Never Buy Wolves From a Guy Named Rattlesnake Joe

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© Tim Peeler, 2018

Anticipation couldn’t have been higher as the end of NC State’s 1935 football season drew nearer.

It had been a good season, with the Wolfpack clutching to a 6-2 record just ahead of the home finale against Big Five and Southern Conference rival Duke. The only losses on the season were home games against Georgia and UNC, but they were offset by big wins over Davidson, South Carolina, Wake Forest, Virginia Tech, Manhattan and Richmond.

Heartley “Hunk” Anderson, Knute Rockne’s replacement a few years earlier as head coach at Notre Dame, was in his second season with the Wolfpack. He had three players who eventually ended up making All-America teams, in senior center Steve Sabol and tackles Vince Farrar and Mac Cara.

Two sincere NC State undergrads, Dick MacKenzie and Jim Coleman Jr., had an idea about three weeks before the game against the Blue Devils to buy live wolves to roam the sidelines of Riddick Stadium, a show of might and force that would surely strike fear in the heavily favored Blue Devils.

The pair spent day and night collecting pennies, nickels and dimes from their classmates—mind you, this was at the height of the Great Depression—to collect the $45 needed to buy a trio of Minnesota timber wolves from a South Carolina snake and alligator collector who lived, unbeknownst to the students, in a ratty tent on the banks of the Santee River.

A week before the big game, the students were still far short of their goal, some 80 years before GoFundMe became a thing. So a few Raleigh merchants with NC State loyalties—including Mayor George Iseley, Commissioner of Public Safety T.K. Fountain and Commissioner of Public Works S.J. Ferguson—pitched in the final few dollars to be wired to H. Ellison Mitchell, owner of the Palmetto Snake and Wild Animal Farm.

Or, as he was known to locals, “Rattlesnake Joe.”

On Thursday before the Homecoming contest, the two students and all their contributing classmates were worried that the wolves had not yet arrived. They called the stationmaster to see if there had been any canines loaded on a train headed to Raleigh in the previous few days.

There had not.

So Mackenzie and John Bing, a fellow student with his own car and a few cans of gas, headed to the South Carolina Lowcountry, intending to bring the three wolves to Raleigh in the back seat of Bing’s car. They drove all night long, some 200 miles on dark and unpaved roads, intent on completing their purchase.

When MacKenzie and Bing pulled up at the farm in the middle of the day, Rattlesnake Joe couldn’t have been more surprised. As it turns out, Joe only dealt in reptiles, not mammals. Not only did he not have any timber wolves in the chicken wire cages on his property, he had never seen one in his life.

The students were angry, but helpless. They managed to get $30 back from Mitchell, but had to file a mail fraud lawsuit in federal court in an attempt to get the rest of the money back. (There’s no record of the outcome of that lawsuit in subsequent newspaper accounts.) The two students, after fruitlessly checking around other Lowcountry farms, returned to Raleigh with an empty backseat, just in time for kickoff.

The lack of live mascots seemed to be a downer for Anderson’s team, whose season had started with such promise.

It not only lost to Duke 6-0 in the close Homecoming contest, giving Duke its second consecutive state and Southern Conference title, it also traveled to Washington on Thanksgiving Day to face Catholic University, The game was played at Griffith Stadium, home of baseball’s Washington Senators and Homestead Grays and the first home of the Washington Redskins, following the franchise’s move from Boston.

Three hours before the game, a massive rainstorm flooded the nation’s capital, and three plays into the game no one could tell what player played for which team. The Pack lost 8-0 to the Cardinals, which had already been invited to face Southeastern Conference champion Ole Miss in Miami’s second-annual postseason game called the Orange Bowl.

The Wolfpack stayed home cold and alone, without even a three-dog pallet to cuddle up with.