Want a hippo for Christmas? The story of a girl who got one

All a cute, curly haired 10-year-old girl named Gayla Peevey wanted for Christmas in 1953 was a hippopotamus.

And amazingly enough, after “I Want a Hippopotamus For Christmas” became the biggest hit song of that holiday season, she actually got one, a 700-pound baby named Matilda. She promptly donated it to the Oklahoma City Zoo, where it lived to be nearly 50, a ripe old age for hippos.

As for Peevey’s song, it may never die.

“That one just really took off, and it’s still going strong, stronger than ever. Sixt ythree years later! Hard to believe,” Peevey, an ebullient woman of 73, says during a recent phone interview from her San Diegoarea home.

So much so that it’s used as a cellphone ringtone these days, included on holiday ornaments and Christmas cards, available for download on iTunes. It’s even featured in a U.S. Postal Service commercial in which the post office boasts it ships more online gifts, hippopotamuses included, than anybody.

Some people will tell you it’s an annoying ear worm, a tune with such silly lyrics and a melody so madden- ingly memorable that it will play endlessly in your head every holiday season until New Year’s Day.

B u t t h a t ’ s p a r t o f i t s charm, says Tim Moore, iHeart Radio’s New Hampshire programming director who over the decades has played it plenty of times.

“It’s got the sound of an old-time recording,” Moore says. “It sounds dated. It sounds a little corny. But that’s the thing about it. Also, not to be discounted is its effect on children.”

Yes, definitely don’t discount that.

For years, Peevey has been hearing from schoolteachers around the world who tell her their students perform the song and can’t get enough of it.

“Over 15 years now we’ve done it, and I don’t think we’re s t oppi ng, ” l aughs Dana Ca ro, who d i re c t s the second- grade Christmas music program at a suburban Southern California school.

Other songs come and go, says Caro, but “Hippo” stays in the mix every year at Arcadia’s Longley Way Elementary School.

And who knows, singing it may actually get a kid a hippo. Unlikely, perhaps, but it did get one for Peevey.

Three thousand dollars later, Matilda arrived on Christmas Eve, a fitting gift for someone who would so enthusiastically declare, “No crocodiles, no rhinoceroses. I only like hippopotamuses. And hippopotamuses like me too.”

S o o n a f t e r, h o we v e r, Peevey left her hippopotamus behind, moving to California.

She had been singing professionally for t wo years before recording “Hippo,” moving up from local watermelon f e s t iv a l s t o r a di o shows and then a spot on television’s “Saturday Night Revue” hosted by Hoagy Carmichael.

B u t h e r h i p p o f a m e caught her off guard, and for months afterward she couldn’t move around Oklahoma Cit y without being mobbed by fans. Her parents figured she’d blend in as just another “normal kid” in California while recording a few more songs.

N o n e wou l d h av e t h e impact of that first one, written by John Rox and personally selected for Peevey by Columbia Records’ legendary producer and A&R man Mitch Miller, who backed her with his orchestra.

Soon after, she was off to college, then marriage and motherhood. Eventually she founded her own advertising agency, keeping her hand in music writing commercial jingles.

Retired and married for 53 years now, she still sings regularly in church.