John McClaughry has never been shy about offering his opinions on just about anything done by the state or federal government. An ex-state senator, former speechwriter and senior policy advisor to President Reagan, and founder of the free-market think tank, Ethan Allen Institute, McClaughry made a career out of wading hip-deep into the weeds of public policy matters. 

Perhaps all that time spent in bureaucratic swamps explains McClaughry’s personal fondness for frogs.

Evidently, though, McClaughry is shy about admitting to his secret, 50-year side gig as champion of croaking amphibians. Beginning in 1961, McClaughry, under the pseudonym Nestle J. Frobish, dubbed himself “Chair-Creature of the Worldwide Fair Play for Frogs Committee.” In that role, he launched a campaign to skewer the political aspirations of a then-California state assemblyman, then later U.S. congressman, named Jerome R. Waldie.

Waldie’s damnable offense? As a freshman Democratic lawmaker from Antioch, Calif., he introduced a one-line bill in the California State Assembly that read, “Frogs may be taken using slingshot.” At the time, McClaughry was a college student at UC Berkeley — another difficult concept to wrap one’s head around. McClaughry describes his alter-ego Frobish as “an outraged liberal who thought this invasion of the rights of the frog was wholly unconscionable and embarked on a crusade that eventually came to victory 44 years later.”

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Staff Writer Ken Picard is a senior staff writer at Seven Days. A Long Island, N.Y., native who moved to Vermont from Missoula, Mont., he was hired in 2002 as Seven Days’ first staff writer, to help create a news department. Ken has since won numerous...

One reply on “John McClaughry: Free-Market Conservative and…Champion of Frogs?”

  1. Reply: The credibility of this story is completely impugned by its scandalous statement that I, John McClaughry, am “Vermont’s foremost advocate for seceding from the Union”.
    Far from being the foremost advocate for secession, I have continuously and unequivocally opposed Vermont’s secession from the Union, dating back to
    the Frank Bryan-John Dooley debates of twenty years ago. My reason: Living in
    the United States of America affords me some protections under the Constitution
    and Bill of Rights. Those would vanish along with our freedoms in an
    independent state run by such as Madeleine Kunin, Bernie Sanders, John Dooley,
    and Peter Shumlin.”
    As for the frog issue, I will leave it to my friend Nestle to comment, but historically he has steered clear of sensational media exposes authored by young journalists seeking to make a name for themselves.
    John McClaughry, Kirby VT 4//6/13

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