Name: 8 Unbelievable Stories From California | The Classics
Uploaded: 2025-11-17T16:56:09.000Z
Duration: 28 min 56 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Adverbs of manner

Only in California where the mayor's a dog, the best Indian food is at a gas station and roller rinks never went out of style.

Adverbs of degree

You can grab Filipino food at a car wash and even learn to dive in prison.

Welcome to California's greatest big stories.

You know, it's really been a game changer having having the mayor on my side.

It's really kind of a full time job than most humans.

This dog is the mayor of a town in California.

Which raises a few questions around how a human politician can be replaced by an animal.

In search of answers, we travel to Idlewild to shadow Max and his team.

I, Max, do swear on my food bowl to faithfully execute my duties as mayor of Utterwild.

Towns across America have been electing their pets into power for decades.

The earliest recorded mayor was Bosco Ramos, a Labrador Rottweiler mix elected in 1981.

In the 80s, a beer drinking goat came to power in Lajitas, Texas.

And from the 90s, mayors were popping up all over the place.

But these small towns have one crucial thing in common.

They're unincorporated areas, which means they have no no official local government and no need for a real mayor.

Animal elections have become a tradition to bring communities together without politics.

Frankly, we weren't convinced a dog was up to the job.

But what we discovered with Mayor Max was truly unexpected.

I'm the chief of staff for the mayor of Ottawa and I'm also his owner.

I run Mayor Max's day to day activities with the help of my husband Glenn.

Max goes to bachelor parties, bachelorette parties, weddings.

All the background work that's behind the scenes that we do with social media, we do produce an annual calendar, the Meramex calendar we have since 2014.

There's a lot of expense involved in that, so it's a time and money endeavor today.

Running the mayor's office cost my husband and I more than $120,000 a year to run.

But Meramax is not a business to me and I can't sell the calendar.

And so I give it away for free as a gift because I actually believe that anyone who gets my calendar and reads it has a happier, longer, more successful life.

I get communications, not Only in email, but from every single social media account that we have.

And then we have the landline, we have my mobile number.

This is a series of letters that I received from children, and

they all wrote Mayor Max a letter from their class.

I got this from the California legislature, from Greg Wallace, and

it was a certificate of recognition for everything that we've done for the community.

Some people create original art, and then they give it to me.

Meramex receives sometimes hundreds of communications, even in a day.

And then I manage everything in a database so that I can remember it.

So if somebody sends me a gift, then I note that in the database.

And what's funny about that is my husband and I are not retired.

Phyllis and Glenn have taken time out of their busy schedules to show us what a day running the office looks like.

So here we have a copy of Mayor Max's oath, and I'll read it to you.

It says, I, Max, do swear on my food bowl to faithfully execute my duties as mayor of Ottawa.

I am proud to take this oath knowing that my human campaign manager went above and beyond to finance this election campaign.

I will be a role model as mayor of all canines, felines, and you mine, so help me.

So this is closet, one of the mares, where we have the ties.

What we do is the mare dresses up every day, and so do the other mares.

We in this closet right now, I probably have about a thousand ties.

I buy them 3,000 at a time because I get a better price discount that way.

And so sometimes I can afford to get them, and sometimes it's more challenging.

All right, now we're entering the second closet for the mare, where I have all the vests for the mare.

So I have the turquoise, green, red, orange, pink on this row, and

I have yellow, dark blue, and I have burgundy and then black and white.

This is the mayor and vice mayor of Ottawa coming to work.

We're lifting in the mayor and now the vice mayor.

First on the agenda, a meet and greet downtown.

And news of their arrival has spread far and wide.

And I also am deputizing children and dogs.

So I have small, small, and large dog ties.

And if you want to be in the picture, I can snap it on your phone, honey.

You're now an official deputy mayor of Idlewild, representing Idlewild, where you live.

Before we knew anything about Idle Wild, we knew.

That's why we came here today to see the dogs.

Max just keeps it, like, 100% up here so that, you know, it's just nature and people and being amazing.

Probably makes a better politician than most humans.

Next up, a ribbon cutting ceremony at new local dog boutique, Mountain Paws.

Subtitles ListPlay Video

8 Unbelievable Stories From California | The Classics

improve

commercial

vice

confront