The Origin of the Snowshark Preservation Society

It was winter in Glens Falls, NY. The year was 1989, and snow was piled high outside Peter’s Pub on Maple Street. It was a sparse crowd. A couple of lumberjacks were playing pool, the click of the balls hitting each other accented by loud and boisterous cursing in French.  A few regulars at the bar were watching the hockey game on the television  being adjusted by the tattooed bartender. It was a house rule at Peter’s that only hockey and wrestling were to be viewed on the establishment's small television.  It was primarily a working class drinking establishment,but it became the pub of choice for me and my friends who were fellow members of management at Native Textiles, merely a few blocks away on Warren Street. Those of us who wore neckties immediately doffed them before entering the door.

We were on our third round of Gennies, or Genesee beer, as we recounted the day at the factory. As I had recently joined the company they were interested in my reaction to the snow.  It was not unusual for me to be treated as some kind of novelty. My Southern drawl would sometimes mesmerize them. Where I had come from in the south if one inch of snow stayed on the ground overnight it was a big deal, a true natural phenomena.  I told them I had a great deal of admiration for the folks that seemed to have no difficult driving in the deep snow.

It was then that I asked them if they had seen any snowsharks. John, the textile designer, said, "No, I have never heard of such an animal.” The others said nothing. I did not know if they were familiar with the cryptozoological  beasts or did not want to display their lack of knowledge. I gave a brief explanation of how they lived under the snow and only appeared when they were hungry. “Once, Watterson put a reference to a snowshark in his Calvin & Hobbs comic strip,” I said. No one expressed any interest in snowsharks, and the evening ended with everyone with their own beer induced buzz.

Later that week, I asked several people whether they had seen any of the beasts. Everyone showed great interest, but there were no sightings. However, about two weeks after I had first mentioned them to my friends, a factory employee reported having seen one in Fort Ann. Fort Ann was a small village near Glens Falls. Sometimes sightings come from some unusual sources. In this case a material allocator working for me told me his grandmother had seen a snowshark. When this happened, I wondered how many other people would see them if I let people know they existed.

I left Native the next spring and came back south but not before I had come up with the name Snowshark Preservation Society and a logo. My friends in the design shop were great help in the logo design. In the late nineties I was in the South Carolina Lowcountry and had bought a Gateway computer. I created my first website.  I built it from scratch, no templates or “drag and drop”.  The Snowshark Preservation Society was my first website. Although I was a true neophyte on the internet, I wanted the site to be interesting and informative, but my main objective was to get people searching for the cryptozoological creatures and reporting their results to me. I created the pages on the origin of the species and their initial discovery in the Adirondack  Mountains of New York state. I published

photos of a pottery shard emblazoned with the image of a snowshark. Soon I was getting emails detailing sightings. These were published and the location of the sighting posted on a map. Academic papers published by experts in the field of cryptozoology journals were posted on the SPS website. One day I received actual photographic evidence of a snowshark. The creatures rarely are visible but their dorsal fin kicks up a “roostertail” which could be clearly seen in the photograph. I gave away refrigerator magnets to people who responded, and I created snowshark chum. Snowshark chum would attract the wiley beasts for observation. There were t-shirts and thong underwear available emblazoned with the SPS logo also.

I continued the SPS website for about three years, during which time I received dozens of reports of sightings. When the company hosting the website decided to charge a fee for their services, I reluctantly shut the website down. And that is how I became an authority on snowsharks by creating the Society for the Preservation of Snowsharks.

Promo products and page 1 of the site.