July 19,2004

Fight Erupts after Goat Eats Historic Harding Postcard

Libertarians, Historians Call Card's Loss a Great Blow

Police, firemen and paramedics were called over the weekend to halt a fight between dairy goat owners and collectors of penny postcards after a three-year old Nubian goat named Esmerelda ate a world famous and very valuable historic postcard.

The card showed a photograph of President Warren G. Harding asleep in the porch swing at his home in Marion, Ohio. It was believed to be the only copy of the card and the photograph in existence.

"It's a great loss of a very important photograph that came to have enormous iconic power as a symbol of the virtues of a do nothing president," said Fairman Netherton, a Harding authority and professor of collectible memorabilia at University of North Central Cincinnati. "To many on the political scene, particularly some of the Libertarians, it's as if a goat has eaten the Bill of Rights or a copy of Reagan's 'Evil Empire' speech.

The near riot was sparked when Esmerelda broke loose from her halter and escaped the livestock show barn on the Pennsylvania Farm Show complex in Harrisburg, where the National Dairy Goat Association was having its annual show. The prize milking goat, bleating loudly and her full udder swinging wildly, dashed across the complex, her handlers in hot pursuit.

Esmerelda bolted through the door of an exhibition hall where the Mid-Atlantic Penny Postcard Collectors were having their annual postcard marathon swap meet and tall tales storytelling festival. With uncanny and dismaying accuracy, she ran through the exhibition hall past dozens of display tables and jumped onto the table of Edward Searcy of Pennington, New Jesey, the owner of the Harding postcard.

Searcy had just taken the card out of its helium-filled display case under the watchful eye of a security guard and was about to show it to a scholar from Great Britain. Esmerelda leaped onto the table and snatched the card from Searcy's hand. She grasped it in her mouth and gummed it meditatively for a minute or two, while Searcy, the security guard and stunned collectors coaxed her to drop it.

Then, as the frantic collectors wailed in disbelief, Esmerelda consumed the card in two gulps.

That led to a tense confrontation between Esmerelda's owner, Homer Botsman of Distant View, Arkansas and the postcard collectors. The fight apparently began when Botsman offered in a less than friendly manner to collect Esmerelda's manure for the next two days and present it to Searcy.

"You can search in it for your silly little card," bystanders quoted Botsman as saying.

Before police and firemen arrived to restore order, dozens of tables displaying postcards were turned over and thousands of cards strewn on the floor. No one was sure whether Esmerelda ate more cards during the fight.

"Loss of the Harding card is a very sad day," said a Libertarian spokesman in Washington. "Just think how much better off this country would be today if during the last 50 years we'd had a succession of Hardings in the White House who knew the importance of going slow with government and taking plenty of naps in the porch swing."

Copyright 2003-2004 William Stockton & Smithtown Creek Productions
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