DANVILLE — Eighty years ago, Clyde Banbury and Clyde Cornell ate raccoons with 30 friends and family in Banbury’s basement.
A few years later, the then-annual dinner was moved to the Danville school’s cafeterias and then to the St. Luke’s Community Center due to increased interest.
Banbury and Cornell died years ago, but they knew the legacy left behind, drawing guests like Ohio State football coaches Woody Hayes and John Cooper and former Ohio Gov. Jim Rhodes.
The dinner will celebrate its 80th anniversary on Feb. 6, with an accumulation of thousands of attendees and pounds of raccoon meat.
The first dinner was seen kinda as a joke, a surprise event for club members, Danville resident Pat Crow said.
“Hunting raccoons wasn’t new in our area. People hunt deer, rabbits and things,” Crow said. “Raccoon was just another form of game, wild game people hunted.”
Did Banbury and Cornell think it would ever be this popular?
“No, I’m sure they never did,” Crow said. “It became a tradition obviously.
“Right now there are only a few members in our club and we certainly couldn’t accomplish this without the community support.”
Throughout the years, the Mickley family has spearheaded the event that has propelled the annual raccoon dinner to new heights.
“They’ve always been the key,” Crow said. “They’ve always been right out there helping acquire the raccoon.”
The family includes a group of avid hunters, scouring and harvesting raccoons for the annual dinner.
“If it wasn’t for that family, I’m not sure we could have (the dinner,)” Crow said. “It wouldn’t have survived this long if we didn’t still have a member of that family as a key player.”
News of the dinner has spread across the country, Crow said. It’s been so strongly branded that anyone noting they’re from Danville will almost certainly be asked about the raccoon dinner.
The notoriety of the dinner has led to many improvements for Danville residents and the village itself, giving back thousands to multiple organizations and infrastructure projects.
In the last 15 years, the dinner has netted almost $40,000, Crow said. Over the past 15 years, more than $14,000 has been put into scholarships for local students.
After the harvest is complete, the raccoon is brought to a local meat processing plant for packaging. It’s put into buckets averaging 24 pounds of raccoon. In total, 400 pounds of raccoon meat are prepared for the dinner, equaling around 200 raccoons.
“We’ve talked about turning it into a kind of hunting, fishing event where we have vendors around,” Crow said. “I think that may be the future of where we’re headed with this.”
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