RACCOON PENIS BONES
gerald
Back in October, 1995, Jim Hudnall posed a question in alt.lucky.w about raccoon
penis bones. He said that Mick Jagger's partner Jeri Hall had mentioned in an
interview that when she was growing up in Texas, boys gave raccoon penis bones to
girls they liked as a form of love token or love charm. Jim said he had never
heard of penis bones before and wondered if raccoons really had them.
I responded that Jeri Hall was right -- raccoons do have penis bones, although
they are by no means the only species with such bones. (For instance, seals,
walruses and whales have them too, and these large penis bones, called oosiks by
the Inuit, are used for making sled dog harness parts.) The scientific name for
these bones is os penis ("penis bone" in Latin") and among their many common
names are "love bone," "pecker bone," "coon dong" "possum prick," Texas
toothpick," "mountain man toothpick" and "baculum" (Latin for "little rod"). More
to the point of Jim's query, though, i can testify from personal experience that
raccoon penis bones were used as charms and curios among white farm boys and men
of the Missouri Ozarks (in south-central Missouri, near the Arkansas line) during
the 10 years i lived there in the 1970s-80s.
Soon after my then-partner Peter Yronwode and i moved to the Ozarks in 1972, we
were told by a couple of local farmers that the proper way to prepare a pecker
bone was to boil it clean and to tie a piece of red thread or string around it
and give it to one's girlfriend to wear as a necklace.
Being non-hunting hippies, we made our charms from the penis bones of freshly
road-killed male coons. (We picked up road-kills anyway because we ate the meat
and tanned the furs and sold the mittens and purses we made therefrom.) I should
also note that rather than dedicate these love bones to the furtherance of
overpopulated HUMANITY, we placed them by our pond, where visiting RACCOONS would
benefit from the resultant sexual potency and fertility among their own species.
Both Barry Carroll and Larry Schroeder of Austin, Texas, reported that the bones
were sold there locally under the name "Texas toothpicks" and kindly donated
samples.
Early in 1996, my co-worker Susie Bosselmann came into my office and saw my stuff
and -- to my surprise, as she is a very "fussy" person who abhors bugs and
spiders -- she said, "Ooh, lookie! You've got coon dongs!" She was pointing to
the penis bones Larry and Barry had sent to me.
Susie is in her 60s and she grew up in Oklahoma, an area contiguous with Missouri
and Texas. I had thought that the wearing of raccoon penis bones was limited to
the Midwest, but she expanded my horizons when she said that she and her husband
had recently been at a gun show in Kentucky and had seen "a beautiful coon dong
necklace, with hundreds of 'em strung together, just like a Cherokee Indian
ceremonial necklace." She would have bought it but it was too expensive, she
said. I asked her why someone would make a coon dong necklace, and she said,
"Well, what ELSE can ya do with 'em?"
Obviously, the use of raccoon penis bones as sex amulets was not known to Susie,
but just to be sure, i asked her if she'd ever heard them called love bones or
heard of boys giving them to their girlfriends. She said, "No, we just made
necklaces out of them."
In May, 1996, Michael Redman added something new on the subect: the use of the
raccoon penis bone as a gambler's charm. Here's what he said:
Just got back from New Orleans for my umpteenth Jazz Fest visit & spent some
extended time in the Voodoo Museum in the Quarter. As touristy as this place is,
there were several exhibits of interest. Did notice a raccoon penis bone there
marked "Lucky for gamblers."
Other readers have written in and added much lore -- about a gambling uncle in
the South who wrapped his coon dong in a ten dollar bill before going out to play
cards of an evening, a grandfather who wore a "possum prick" bone as a watch fob,
a jeweler who caps the bones with sterling silver and sells them as necklace
pendants, and a family which has owned a "mountain toothpick" for years. Scott
Stauffer, a taxidermist in Michigan, writes, "I have had several requests for
raccoon penis necklaces. Thinking this to be strange, I asked as to the reason
one would want to wear such a thing. Up here the general consensus is that
'You're not cool unless you're hangin.' No red ribbons or gifts to girl friends;
the guys wear them, mostly, it seems, for luck. A jeweler's clasp is glued to the
straight end and it is worn on a length of gold chain. Although strange, they are
strikingly handsome when boiled and pollished."
--
Gerald
Mothers of teens know why animals eat their young.