GLACE BAY — Growing up in the Bridgeport area of Glace Bay in the early 1980s, Wayne McKay used to love walking to the local corner store to buy candy.
But things would sometimes get a bit hairy — literally — when he had to walk past the neighbour’s pet primate.
“It was tied out on a leash in front of the house. I just remember when we’d walk to the store there — it was the best store to get candy and stuff like that —the monkey would run out at us and basically try to chase people,” said McKay, who grew up on Connaught Avenue and would cut through the yard of the home on Station Street on his way to the mom-and-pop shop on Main Street.
While McKay isn’t sure whether it was a monkey or a chimpanzee, he clearly recalls the animal, which was owned by the Powell family who lived in a large home where Wilson’s Collision Repair is now located.
'Just like a baby'
He said his brother Aaron had frequent run-ins with the creature on his newspaper route.
“My brother delivered papers to them and the monkey, or chimp, used to chase him when he would go with the paper,” he said, chuckling.
Mike Byrne, a constable with the Cape Breton Regional Police, used to cut through the Powell property on his way to and from school. He said the creature was often dressed in children’s clothing.
“When it was outside they had a coat on it to keep it warm,” he said. “You’d see it out with a diaper on — it was treated just like a baby.”
The Post reached out several family members of the late George and Shirley Powell, who owned the animal.
Their son Cory Powell and daughter Samantha Paul, with both confirming on social media their mother did own the unusual pet. Neither responded to followup attempts, although Paul wrote that its name was Judy.
Incredibly sassy
“Mom passed in 2019 and she had the chimp before I was born,” she said, “but her name was Judy. She used to drink from a bottle and wear diapers and dresses. She was also incredibly sassy from what I hear.”
Many other people shared their memories of the animal when McKay posted about it on Facebook several months ago, Margie Cann saying it “used to chase us when he got off the leash,” and Barbara Allison adding “she was scary.” Darren Talbot
“It used to be on the front step all the time,” wrote Darren Talbot.
However, the strangest response came from Glen Muise, who had a wildly different story. He said a man named Coogan Hill from Dominion told him he and his wife somehow ended up returning from a trip to Boston with a monkey or chimpanzee that they a bottle of sherry to every day to keep it placated.
Alcoholic ape
“Every summer for miners’ vacation, Coogan and his wife would get on the train, and their trip was going down to Boston and coming back to Cape Breton on the train. On one trip when they got home, they were upstairs in bed early in the morning — Coogan said he woke up and he remembered the monkey. The monkey was downstairs in a cage and he was going haywire, he’d drunk so much wine with them that he was now an alcoholic. So the monkey had to be fed wine the whole time that it was there at Coogan’s house.”
However, attempts to confirm that story with relatives of the late Alexander Joseph (Coogan) Hill were unsuccessful, and longtime Cape Breton Regional Municipality councillor and former Dominion mayor Darren Bruckschwaiger said he knew Hill but doesn’t believe he owned a monkey or a chimpanzee.
For his part, McKay said he was just happy that other people simply confirmed that the monkey — or chimp — wasn’t just a figment of his imagination.
“I told my wife stories about this chimp over the years about. There’s all kinds of crazy memories from growing up in Bridgeport and that was one of them. The farther you get removed from the past, the more you kind of question if it really happened. When the thought came to me, I wondered ‘Is that real?’ I’ve been telling that story and I think it’s real but I’m not sure. So I just put it out there and I was happy to see people validated it — unless we all have a collective wrong memory,” he said, adding that as humorous as it is to look back on, in retrospect Bridgeport was probably not the best place for a wild animal to live.
“There might have been more than one, which is even sadder. They must have gotten them from circuses or something. It is funny to think back on it but it is bad for the animals.”
