Thursday, July 17, 2025

Mr. T and Trees

As much as I did a deep-dive on Mr. T a while back (or several deep-dives) I believe I missed that he was in the National Guard for a short stint and the legendary story, now posted on military.com, from his time there:

At some point during his military career, a platoon sergeant started "throwing his weight around." He ordered Pvt. Mr. T to chop down trees on the base but failed to mention how many. Mr. T axed 70 trees in 3.5 hours before the company commander ordered him to stop.

A tall tale? The new Chuck Norris? A modern day Paul Bunyan? I sure don't know. But, reddit has already made the connection to other obscure Mr. T Tree lore (from Curbed Chicago):

 Now, in honor of Curbed Outdoors Week, let's take a look back at one of the Chicago area's most infamous landscaping debacles: Mr. T's 1987 inexplicable destruction of more than 100 trees (actual tree counts vary) on the old Armour estate in Lake Forest... 

...The home in question was built in 1910 for a banker named Orville Elias Babcock, and it was later occupied by meatpacking magnet[sic] Laurance Armour... In 1986, Mr. T (a Chicago native, by the way) bought the sprawling English Tudor estate for $1.7 million... Then, a year later, he went all Paul Bunyan on the hundreds of trees that filled his property. He even wiped out four 12-foot topiary trees that had been sculpted to represent birds in nests....

The papers called it the 'Lake Forest Chainsaw Massacre.' Arborists were stunned. And for his part, Mr. T never bothered to fully explain why he fired up a chainsaw and, alongside hired workmen, got busy clearcutting the oaks, elms and maples that populated his seven-acre estate...

So, I don't know, it seems that Mr. T hates trees. If we're looking to see if this can be added to the Mr. T Cinematic Universe, it maps to the S03E05 "A-Team" episode "Timber!" where the A-Team helps out a lumber company, but I don't know of any other connections.

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