By the Lake

(See Cover)

If the weather this Fourth of July weekend is warm, and sunny, the U.S. people will go to their zoos by the hundreds of thousands. From New York's 251-acre Bronx Zoo to San Diego's magnificently landscaped Balboa Park, they will wander along the tree-shaded walks, peering into cages, gawking over moats, throwing peanuts to the elephants and popcorn to the bears, lolling, sweating, drinking, eating--enjoying, in sum, what is one of the most universal of summer pastimes.

One of the biggest crowds of all will go to Chicago's Lincoln Park Zoo, a 79-year-old institution rich in legends of escaped animals (two of its sea lions once flopped into a North Clark Street saloon), and one of the chief ornaments of Chicago's tiara-like lake front. The Lincoln Park Zoo is not the nation's biggest, or even its best. But it has one great advantage: it is small, compact, set off by lagoons and gently rolling lawns, and is easily accessible by foot, bus, trolley and El. Largely because of its location, it consistently outdraws Chicago's bigger, more modern Brookfield Zoo, which lies 13 miles southwest of the Loop. Even when the Cubs are as determinedly in the pennant race as they are this season, Lincoln Park has bigger crowds than Wrigley Field; its 1947 attendance will probably hit 3,000,000--a new high.

At the head of this crowd-catching public institution (financed by the Chicago Park Board), is one of the fastest rising zoo directors in the country: lean, grey-haired R. Marlin Perkins, who has devoted most of his 42 years to studying, mothering, training, understanding, exploiting and explaining specimens of the animal kingdom from blacksnakes to baboons.

"Intelligence Park." Perkins' job, like those of all his zoo-keeping colleagues, is solidly founded on the eternal attraction that the animal kingdom has for man. The zoo, as such, is an ancient institution. Like the Fourth of July firecracker, it was invented by the Chinese. They built their first zoo around 1100 B.C. and named it "Intelligence Park."

In the 20th Century, a zoo is many things. For some, it is still an intelligence park. The zoophilist can learn about the world from the animals he sees. For others it is a menagerie and a circus. It is a place for lovers, walking hand in hand; a place for old men to sit in the shade; a place for children and their insatiable search for knowledge.

On a hot summer day, it is a place to feel cool by watching the seals slither through the blue water. Looking at the monkeys, a zoogoer can conclude that they resemble the family in the apartment downstairs--or a family uncomfortably like his own. Looking at a tiger, he can feel weak, unarmed and humble; at a gorilla, helpless; at an echidna (a mammal that lays eggs), vastly superior. Zoo men have built their exhibits on the proposition that if the proper study of mankind is man, a subsidiary and equally wholesome occupation is the contemplation of the lower animals.

Across the Land. U.S. zoogoers are lucky; they have the best zoos in the world. Once the Germans ranked the field, but before World War II the Americans had outstripped them. Few cities of any size are without a zoo of some sort, and even the whistle stops have their single cages with a moth-eaten bear or a few monkeys.

Of the big zoos, each has its points of superiority. The Bronx's is the biggest anywhere. Little, open-air tractor trains, salvaged from the 1939 World's Fair, help visitors get around its spacious preserve. The Bronx has the greatest variety of species, and some of the greatest oddities. Its bongo, a reddish antelope with white rings around its middle, is the only one in captivity. Its okapi, built like a giraffe in front and a zebra behind, is the only one in the U.S. This spring the Bronx made a big splash with the importation of three duck-billed platypuses, the first to be brought to the U.S. from Australia since 1922.

Philadelphia's zoo, founded in 1859, claims to be the oldest in the land. Chicago's Brookfield, opened in 1934, is the newest of the big zoos; it emphasizes quantity--49 kangaroos, an antelope collection of 29 species. St. Louis, where Perkins was trained, has the most showmanlike zoo, with elaborate daily performances by trained chimps, elephants and lions.

At the Cincinnati Zoo, over the din of squawking birds and roaring cats, grand opera is performed nightly in midsummer. Washington's National Zoo is notable for the contributions it gets from the White House--Teddy Roosevelt gave it a Somali ostrich, Calvin Coolidge a pigmy hippo, Franklin Roosevelt an Archangel pigeon.

The San Diego Zoo permits vulture-headed guineas, crested screamers and wild turkeys to roam free over its 200-odd acres. Here, California hair seals are trained for circuses and other zoos.

Bushman. Marlin Perkins' collection at Lincoln Park is good, if not dazzling. Among its 2,800 specimens are several star performers. One of them is Heinie, a male chimp who does a terrifying stomp to get an audience's notice and then spits ponderously at the nearest face. Other headliners are Dillinger, an 18-year-old lion whose savagery has never been tempered, and Judy, a 39-year-old elephant, who loves cough drops.

