It was in 1990 that Gregg Bassett had his first close encounter with a squirrel, when she pressed her nose against his back porch window. “I was never the same after that,” he says. Squirrels began approaching cautiously when he and his wife, Kathy, took their evening walks. Bassett coaxed one squirrel to take a nut from his hand, and eventually a squirrel he named GG—short for “Gray Girl”—began taking peanuts from his mouth. (That was rather risky on his part, Bassett says, because wild squirrels are unpredictable and have sharp teeth and claws like needles.) “This squirrel got to where she treated me with total abandon,” he says. “I’d come out of the house, and she’d come blasting across the lawn.”
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“We’re not an animal-rights group,” Bassett says. “I won’t hunt or eat squirrel, but I also won’t stop hunters. I wouldn’t want my steaks taken from me by someone in a cow lovers’ club. But on the serious side, we will stick up for squirrel lovers and people who want to keep squirrels as pets.”
In September 1994, Bassett read a newspaper article about a woman in Garden City, Kansas, who’d adopted a baby fox squirrel. “Her cat treated it as a fifth kitten,” Bassett says. Mary Guy got in trouble with the law for her good deed, however. “The Kansas department of wildlife was saying she couldn’t keep the squirrel as a pet,” Bassett says. “But there was a loophole under Kansas law. If she bought a $13 license from the wildlife department, she could keep the squirrel until hunting season ended. That bought her some time.”
One weekend last fall, Bassett was hunkered down with 13 other members of the club in a room at the Traveler’s Inn in Olney, Illinois. They’d come to participate in the official count of white squirrels conducted annually by Olney Central College, but rain and violent thunderstorms kept the Squirrel Lovers group—mostly people from Chicago and the surrounding suburbs—inside much of the time. Fortunately Sheila Sullivan, from Sarasota, Florida, had brought her pet squirrel, Winky, who kept everyone entertained. A paraplegic, Winky sat snug in Sullivan’s purse and eventually offered up dollar bills to adoring club members.
Tony Sereda of Chicago received a membership from his daughter. “She was always fascinated by my activities with the little critters,” Sereda says. “I used to have three squirrel pals, and I’d teach them new things—to stand up, form a line, do an about-face. Then I’d pay them off with a peanut. She said to me once, ‘Hey, dad, they listen, they’re very intelligent.’”
Most of Bassett’s squirrel friends—Blacky, Slitty, Cutie, Frisky—have resided in the trees around his home. But he’s also well acquainted with a celebrity squirrel: Twiggy, who water-skis behind a remote-control boat at boat shows across the nation. Twiggy’s owner is a club member and a good friend of Bassett and his wife. So when the tabloid Weekly World News published an article about a French squirrel killed in a waterskiing accident, Bassett recognized the squirrel in the photo as Twiggy right away even though the story was about a different squirrel. “It was all so fake,” he says.
