Nagley's Store and the Cat Who Was Mayor
Near Talkeetna, Alaska
Nagley's General Store has anchored Main Street since nineteen twenty one, making it the oldest continuously running store in the northern Susitna Valley. For a century it has sold groceries, fishing tackle, and hardware to miners, trappers, climbers, and tourists alike. But Nagley's is best known around the world for its cat.
In nineteen ninety seven a store manager adopted a kitten with a stubby tail, a Manx mix she named Stubbs. Because Talkeetna is unincorporated and has no true mayor, residents gave the cat an honorary one. A popular story claims the town elected Stubbs as a write in protest against the human candidates, but that version is apocryphal.
However it happened, Stubbs held the title for twenty years. The cat became a genuine attraction, drawing thirty or forty visitors a day who came just to meet him. He was said to sip water spiked with catnip from a glass at a nearby restaurant.
In two thousand thirteen a dog attacked him, leaving him with a punctured lung and a fractured breastbone, but he pulled through. Stubbs died in twenty seventeen at the age of twenty. Nagley's carried on the tradition with younger store cats, and the mayor's chair, so to speak, has rarely sat empty since.
