MARY J. WILSON

83, Ashburton

Mary J. Wilson, the first African American senior zookeeper at what is now the Maryland Zoo in Baltimore whose expertise was caring for gorillas and elephants, died Thursday at Northwest Hospital in Randallstown of the coronavirus. The former Ashburton resident was 83.

Mike J. McClure, who is general curator of the animal department at the zoo, was a young novice zookeeper when he met Ms. Wilson.

“I was very lucky being able to work with Mary. It was an invaluable experience and she put me on the right track,” the Forest Hill resident said. “She was a very interesting lady, very sweet and kind, but very structured and firm. She was respectful and treated you fairly and had compassion, and that’s how she treated the animals and they responded to it. She treated them like equals.”

Said Carol M. Barth, of Parkville, who worked with Ms. Wilson at the thenBaltimore Zoo from 1973 to 1991: “Mary brought love, skill and passion to her work with the animals at the zoo. She was also like everyone’s mentor. She was a mother, friend and supervisor. What a great woman.”

Mary Jeanette Wilson, daughter of Willie Wilson and Mary Henry, was born and raised in West Baltimore and graduated from Paul Laurence Dunbar High School.

“She started working at the zoo in 1961,” said her daughter, Sharron Wilson Jackson, an Ashburton resident who is a retired Platinum Hill Records executive and former owner of Sound Sages Entertainment. “She was an animal lover and had always loved them, and her love of them rubbed off on me. Gorillas and elephants were her favorites.”

Arthur R. Watson, who headed the zoo from1948 to1980, hired Ms. Wilson, whose only qualifications, The Sun reported in 1996, were a “willingness to work hard and a love of animals. In these days of specialized training, she probably wouldn’t get past the front door.”

At the time of her hire, most women started out working with birds or nurserytype animals, but Ms. Wilson went right into caring for mammals. She spent her entire career working with gorillas, cats and elephants in the Mammal House.

“It’s like baby-sitting, only more so, and you can get just as attached to your work,” Ms. Wilson told the old Sunday Sun Magazine in 1966.

Said Mr. McClure: “She had a special relationship with animals. She was very consistent and very clear. She was very tall and could look eye-to-eye to Dolly the elephant. And she’d do what Mary told her to do because she treated her like an equal.”

He said Ms. Wilson was “fearless” when working with elephants but was “terrified by mice.”

In the mid-1960s, a baby gorilla named Sylvia, who was less than a year old, came to the zoo from the Congo, and because she had no mother, it fell to Ms. Wilson to assume that role.

Sylvia was then about 10 months old, weighed 18 pounds, 8 ounces, and was about 23 inches tall.

“Sylvia was like a baby to me. She was this cute little reddish-colored gorilla,” she explained to The Sun in 1996. “We had to care for her just like we’d care for a human