trip describes him stretching out on the counters for belly rubs and lounging behind the drinks machine. Visitors called their stop “a meeting with the Mayor”, and according to Culture Trip, the title brought untold amounts of business into the store.
Bonus fact: During the 2014 U.S. Senate election in Alaska, someone made a campaign ad for Stubbs, and a local DJ told the radio station KTNA that he wrote in “Mayor Stubbs” for every race except governor.
Two decades in office
Stubbs held the honorary title until 2017. His family wrote that he lived for “20 years and 3 months”, and they already had a possible successor in mind: a kitten called Denali, who, according to the family’s statement on CBS News, has “the exact personality as Stubbs”.
Two decades in office, no campaign, paid in catnip. Not a bad career for a kitten from a box.