Grizzly Adams
This celebrity goo was created by Scott Hardie.
publication date: Monday, July 13, 2026 (part of July 2026)
category: 
Legends
clue: He wasn't a lawyer from Massachusetts. He was an outdoorsman who risked death many times to get up close and personal with the beasts who would become his legacy, turning up years later in such places as the Bronx Zoo, an NBC TV series, and the flag of California.
explanation: John "Grizzly" Adams was a famed outdoorsman of the mid-1800s, popularly known for trapping grizzly bears and surviving many deadly encounters and dangers. His menagerie became a zoo in San Francisco, which inspired other zoos across the country, including the Bronx Zoo which remains the home of grizzly bears to this day. The 1977-1982 TV series The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams depicted a fictionalized version of Adams from 1977 to 1982. One of Adams's grizzlies was the model of an 1855 painting by Charles Nahl that was eventually standardized as the bear on the California flag. more…
intended difficulty: easy
solved by: Russ Wilhelm, Richard Slominsky, and Erik Bates
trivia: This goo was inspired by founding father John Adams.
You're Not My Real Founding Fathers!: America loves its Founding Fathers, and the nation's 250th anniversary makes for a fine opportunity to celebrate them. But wait—who are these imitators? These are actors, and musicians, and authors, and athletes! Their John Hancocks are very similar, but these aren't the real Founding Fathers! Starting apropos on Father's Day, here are a whopping fifty goos to challenge your knowledge of patriotic trivia. Can you identify these fifty fake signatories to a Declaration of Independence that never was? With luck, you\ll hold these goos to be self-evident.Similar Goos
June Blair
She wasn't a judge from Virginia. She was an actress who married into a TV-perfect 1950s family, complete with Ricky Nelson as the best man. Go »
John Witherspoon
He wasn't a minister from New Jersey. He was Ice Cube's weekday father, Kid & Play's annoyed neighbor, Robert Townsend's fast-food boss, Eddie Murphy's vamping victim, and a very animated granddad. Go »
Frances Dana Barker Gage
She wasn't a lawyer from Massachusetts. She was a universal suffragist and abolitionist who refused to sit on her fanny in the face of injustice, until an accident forced it. Go »
George Washington Carver
He wasn't a military commander from Virginia. He was an agricultural scientist and inventor, the arc of whose life—being born into slavery, witnessing race crimes, overcoming educational discrimination, joining the faculty of an esteemed school, devoting his career to teaching poor Southerners who spurned him how they could grow new crops like peanuts in soil that was depleted by cotton, and surviving until the eve of the post-war boom—inspires hope that America will spend its second 250 years fully embodying the principles that it established in its first. Go »
Jonathan Dickinson
He wasn't a lawyer from Delaware. He was a merchant whose journal after a famous shipwreck in Florida has been hailed as one of the great survival-in-captivity tales, but spoiler warning: He lived to become the mayor of Philadelphia. Go »
