Lutz Children's Museum
Connecticut
A Manchester museum's most famous resident is a woodchuck named Chuckles, who presides over its Groundhog Day celebration.
Every February, a woodchuck named Chuckles takes charge in Manchester, Connecticut. He lives in the Animal Room at the Lutz Children's Museum, alongside snakes, chinchillas, turtles, rabbits and various birds. Chuckles is the one who presides over the museum's annual Groundhog Day celebration. The rest of the building is built for hands-on nonsense of the best kind. There is a farm room with a statue of a cow that can actually be milked. There is a full replica of Manchester's Main Street as it looked in 1943, complete with an old-fashioned radio, wartime newspapers, and a version of Marlow's department store, which in real life has since closed. Museum educators load up artifacts and live animals and drive them out to schools and summer camps, sometimes turning up in costume. They tend to hold degrees in things like archaeology or biology, plus teaching credentials on top. The museum also runs a nature center on a fifty-two-acre preserve a few streets away.
This is the first of 2 parts. The rest runs about 2 minutes and is read to you as you drive past. Hear the whole piece.
most famously, Chuckles the woodchuck, who presides over the museum's annual Groundhog Day celebration
Written from Wikipedia, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.
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