Giving The Zoo Back To The Animals -- Woodland Park Has Come Far From Tiny Cages And Bored Critters

As the millennium approaches Pacific Northwest is quietly trying to keep its gaze focused on the past. This is a the second of an occasional series of stories on interesting and unusual chapters in the area's history.

IT'S MOMENTS AFTER a zoo-wide meeting at Woodland Park Zoo and the elephant keepers, slightly gamy in their damp coats and boots, linger in front of a flickering television.

The zoo is officially 100 years old. Images are being gathered for celebrations later this summer, and here on tape is a hodgepodge of what was important in the '20s, '30s and even up to the '60s.

There's no footage, of course, of Guy Phinney's 1890s menagerie at his private Woodland Park - a streetcar ride up the long hill from Fremont - open to all who would leave behind gun, dog and any temptation to tease Bosco the bear.

We don't see famed French actress Sarah Bernhardt, lured from town in 1891 on a publicity stunt to shoot a wild version of Bosco. She settled for a squirrel.

Missing, sadly, are images of the 60-foot tapeworm pulled from a polar bear in 1915 and still preserved in a jar somewhere on zoo grounds. The bear's name was Hannah and the tapeworm was Stanley, named years later for a favorite measuring device.

Nor is there a single image of the gigantic blood clot that was nailed to the side of a barn in 1933, the cause of death of the magnificent rogue elephant Tusko, a brief resident. Tusko died in the midst of a fund-raising drive to build a new elephant house, a request familiar to generations of Seattle taxpayers.

But what images there are in this collection of film clips show how much things have changed since the city of Seattle officially purchased Woodland Park in 1899 - and how much they haven't.

There's footage of the Works Progress Administration construction of "Monkey Island" in 1940, a forerunner to the zoo's more recent reputation as a world pioneer in barless exhibits.

It was designed by longtime zoo director Gus Knudson, who, in 1914, talked about the revolution of allowing zoo animals to roam in a natural environment, the antithesis of cages where creatures are "unhappy, unsightly and uninteresting."

During the next 60 years, Woodland Park tried to move away from the traditional collection of one bored animal per tiny cage, but the idea was slow to catch on. When Seattle zoo officials announced plans to build an open-air gorilla exhibit with real grass and trees in the late 1970s, attendees at a national zoo directors' meeting declared it a "screwy idea, a complete waste of money."

But by the 1980s and 1990s, Woodland Park was being lauded internationally for giving the garden back to the animals, which had the bonus of helping visitors make the connection between habitat and survival.

As life improves in zoos, it grows grimmer in the wild. King County taxpayers and private donors seem to have made that link, generously supporting not only Woodland Park's animals, but also the zoo's programs of breeding endangered species and championing habitat protection in 14 countries.

For much of its history, Woodland Park relied on pony rides, picnics and the occasional animal star, attractive not for its nobility but for how human it could seem.

"That must be Wide Awake!" said one of the elephant keepers excitedly as footage flew by of the little elephant who arrived in 1921 and still dazzled visitors with her old circus tricks in 1967.

Then, finally, as the film flickered to its end, a flash of Bobo, Wide Awake's usurper.

Bobo was a gorilla raised like a child for two years in Anacortes, where he wore clothes, went to the drive-in movie and responded to such commands as "Bobo, let the dog out."

He grew so connected to human beings that people flocked to his glass-fronted cage and then left disquieted, as if that were Uncle Harry slumped in there, the vigor of his 525 pounds reduced to the intensity of his stare.

From 1953 to 1968, Bobo did very little to make people picture what his behavior would have been like in Africa. But he did a lot to make them care.

MENAGERIES HAVE been around since the time of the early Egyptians, with the notion of traveling menageries making its way from Europe to the Eastern United States in the late 1700s.

Naturally, by the time the idea got here, it included a commercial sponsor. People in small towns were drawn by the sight of bears and more exotic animals in cages, and bought the miracle elixirs hawked alongside.

Guy Phinney had a little something to sell visitors, too.

Phinney was a Nova Scotian of English descent who followed booms and busts across Canada until he arrived here busted in 1881. He rapidly made his way back to boom, putting every spare penny from a Lake Washington sawmill into real estate.

By 1889, he paid $10,000 for 342 acres along the ridge west of Green Lake. He kept 188 acres, including a half-mile of lake frontage, for himself and his family, leaving the rest for potential home sites.

