Large Fierce Mammal

With what they witnessed growing up, it’s no wonder the Cabbage Patch Kids devolved into Children of the Sauerkraut. (Source: http://www.worth1000.com/)

Mahone Bay is a tiny and picturesque town on the south shore of Nova Scotia with a population that has been steadily shrinking for decades, mostly due to natural causes. On the thirty-first day of January 2001, a landmark business in that town, Bills Department Store, closed for good, but not before it had borne witness to an unprecedented spectacle of Yuletide violence. In my 23 December 2011 article, A Long Winter’s Night – Festivus, I promised to relate the tale of what has come to be known in local lore (at least when I’m telling it) as “The Mahone Bay Riot”, and tonight I intend to fulfill that promise.

Entering Bill’s Department Store was like stepping back in time. Founded by entrepreneur Bill Webber in 1955, Bill’s Store sported an entire second floor devoted to nothing but the most incredibly diverse selection of toys to be found anywhere outside of a specialty boutique. The toys were enthralling at any time of year, but most particularly in the run up to Christmas.

The events I am about to relate are rendered all the more incredible by the fact that Bill’s Store normally didn’t trade in the trendy merchandise that was the life blood of toy departments in big name department stores. Perhaps that was the root of evil in this case – the departure from the norm. To this day we don’t know the answer as the store is no more, the records of the investigation sealed, and I alone stand as the last known witness.

In the United States, and major Canadian population centers, the Cabbage Patch Kid craze was hitting its peak in 1984, with parents willing to commit acts of violence against one another in the name of a merry fucking Christmas.

Of course, all these shenanigans and goings on took some time to flare up in small town Nova Scotia for pretty much the same reasons the theatre in Bug Tussel, operated by Jed Clampett’s sister Pearl in The Beverly Hillbillies, was playing silent movies as new releases. A few years passed until the fateful day arrived.

Bill’s Store was a security client of mine for sixteen years, and one evening the staff called for advice because they were having difficulty arming the security system for the night. In the course of my conversation with the staff member who was trying to lock up, it came out that the fire escape door leading out of the second floor toy department was erroneously showing ajar. Not worried because the area was also covered by interior motion sensors, I talked the person through the process of bypassing the door for the night, and resolved to visit the store to take corrective action before it opened the following day.

As it turned  out, I was detained at another call, and arrived slightly later than I had intended – approximately 15 minutes before opening time. I had confirmed that the magnetic contact on the affected door was to blame, set up my ladder in front of it, and was beginning the replacement process when I heard the distant sound of stampeding feet coming rapidly closer. I paused to check my watch and realized this must have started when the doors were unlocked.

The sounds of footsteps reached the bottom of the stairs, and continued up them accompanied by the new sounds of panting, swearing women, and the thuds of stumbling bodies hitting stairs. My vantage from the ladder was well outside the range of danger, and I watched with great interest as two middle aged women came into view on the landing at the top of the first flight of stairs where they collapsed briefly in a tangled mass of flailing purses and kicking feet before one broke free and bolted to freedom up the remaining flight … almost. Her adversary grabbed her ankle at the last instant whereupon the erstwhile victor landed face down in agonizingly full view of what I knew had to be her goal – a single Cabbage Patch Kid doll sitting in the middle of a large bin.

The felled woman regained her feet as her cackling nemesis grasped the prize, and with a scream tackled her to the floor. There were now more sounds of ascending feet, and soon the manager and a male member of his staff arrived to take the women in hand. By then, the Cabbage Patch Kid was a tattered mess of torn packaging with bits of doll embedded, and both combatants clutched disembodied limbs. I watched as they were both led sobbing to the exit through which they were ejected with a stern command never to return. Thoroughly entertained, and with my long held belief in human nature once again proven, I returned to my task and completed it in short order.

I would like to close with an illustrative bit of film that comes as close as anything I’ve seen since to conveying what I witnessed that day. While it is performed on a somewhat grander scale – it does depict a battle after all, while what I witnessed was just a riot – it should help you to come away from this account with a better grasp of events.