Lincoln Park's star of stars is a gorilla named Bushman. Recently, the American Association of Zoological Parks and Aquariums proclaimed Bushman "the most outstanding and most valuable single animal of its kind in any zoo in the world." Worth about $100,000, Bushman is a magnificent, 520-lb. anthropoid, 6 ft. 2 in. tall, with an arm spread of nearly twelve feet. At 19, he is in his black prime.

Born in the bush of French West Africa, Bushman was captured in babyhood. He got to Lincoln Park in 1930, weighing 38 Ibs. Almost every morning for 4 1/2 years, Keeper Eddie Robinson hitched Bushman to a 75-ft. rope and took him out for a romp on the monkey-house lawn. Man and beast wrestled, ran races, played football. Bushman learned how to heave a neat underhand pass, run with the ball, dodge tacklers. He was always gentle and obedient.

"He Just Sat There." Then one day Bushman balked at going back to his cage. Finally, mild-mannered Eddie Robinson slapped the gorilla across the face. Bushman got down on his knuckles and gave forth a low, ominous growl. Then he started running. He pulled Robinson after him, pell-mell down a flight of stairs, across the monkey-house basement. There he stopped. Robinson started petting him. Said Robinson later: "He could have killed me easily. But he followed me into the cage. He sat in front of the door of the cage and wouldn't let me leave. He just sat there looking at me like I'd done something awful bad. Finally he looked at me, kind of disgusted, and walked to the corner of the cage. I got out. That's the last time he was out."

Bushman did not turn mean. Although much of his box-office appeal, which is tremendous, lies in his menacing look, he generally seems playful, happy and welladjusted. He still likes to be fed by hand through an opening in his cage. Zoo Boss Perkins often helps with his feeding; Bushman took a quick liking to him.

Awful Boy. The fact that Bushman exhibited a fondness for Marlin Perkins was a natural thing; any good animal man could explain it. The feeling was mutual. To Perkins, man is a creature to talk to and drink with; animals live to be understood. Like most boys, he began with a dog. But from there he progressed so rapidly to ownership of goats, rabbits, squirrels, possums and garter snakes that, in Carthage, Mo., where he was born and in Pittsburg, Kans., where he spent his boyhood, he was inevitably known to the neighbors as "that awful Perkins boy." The neighbors had a point.

His father, a circuit judge, was a sedate and patient man who permitted young Marlin to bring home all the animal life he wanted. Snakes turned out to be his favorites. He is still unable to explain this preference adequately, although he admits it stems somewhat from his feeling that snakes are misunderstood. He points out that snakes are the world's best rodent hunters. When people fail to agree that this should win universal affection for reptiles, Perkins helplessly throws up his hands and says: "Some people would rather have rats than snakes around the house."

At 14, young Perkins was sent to Wentworth Military Academy, in Lexington, Mo., where he hid snakes in his closet. One day, an instructor caught him exercising two of them in a field. Although Perkins let himself be bitten to show how harmless they were, he was given a dressing down and ordered to throw the snakes away. He finished high school at Carthage.

After working for a year at odd jobs, Perkins went off to the University of Missouri to study zoology. His dedication to snakes kept him in minor but fairly constant trouble. Once, while talking to his girl, he casually produced a king snake from his pocket. "I honestly thought she'd like it as well as I did," he recalls wistfully, "but she took one look and had hysterics. That ended the romance." Another time, he lost a snake in the house where he boarded. He thought it would be only fair to report the disappearance to his landlady. "She never forgave me," he says. "That snake seemed to haunt her."

On the Sidewalk. After two years of college, Perkins went to St. Louis. There, one day in the '20s, he turned up at the zoo in Forest Park and asked for a job. He got one--sweeping sidewalks.

After two weeks, he was put in charge of the reptiles, a piddling display of five snakes indigenous to the Midwest and one tired, ten-foot python. Slowly, Perkins began to build up the collection by hunting the snakes himself, first in southern Illinois, then in Arkansas and Florida. To him, catching snakes is one of the easiest things in the world: just grab them behind the heads so they can't bite and stuff them in a sack.

The Show. The St. Louis Zoo was--and still is--under the direction of George Vierheller, who began as a zoo clerk and decided on his real vocation when he stayed up all night with a sick chimpanzee. Until the rise of Vierheller, the preeminent zoo director in the U.S. was The Bronx's late Dr. William Temple Hornaday, who insisted that a zoo's main function was educational and scientific. George Vierheller, who is now the Old Man Noah of U.S. zoos, thought differently. Like the original Old Man Noah, he knew a thing or two, especially about showmanship.

