Years ago, when I was a finance company collector (sometimes repo man), I paid a visit to a customer’s double-wide in a small unincorporated town in West Virginia, not far from the Kentucky border. I had a new employee, Tom, with me that was going to take over the entire state while I shifted down to North Carolina.
The customer was behind almost from the start on a new 400G crawler dozer with a winch. He was a logger who also had a chainsaw business in a garage next to his double-wide. The three of us sat at his kitchen table to discuss his situation. A few minutes in, we heard a whining, crying noise coming from one of the other rooms. The logger never blinked and went on about his travails.
A couple minutes later, the whining, crying noise got louder, and when we turned to look, a little brown bear cub walked out on his hind legs. He had on a diaper and a t-shirt that said “Jesus Loves
Me.” He was about 2-ft tall and crawled under the table and started crawling up my leg, like he wanted to get in my lap. He already had claws that were sharp, and I was worried that he would get his claws to the parts of me that count.
I managed to shake my leg enough to keep the bear cub from getting into my lap, and he then started up Tom’s leg and almost made it into his lap. The logger finally woke up and called his son to the kitchen to get the bear cub. Apparently, it was hungry, so the kid got the bear cub a baby bottle of milk, and the bear walked off sucking on the bottle.
I asked the logger how he came to getting the bear cub, and he said he traded an acetylene torch for it with a guy just over the border up in Ohio.
We collected four post-dated checks and got the location of the dozer so we could inspect it. It was hardly touched. I told Tom to note its location because I was sure he’d be picking it up at a later date. Sure enough, a couple of months later, I met up with Tom in a town that bordered our territories, and I asked him about that dozer. He chuckled, and said I was right- the checks bounced, and he picked up the 400G. It hadn’t moved. I asked if he talked to the logger, and he said he did. He said he told him he had to give the bear cub up to a wildlife preserve because it got too big too fast and became “unruly.”
That story became legend at our company. Everyone heard and knew about the bear.