But Phinney's ridge was a day's ride by wagon from town and lots were still plentiful much nearer. How could he attract potential land buyers, much less Sarah Bernhardt, should she ever happen to come to Seattle to appear in "Fedora" at the Third Avenue Theater?

The answer? A menagerie.

Not just elk, deer, raccoons, beavers and bears, but animals set on grounds with a beautiful English garden, a hotel, hunting cabin, dance pavilion, bicycle racetrack and bathhouse.

Phinney put $50,000 into improvements and then drew it all closer to town by making his private trolley - known as the "White Elephant" - available from Fremont.

All went well with the plan until Phinney died from a sudden illness in 1893, leaving his widow, Nellie, to carry on.

Her personal sorrows were bad enough, but the country was in an economic depression. Things perked up in 1899, however, when the Seattle City Council offered her $100,000 for the Phinneys' popular picnic grounds.

Bad idea, said the mayor, who tried to veto the offer. Waste of money for a "park so far from town," said other detractors.

But the farsighted council predicted that though growth was slow, there could come a day "when some of the property most desirable for a city park could not be had at all."

Five years later, Green Lake was surrounded by homes, except for the land set aside for Woodland Park.

WHEN WIDE AWAKE paraded down Seattle streets in 1921, it was a major event for the city, though it didn't compare with the 65,000 people estimated to have witnessed the arrival of the notorious Tusko 11 years later.

Wide Awake was purchased primarily with $3,122 in dimes and pennies from schoolchildren. She managed to behave herself at the parade and at the christening ceremonies that followed, perhaps mindful she didn't want to spoil her party dress provided by Standard Furniture Co.

In later years, she was known to flirt with city buses. She abruptly ended her career of giving rides to children the day she opted to head for Mexico, possibly loaded with children as luggage, leading pursuers down either Fremont or Aurora avenues.

The city found money for the famous Olmsted brothers to design the new zoological gardens in 1902 and it hired a genuine keeper, Gus Knudson, in 1907. But, except for a herd of Olympic elk led by a bull named Dewey, it provided no money for animal purchase until 1947.

The ocelot, the puma, the camels and leopards were donated to the zoo, some by citizens who brought back live souvenirs from their world travels. By the 1920s, Seattle had 1,600 animals, making it the fifth-largest zoo in the country.

Tusko wasn't donated, he was condemned as a public nuisance by the mayor in 1932. After being found in miserable conditions in a traveling show at Virginia Street and Westlake Avenue, he was conveniently relocated to Woodland Park Zoo.

Tusko was billed as the largest elephant on Earth, said to have stood 12 feet 7 inches tall at a weight of 7 tons. An early newspaper article says he once belonged to the king of Siam, who used him as a spare in case of breakdown.

Tusko's past included a wild rampage after getting involved with an alcohol still, according to legend, and emptying the streets of Sedro Woolley "as a tornado might." But he behaved for keeper George "Slim" Lewis, and, before being felled by the gigantic blood clot in 1933, lived his last months at Woodland Park confined by a single leg chain.

The Great Depression was as hard on zoo animals as it was on humans. In an interview taped before his death, keeper Gene Chriest told of going from shop to shop begging food for those animals who survived a culling ordered by the city.

Director Gus Knudson also soldiered on, even as his wages dropped.

Knudson arrived in 1907 with impressive credentials. He had training in veterinary science, dentistry and horticulture. He also had the best hands-on exotic-animal experience possible for the time - he'd run away from home at age 10 to care for circus animals.

It was Knudson who talked about the dream of having room for the animals to roam and who gave the monkeys outdoor space, ending deaths attributed to the bad indoor air that a report said "carried the little beggars off" with tuberculosis in increasing numbers every year.

When Knudson retired in 1947, he called the zoo "a prison and a disgrace to the city."

"I've been a goat all these years," Knudson told the park board. "I've had to send keepers out begging for food for the animals and have had to keep 'em penned up without enough room."

The zoo Knudson had so come to despise is summed up today in old film footage of a polar bear named Emma, who goes back and forth, covering the same short path for most of her life.

By beating his chest, Knudson drew the attention needed to usher in a new era. Thirty-five years later, one of his successors, David Hancocks, did the same, igniting change with his departure when he compared parts of Woodland Park to an abandoned bus station in Detroit.

In Knudson's wake came:

-- A modern aviary in 1947.

