See Hoover's Billy O'Possum Letter to Hyattsville High School

You may remember reading about Hyattsville's historic brush with an unusual presidential pet, President Herbert Hoover's possum Billy O'Possum. The story goes that in 1929 the Hyattsville High School Athletic Association lost their beloved opossum mascot right as the county prep baseball championships were about to start. Missing their mascot, the team turned to Hoover, one of the more prolific pet-owning presidents in US history, to see if they could use an opossum which had been adopted by the family after the marsupial was captured on the White House Grounds. 

Hoover agreed, and the Hyattsville baseball boys went on to win the 1929 county baseball championship. When they were done, they wrote a letter to Hoover thanking him for the loan of the opossum. You can see the entire brief exchange in these letters, copies of which were obtained by Hyattsville Patch after putting in a request with researcher's at the Hoover Presidential Library and Museum in West Branch, Iowa. 

The contents of the letters were fairly well documented in contemporary media accounts of Billy O'Possum's brief sojourn with the Hyattsville High School baseball team. But these documents do refute one aspect of the story as reported by the media at the time, namely that Hoover replied with a handwritten note. In fact, the note was composed on a typewriter. 

View the letters here.