The Fledgling

As a general rule, elephants and streetcars are better off when they do not try to fly, but all rules have their exceptions. A few years back Walt Disney conceived an elephant named Dumbo with ears so big that he could flap them like wings and fly through the air with the greatest of ease. And Germany's sprawling city of greater Wuppertal has long been hooked in on an interurban elevated line whose cars are suspended from a single elevated rail.

Last week the proprietors of a traveling circus playing Wuppertal decided to combine the talents of the district's flying streetcars with those of their own earth-bound star, a 450-lb. heifer elephant named Tuffi.

Fired by their pressagent's persistence, the circusmen pushed, shoved, squeezed and bedeviled the little elephant up the station steps and through the narrow doors of a monorail car that was already crowded with passengers. The car took off, soaring across the city and along the banks of the winding Wupper river. Tuffi screamed and began running wildly up & down inside. Then, with the courage of a Dumbo but without air-force ears, she plunged through the car door into open space. A few minutes later circus attendants rounded Tuffi up as she sprawled shocked but uninjured in the bed of the Wupper 18 feet below. Overhead dangled the wreckage of the flying tram, still filled with Tuffi's startled fellow passengers.

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