Changing zoos
is traumatic.
I'll admit I'm sentimental about the Topeka Zoo. Many of the animals and people I became attached to in my years on the
zoo beat for The Topeka Capital-Journal are gone now. But I'll always remember them with affection.
My friends kept telling me I would love the National Zoo in Washington, D.C., even more. But they never told me how big
the National Zoo is. They didn't caution, "Be sure to wear your walking shoes." They never said it would take hours
to tour the zoo.
Yes, it's a wonderful place -- and, yes, Hsing Hsing, the panda from China, did have an interesting birthday recently.
But the Topeka Zoo was a place I could tour in a spare hour or two. A place with shady nooks and benches -- and animals
that were amusing and appealing.
When I joined the newspaper staff in 1958, there wasn't much of a zoo in Gage Park. A monkey island. A few native Kansas
animals. A somewhat disreputable lion named Wonderful William. Its prairie dogs had dug their way out of the zoo and were
popping up in the velvety lawns of Westboro.
An innovative Topeka Zoo evolved with the arrival of a brash but gentle young man, Gary K. Clarke, as director. He had
some big ideas -- and a way of enticing the community to help.
Some of my memories include:
* Mischievous polar bears that waited for a crowd to gather close to their exhibit. The polar bears would jump into their
pool, drenching everyone within reach. The public never learned.
* Monkeys that discovered how to open their cage and kept getting out and roaming over Gage Park. That led to the director
of the London Zoo advising Clarke to give the monkeys their own key so they could come and go as they pleased.
* Some rowdy chimpanzees that were throwing something awful at zoo visitors. (I don't dare report what they were throwing
in a family newspaper.)
* The dental assistant who was astounded to get a telephone call from the zoo, saying Max the baby gorilla had a toothache.
The dental assistant protested that the dentist wasn't a veterinarian, but was told, "We know, but Max's pediatrician says
he's in a lot of pain and really needs help." (His pediatrician?) The intrigued dentist did his first ever procedure on a
little gorilla and became a hero to his children.
* Peka Sue, the hippopotamus, giving her animal keeper an accusing look from the middle of her pool. The keeper said the
heating system for the pool had malfunctioned. A crew was working on it, but she kept letting him know they weren't working
fast enough.
* And things just seemed to happen to Clarke. There was the time he was on an airliner with a small alligator in his briefcase.
Sometime during the flight the alligator got its snout out of the briefcase.
At first, Clarke thought he could shove it back. But the alligator was too strong. It kept shoving more and more of itself
out, and before Clarke could figure out what to do, the alligator was outside the case and the two were wrestling in the aisle.
The other passengers were vastly entertained.
* What do you do when a 369-pound gorilla doesn't want to come out of his living quarters to explore a new $645,000 gorilla
heaven, when the public is waiting? You let him do exactly as he pleases. Later Max decided to come out and greet his fans.
* Max the gorilla liked children. His Gorilla Encounter permitted the children to get close to him, with a thick glass
wall between them. Max would wait quietly while a crowd of children gathered. Then, he would ball up a huge fist, and "BAM!"
he would strike the glass. The children would scream and scatter in all directions like mice. Max enjoyed that as much as
the children.
* Then there was Jim the orangutan. Jim as a youngster liked to paint pictures. Clarke decided to enter one anonymously
in a Kansas art contest for children, and Jim won a prize. His painting for a time was exhibited at the White House in Washington,
D.C.
* One of Clarke's favorite animals was Jenkins, a puma, which was hand-raised. She licked his head and purred like a buzzsaw.
* The zoo produced the first hatching of a golden eagle egg in captivity. That brought world acclaim.
* Snakes were never my favorites. Clarke coaxed me to stroke one. It wasn't slimy as I thought it would be, but I still
don't like snakes. Clarke loved snakes. I had read a New Yorker "Annals of Medicine" about his experience of being bitten
by a rare red diamondback rattlesnake.
Clarke at the time was working at a research institute in Kansas City. Part of his duties was to pick up the snakes one
at a time, drop them into a burlap sack, knot it at the top and weigh them. He said when he picked up Big Red, the snake kept
flipping away from the sack. Clarke kept trying, and an irritated Big Red bit him on the leg. After a painful stay at the
hospital, Clarke recovered.
"It was my fault he bit me," Clarke said. "I should have stopped when he got upset. Red has the sweetest nature of any
rattlesnake I have ever known."
After I became an editor, I lost intimate contact with the zoo, but never my interest in it.
Eventually Clarke left the zoo. He was replaced by Mike LaRue, and now the zoo has a new director, David Mask.
The zoo, in existence since 1912, continues to be a major source of entertainment for Topeka area visitors.
And -- trust me -- it's a lot more fun than the National Zoo.
Stannie Anderson was a health and general assignment writer for The State Journal and for The Capital-Journal. She was
city editor of The State Journal and later assistant city editor of The Capital-Journal. After retirement she worked six years
as writing coach for the newspaper. She moved to Burke, Va., in December 1998.
