OBITUARIES
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, December 1998:
Charles “Goat Man” McCartney,
97, died on November 15 in Macon,
Georgia. Recounted New York Times obituarist
Robert McG. Thomas Jr., “According to
research by Darryl Patton and Jimmy
Hammett, who collaborated on a 1993 Goat
Man video and a 1994 Goat Man book,
McCartney grew up on a farm outside
Sigourney, Iowa, where he was considered
such an odd child that the family goats were
about his only true friends. That helps
explain why he took off at 14, married a 24-
year-old Spanish knife-thrower, served as
her exhibition target for a couple of years,
then returned to Iowa and married at least
twice more. The last marriage ended when
he sold his goat-weary wife for $1,000 to a
farmer she’d already grown sweet on.” He
was by then already making frequent long
treks with 30-odd goats and a goat-drawn
wagon, selling postcards of himself and
passing himself off as the Second Coming for
a time in north Georgia until skeptics tarred
and feathered him. He continued preaching
and herding goats along rural roads between
Iowa and Georgia until 1968, when a gang
severely beat him and cut the throats of eight
of his goats at Signal Mountain, Tennessee.
He spent most of the rest of his life living
with his goats and a son, Albert Gene, who
predeceased him, in an old school bus near
Jeffersonville, Georgia.