SHEDDING HIS SHACKLES
ZIGGY THE ELEPHANT TASTED FREEDOM THANKS TO A CRUSADE SPARKED BY A TRIBUNE ARTICLE
Thanks to schoolchildren’s pennies and dimes, Ziggy the elephant got a taste of freedom on Sept. 23, 1970. The door to his cage at Brookfield Zoo opened, and there stood his former keeper, George “Slim” Lewis, who came from Seattle for the reunion. “Ziggy’s ears flopped at the sound of a familiar voice, and an old acquaintance smiled at not being forgotten,” the Tribune reported.
Having been chained to a wall in the Pachyderm House for 29 years, Ziggy hesitated. It took 30 minutes of Lewis’ coaxing for him to step outside and munch a bale of hay. “Then, with one last swing of his trunk, the 53-year-old elephant walked back inside of his own accord.”
His brief reprieve was a feasibility test of an outdoor enclosure for Ziggy championed by then-Tribune reporter Michael Sneed. Her appeal had generated $15,000 in donations from the elephant’s young and old fans for a new enclosure for the elephant. Before going any further, the zoo’s director wanted to know if the money would be well spent. Or like an aging movie star, would Ziggy shy away from the spotlight?
It was magnanimous of Lewis to participate in the experiment. Ziggy’ s confinement resulted from an attack that nearly took the keeper’s life.
On April 26, 1941, Ziggy threw Lewis down and tried to gore him. But his tusks missed and became lodged in the ground. Lewis stunned him with a punch to the eye, jumped into the enclosure’s moat and escaped. The zoo’s management wanted to put Ziggy down, but Lewis begged that the sentence be commuted to life imprisonment, indoors.
The attack was attributed to musk, the heightened production of testosterone during the mating season that causes male elephants to become crazed. But even before puberty, Ziggy had a bad-boy reputation.
Ziggy was named for the theatrical producer Florenz Ziegfeld, who bought him, as a 1-year-old, as a gift for his 6-year-old daughter. But he was sold back to the Ringling Bros. Circus after trampling through the girl’s birthday party in Ziegfeld’s greenhouse, eating plants and snatching cookies from children’s hands.
Next, he was sold to Singer’s Midgets circus, where he learned to dance, smoke and play a giant harmonica with his trunk to the tune of “Yes, Sir, That’s My Baby.”
While doctor’s tethered barn to in a Milwaukee prominent during Prohibition, Ziggy battered down a wall, uncovering a stash of bootleg liquor that embarrassed the circus’ host. His brother was the city’s captain of detectives.
During a 1936 appearance in San Diego, Ziggy reportedly tossed a trombone player 30 feet in the air and fled. Recaptured, Ziggy was sold to Brookfield field Zoo, which denied its prized acquisition was guilty of killing anyone. The zoo cited a letter from an elephant maven who said Ziggy’s name didn’t appear on a list of killer elephants. So the trombone player must have been only bruised.
Either way, the sight of a 6-ton Asian elephant made a lasting impression on zoo visitors. Sneed tapped into those memories with a tear-jerker description of Ziggy in solitary confinement.
“Ziggy’s six-foot tusks, which at one time had grown so long they crossed over each other, are now broken and decayed,” she wrote in 1969. “He is kept in a stall of his own, held with a short chain around one of his legs, attached to a wall. One-thousand-pound doors guard his prison. He generally refuses to face his visitors, and turns toward the back wall, swaying back and forth, occasionally picking up stray articles of food thrown to him.”
Sneed’s column and the zoo’s response produced a flood of outrage.
“We are trying to get away from images of star animals,” Brookfield’s assistant director said. “Ziggy is a relic and a rogue at that.”
But an underling flipped, telling the Tribune that Ziggy was never washed. A ton of hay thrown into his cage weekly was pretty much all the care he got. The Anti-Cruelty Society chimed in, saying it had tried in vain to get the zoo to treat Ziggy more humanely.
That did it. Kids broke into their piggy banks. Students at an Elmhurst grade school raised and sold chickens for 50 cents each, sending the money to “their friend Ziggy.”
The Bellwood Boys Club wheeled a 5-foot papier-mache elephant with a chain on its leg from door to door. They carried signs reading “Quarters for a New Quarter for Ziggy.” A Niles fifth-grader wrote to Ziggy: “I hope St. Francis will help you. He loved animals.”
Another envelope contained a crumpled dollar bill and a note: “I will have to go to bed without any dinner for the next two nights, but it is worth it.”
Some American service members in South Vietnam sent $10. A visitor from Colorado wrote a $100 check, the Goodman Theatre staged a benefit and Buick-Opel car dealers contributed $13,485. Ziggy’s financial worth topped $50,000.
That kind of money talks, and Brookfield Zoo built Ziggy his own enclosure that included a wading pool. For good measure, his Pachyderm House quarters were redecorated with an East Indian theme, the walls painted to look like the dense foliage of his birthplace.
Not only did he enjoy creature comfort when his outside enclosure was completed in 1971, but he also gained companionship a few years later. In 1973, Minnie, a female elephant, was given access to Ziggy’s bachelor pad. He was temporarily chained, lest he violently object. But he was OK with the idea of a roommate, and on the Fourth of July, his shackles were removed, this time for good.
Minnie’s reaction was different. She tried to shove Ziggy up the ramp to his cage. But she came around, to Ziggy’s delight.
They nuzzled, and as the Tribune echoed a zookeeper: “He wrapped his trunk around a female African elephant despite the obstruction of a large wooden barricade. She was able to take care of him, but he almost fell into the moat.”
There were no offspring from their first date or subsequent ones. Frailties of age shaped their romance. Minnie had rheumatoid arthritis and sometimes just wanted to be left alone. Ziggy responded by eating her food. His eyesight was fading, and he tumbled into the moat.
Getting a 7-ton elephant out — Ziggy had put on weight — wasn’t easy. Workers dumped 84,000 pounds of gravel into the moat to create a ramp. But Ziggy wouldn’t climb it. For 31 hours, he just stood there in 10 feet of water
Then a zookeeper brought Widget, a 21-year-old female African elephant, out of the Pachyderm House. They occupied adjoining stalls and the zookeeper often heard Ziggy calling out to her. At the sound of Widget’s voice, Ziggy started gingerly walking up the ramp, picking up the pace until he made it to dry land.
But the accident took its toll. He stopped eating and leaned against a wall.
“When elephants get old like this, and death becomes imminent, they’re afraid to lie down, for fear they won’t be able to get back up,” the zoo’s veterinarian told the Tribune.
In late October 1975, Ziggy slumped down, rolled over and died. His remains were brought to the Field Museum, which lacked the space to display them. A storeroom would be Ziggy’s final resting place, the museum’s curator of mammals told the Tribune in March 1976.
“Even so, I’m so sorry about this,” Luis de la Torre said. “He will always be a priceless research specimen, but the public has seen the last of him.”
On that sad note, the story of Ziggy ends.
The “artist” elephant had a spirit to match his size. Once while he was performing with Singer’s circus in Spain, a stage collapsed. Ziggy climbed out of the wreckage and saw the frightened audience.
Trouper that he was, Ziggy stood on his hind legs and danced.