-- The Feline House in 1951, with the first glass-fronted cages in the country.

-- A state-of-the-art bear grotto in 1951, allowing the bears to wander about in relative freedom in a simulated natural setting.

"The zoo in the 1950s was not a terrible zoo for its time, it was somewhere between adequate and pretty good," said Dana Payne, a senior keeper helping track zoo history.

As a child, Payne should have known his calling: He tailed people who'd bought the 50-cent plastic elephant keys that unlocked Talking Storybook lectures at animal exhibits at Woodland Park in 1960, while other children hurried onto the miniature train.

THE ZOO PERKED with strollers filled with boomer babies in the 1950s and '60s. Their first stop after the rides was to go see Bobo.

Seattle taxpayers were stunned when the zoo spent $5,500 for a single animal in 1953, even if he was a personable 22-month-old gorilla, the zoo's first.

Bobo played the crowd, bouncing off the walls and displaying his splendor. All over Seattle, Bobo imitators sprang up: on playgrounds, in nightclubs and certainly in front of his cage.

By 1957, citizens loved him so much, they paid for his new home. The Great Ape House was built without bars - or much else. Except for a tire on a chain, Bobo's cage looked like an empty motel room sliced in half by glass.

How Bobo came to be so stuck on humans is a story of both love and sadness.

For years after he came to the zoo, he wanted to be held by his keepers, who grew tiny beside him. He must have scanned the crowds every day for members of the family that raised him. He got so excited when he spotted them that his keepers came running.

Being Bobo's "Dad" turned out to be the primary fame of Anacortes' Bill Lowman, a stocky working man who is now 83 and slightly slowed by arthritis.

In a back bedroom of the house he shares with a giant dog, there are boxes of memories - scrapbooks from Life magazine spreads, reels of home movies and old textbooks the Lowman family studied to learn more about their youngest "child."

Lowman was living with his parents, Raymond and Jean Lowman, when he called to tell his two daughters he was bringing home a surprise in 1951.

They thought it might be a chimpanzee, which had been Lowman's intent until he spotted the gorilla baby and drained his bank account of $4,000.

Lowman was away for long periods of time fishing in Alaska, so the duty of raising Bobo fell to his 60-year-old mother. She bathed Bobo every day, oiled him, brushed his teeth and put him in fresh clothes and diapers - tasks that deepened her maternal bond.

"I don't mean to be rude," a Fuller Brush man once told Mrs. Lowman as Bobo leaned against the couch to look at his wares, "but what is he, some kind of throwback?"

Bobo loved his life, which included playing with the neighborhood kids and cuddling with the Lowman girls.

But soon he had the strength of a high-school boy and the sensibility of a 3-year-old, Lowman says. Over went the TV, off went the piano keys, and down, more than once, went Mrs. Lowman, "the last person in the world he'd want to hurt."

Finally, the Lowmans made the long ride to Seattle in their old Plymouth in late 1953. Bobo went to live at the zoo.

So did Mrs. Lowman. She'd made arrangements to sleep on a cot in Bobo's cage. It was supposed to be for only a couple of days, but it lasted weeks as Bobo adjusted to living in the Feline House with the roars of his mortal enemies and no TV.

Lowman and his father drove to Seattle several times to bring Mrs. Lowman home, but she wouldn't budge. Finally, they dragged her out to the car, which started a flow of tears that lasted a month.

"As far as she was concerned, that was her baby," Lowman says.

Lowman believes Bobo taught the people in Seattle to care about wild animals. Somewhere along the way, visitors also began caring about where wild animals live, which may have had more to do with Bobo's successors.

Newspapers at the time told the story that Lowman still tells about how Bobo's fleeing mother left him in the crotch of a tree and animal trackers had no choice but to take him to save him.

The practice was - and is - to shoot the mother to get the baby, curator Payne says, which is why zoos no longer accept wild-born primates and why they try so hard to expand the captive gene pool.

Bobo had his chance to do just that in 1956, when the zoo brought in "Bobo's Bride." Though citizens had high expectations, Fifi looked like some sort of gorilla to Bobo, and their romance never evolved past "Ring Around the Rosie."

Following his death at age 17 from a loose blood clot, an autopsy showed Bobo had Klinefelter's syndrome, meaning his reproductive organs didn't mature.

Fifi also died childless, but at least she got to move to Hawaii.