Rival zoo directors say that George Vierheller would allow himself to be impaled by a rhinoceros if he thought it would bring people to his zoo. Vierheller has never gone quite that far. But he did christen a baby elephant with champagne; and once a month he got a big crowd to his menagerie by force-feeding a listless python in public (stuffing 14 pounds of ground rabbit meat through a fire hose and down its gullet). He built a theater for his chimpanzees, dressed them in costumes, and taught them to count, smoke, bicycle, box and play the tympani. He put lions, tigers and leopards together in an animal-training act, and coaxed his baby elephants to do the hula.

He built some of the country's first barless enclosures, and kept his buildings spotlessly clean. He wangled some of the first pandas out of China, and had bamboo shoots flown up weekly from Florida for their fodder. Quite naturally, Perkins worked for the boss and learned. With Vierheller, he built the St. Louis reptile collection into one of great size and variety.

Viper's Fang. On New Year's Eve, 1928, Perkins was removing parasites from the back of a gaboon viper, a small African reptile, when the snake wriggled its head free and sank one fang into Perkins' index finger. The bite "felt like a bee sting magnified 100 times"; according to all known experience with the gaboon viper, Perkins should have died. He slashed an incision in his finger; he and a helper tried to suck out the venom. But in a few minutes he became dizzy. In 20 minutes, his left arm was twice its normal size and turning black.

Rushed to a hospital, he was given injections of antivenom serum and strychnine, but his condition rapidly worsened. An hour and ten minutes after he was bitten, he passed out. More injections and a blood transfusion finally pulled him through. Even so, it was three weeks before he could leave the hospital, several more before he felt entirely normal.

This experience had no effect on Marlin Perkins' relations with snakes. He thought it quite natural to take four days out from his honeymoon to go snake-hunting in Arizona. He still thinks that rattlesnake and iguana meat are gourmets' delights.

In 1938 Perkins left St. Louis to take over the directorship of the Buffalo Zoo. There he found, an institution that was smelly, filthy and ratinfested. He cleaned it up. He doubled the animal population (a mere 400 specimens when he arrived). He designed and supervised the building of a new reptile house; its natural-habitat display cases, with fluorescent lighting, set a new standard for U.S. zoos. But he had difficulties; the Buffalo Zoo was mired in city politics. In 1944, he quit and went to Chicago.

In, three years at Lincoln Park, Perkins has already done an impressive job of brightening up and modernizing. To start with, he rewrote almost every label in the place so that visitors could get at least a faint bit of information about his animals. He set up a Zooanswer Shop, where people could have their curiosity about animals satisfied. (No. 1 question: "What is the gestation period of an elephant?" Answer: 19 to 21 months.) He repainted cages. He opened a Zoorookery (a cageless exhibit of scores of pinioned birds). And he enlarged the reptile exhibit.

In his day, Perkins has done many an odd chore. He has cleaned out elephant skulls and put them on exhibition, and removed the scent glands from skunks. In April, along with two Chicago newsmen, he hunted eels by flashlight in the open sewers of a southern Louisiana town. His wastebasket is the hollowed-out foot of an unmanageable elephant that was shot at the St. Louis Zoo.

Prohibitive Prices. Now that animals are being delivered to the U.S. from abroad in quantity, Perkins is anxious to enlarge his entire collection, which, like most others, lost some specimens during the war. But animal prices are sky-high (nearly double prewar), and Perkins has little money for purchases. Last week, when a boatload of animals came in from Singapore, he made a quick round of dealers in Manhattan and Camden, N.J. He especially wanted an orangutan: the $3,500 price tag was prohibitive. Instead he chose a pair of cheetahs ($1,800), a sacred ibis ($65), a patas monkey ($5).

Perkins is full of ideas to make zoogoing even more fun and more instructive. One small dream involves a sort of slot machine, called the "Chimpomat," which would demonstrate the learning capacity of chimps by automatically rewarding them for tricks well done. Another idea is for a great new reptile house for Lincoln Park. In it, he would like to have the best snake collection in the world. Then, he would like to use his old reptile house to present a complete natural history of animals. Says he: "Everything in the animal kingdom stems from water, and if you could show the relation between animals step by step, it would be wonderfully educational. Just think--you start out with microscopic life, go on with sea worms, and pretty soon you have the whole blooming animal kingdom there in front of you."

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