Alonzo Nichols was probably born in 1865 in Williamstown, New York, though he often claimed to remember Abe Lincoln's inauguration. He probably never attended school, but worked for most of his life as a boot black.

Everything we know about Lonnie suggests that he was, at best, slow and, at most, what we used to call "retarded." Early on in life he developed his own dance called the "grasshopper" from which one of his nicknames "Grassy" was derived.

Yet newspaper coverage of his exploits never calls him so much as "simple." In 1901 the Evening News  said, "he developed an elastic imagination that has been constantly stretched until today its extension is unlimited..."

He called himself the mayor, the fire chief, the police chief and the band leader, and for much of his life he had no home, but slept each night in the band room on the third floor of city hall, an address duly noted in many city directories. His loyalty to the band was legendary. Once, when the band left for Buffalo without him, he simply started walking up the train tracks after them.

He spoke at public gatherings, and was always a featured performer in Elk minstrel shows. When a faraway city would call to say that they had arrested him up for vagrancy and that he claimed to be the mayor of Franklin, someone would just go pick him up.