IN THE EARLY DAYS of the zoo, bears were kept in pits 17 feet deep, and Knudson cleaned out tin whistles, pocket watches and knives dropped by people leaning over to look. Ostriches choked on cigar butts and six begging bears died from peanut indigestion.

Woodland Park's grizzlies now look down on people from a long rise that includes logs filled with hidden nuts and berries and a stream where the bears can fish for trout. They're not free, but at least they have distractions and dignified lives.

Seeing animals in settings that resemble their homes in the wild gives visitors a greater understanding of their wonder and worth.

It's not a big leap from viewing the giraffes and springboks mingling at the zoo's savanna to recognizing the need for saving natural habitat. Cameras set up at African watering holes further strengthen the connection by allowing people to tune in to the same scenes live over the Internet.

Throughout the zoo's history, people protested the treatment of animals.

Articles in the 1920s debated whether animals were better off in zoos or vulnerable to the "huntsman's gun."

Knudson backed up the flowery prose of one writer who said a lioness killed her cub "because she wanted to save it from a life doomed behind the iron bars of captivity."

In 1978, Woodland Park's gorilla exhibit changed the standard for making life more tolerable for the captives, and visitors more aware of what is needed in the wild.

Former director David Hancocks arrived here just as Seattle was struggling with a 1975 long-range plan.

Hancocks was a British architect who'd pointed out the failure of low-income housing to recognize the principles of human behavior before turning his attention to zoos.

With a Seattle architectural firm, Jones & Jones, he helped design a gorilla exhibit that kept natural behavior at the forefront.

Critics warned that the gorillas would get sick living outside on real grass. They would almost surely escape. At the very least, they would destroy the plants, making all the effort and expense for naught.

"It's a wonder gorillas ever survived in the wilds of Africa," Hancocks would later say, adding that Seattle was just enough of a backwater to get away with the gamble.

The gorillas didn't get sick, they flourished. Last year, Seattle's two stable family groups had babies Nos. 8 and 9. They care more about one another than who's in the crowd.

The gorilla exhibit was followed by the African Savanna, which was voted by zoo peers as the best new exhibit in 1980. Woodland Park's slow evolution to all-natural exhibits had begun.

But voters were understandably miffed about the savanna. They felt they'd voted for a new elephant home with the 1968 Forward Thrust money for "pachyderms and antelope." Instead, they got a home for hippopotamuses and springboks. When it became clear the elephant's portion would have been second-rate, Hancocks admitted to "creatively interpreting pachyderm" to mean "any thick-skinned animal."

When voters said no to more funds, Hancocks resigned, saying Woodland Park in 1984 showed the best and worst that zoos have to offer.

Seattle got its Elephant Forest in 1989. With David Towne at the helm, voters resoundingly supported a 1985 bond issue that also created Northern Trail, the Tropical Rain Forest, Trail of Vines and other award-winning exhibits.

Including private funds, 14 years of improvement cost $53 million, less than the temporary Kingdome roof repair, as Payne likes to point out.

What's next for the zoo? What else: Another fund drive, this time without Tusko's dumpy old elephant house to garner pity.

Zoo officials spent the winter lobbying to create a metropolitan park district that also would watch over the aquarium and city parks and allow for steadier funding.

The Zoo21 Campaign will maintain and renew what's there, and try to provide new and more natural homes for the hyenas, endangered red pandas, snow leopards, jaguars and tigers.

"The zoo is never done," said deputy director Mike Waller. "The state of the art has progressed. This thing that was new is old now."

This time, taxpayers should demand nothing less than proper display for Stanley the tapeworm.

Sherry Stripling is a Seattle Times staff reporter. Harley Soltes is staff photographer for Pacific Northwest magazine. ------------------------------- ZOO FACT

Tigers Tongou and Sultana came to the zoo in 1953 and began a romance that eventually produced 54 offspring, which were selling for $1,000 apiece in the 1950s.

The late department store, Frederick & Nelson, donated the "Quincuplets," five sibling lion cubs featured in its 1943 Christmas promotions, who received almost as much attention as the famous Dionne quintuplets. Window animals and fowl displayed by Frederick's throughout the 1950s were donated to the zoo. In later years, the zoo lent animals to the store for display, a practice halted in 1967.

The zoo is setting up 15 history kiosks on zoo grounds this spring and plans to celebrate the centennial with a picnic Sept. 18.