Tuesday, January 02, 2007

"Ziggy" 1965



When we showed Medinah Temple with the Polack Show I would go down to the Brookfield Zoo from time to time. On this occasion Cliff Jones gave me a piece of Ziggy's tusk which I still have.
I have never seen one like it since, it is like the outer shell of the tusk, smooth as tho it had just slid off. I also have a slice from one of Jumbo's tusks as well as the complete tusk from "Columbia" of the original Forepaugh Dancing Eight.
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Posted by Buckles at 1/02/2007 05:39:00 PM

17 comments:

Anonymous said...

That hat could be red to pass!!!!

02 January, 2007 19:30
Casey McCoy Cainan said...

Earlier today there was a photo of Tusko Buke and Rex standing up,,,,did it get pulled from the blog or is my pc playing a trick on me?

02 January, 2007 20:43
Buckles said...

I was trying to enter the series you mention but couldn't get them in the proper sequence.
I suddenly received more Singers Midgets pictures and decided to use them instead. Check out the Blog in the morning.

02 January, 2007 21:55
Casey McCoy Cainan said...

Thanks,,,can't wait!!

02 January, 2007 21:59
Anonymous said...

Buckles --- I saw the Gold Unit today in Ft Myers. One act I liked was the elephant act. (Make that: the elephant). Beautiful/handsome Asian elephant with amazing tusks (not quite the Ziggy class, but still large). Please tell me about this elephant. Male? Female? Name? Show-owned animal? One that perhaps you trained at Circus World when it was a youngster?
Thank you. --- ToddP

02 January, 2007 22:11
Buckles said...

The elephant you saw was not a Ringling elephant but "Cool Hand Luke" owned and presented by Tarzan Zerbini's daughter Patricia.

03 January, 2007 00:35
Anonymous said...

Thank you, Buckles. That explains it. I thought it was the best act in the show. I had only read about the terrific elephant act Patricia Zerbini presented at Circus Krone. Never in Germany at the time, however. So never saw it. Glad I got to see her. The act really stood out from the others. --- ToddP

03 January, 2007 08:29
Anonymous said...

BTW,you can still see Ziggy,or at least his massive bones.
Next time you visit the
Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago Illinois,
ask around
if you can visit the Mammal collections dept.

03 January, 2007 18:49
Anonymous said...

Mr. Woodcock,
Is that the"Columbia" of the Forepaugh show that fell out of the boxcar and was hit by a train ,developed gangrene and unfortanetly died
a long painful in Albany New York sometime in the 1890's?
Its skeleton was donated to the Stae Museum in Albany,and was mounted and on display for many years next to the famous Cohoes Mastodon skeleton.
The museum changed locations about 25 years ago,but no one there seems to know what became of Columbia's skeleton.
How does one go about and loose about a ton of mounted bones anyway?

03 January, 2007 18:54
Buckles said...

I should have been more clear about this. My "Columbia" was a female, her original name was "Victoria".
She died at Hall's place while my dad was there.

03 January, 2007 19:34
GaryHill said...

Comrade Captain, didn't your Dad work with Ziggy at one time?

03 January, 2007 19:50
Buckles said...

No he never did. In fact I don't think "Ziggy" was ever with a circus.
As far as I know he went right from Vaudeville to a long career in zoos.

03 January, 2007 23:08
Anonymous said...

Ziggy would later fall into the moat,and break his tusks off around 1974.
He died not to long after that,at the estimated age of 55 years old,which is about the limit for a captive male zoo elephant.
BTW anyone interested in Ziggy,purchase a copy of the book,I LOVED ROGUES
by George Slim Lewis in 1979.
Its a must with a number of photographs of Ziggy(mostly from early 1970's).
maybe albris has a few copies.

06 January, 2007 12:56
Anonymous said...

To make things more confusing the famous"Columbia" of the Cooper&Bailey circus born in Philadelphia around 1881.
I think her original name at birth had been,"Young America".

06 January, 2007 13:13
Anonymous said...

More about Forepaugh's Columbia.
Reportly before she died in Albany New York June.27.1890, a month earlier she fell out of the bull car in Johnstown ,PA and then a freight train ran into the elephant.
Newpaper accounts refer to him(actually her)then as
"Seventy years old and twelve feet tall"(surely an exaggeration)
After she died in Albany,her hide was sold to New York(probably for hand bags,shoes,etc)
James E. Cooper presented her bones to the State Museum in Albany New York,
and her flesh was purchased by a fertilizer manufacturer.
The carcass actually weighed
4 tons.
BTW I have seen an old photograph of her mounted skeleton in the
New York State Museum next to the Mastodon skeleton and it doesnt look like Columbia had been much over 8 feet tall at the shoulder in life, if that tall.

06 January, 2007 14:09
Anonymous said...

Ziggy, An Elephant With Issues
Died 1975 - Chicago, Illinois

Ziggy The Elephant used to be a Chicago institution, a real-life folk tale that flowered in the '70s, then was slowly forgotten. He was ten feet tall and weighed 13,000 pounds. School kids from that time collected pennies and washed cars to build Ziggy a new and enlightened zoo enclosure. The date of his coming out into the sunshine after 29 years of being chained to a wall indoors was published by Chicago newspapers in their timelines of local history. So was the date he nearly killed his keeper.

Ziggy got his name from vaudeville impresario Flo Ziegfeld, his first US owner. Ziegfeld sold him to Singer's Midgets, who then unloaded four of their most dangerous elephants, which is how Ziggy first got to Chicago's Brookfield Zoo in the '30s. For the first year, no one at the zoo could get close enough to unchain him.

Slim Lewis, then America's foremost elephant trainer -- from the 'old school'-- was brought in to break the Asian rogue. Lewis was able to get Ziggy unchained, and for a while to participate in zoo activities. Then, on April 26, 1941, hormones high from being 'in musth,' Ziggy trunk-slapped Lewis, knocking him fifty feet, while zoo visitors looked on in horror. Before Lewis could get up, Ziggy had him by the leg, plunging his tusks down repeatedly, while Lewis, happy to be slim, rolled into the space in between them to avoid getting gored. When his tusks briefly caught deep in the dirt, Lewis managed to escape. Ziggy picked up Lewis's hat and threw it after him.

Lewis, describing Ziggy as a "devilish, wild-eyed monster," quit the zoo. For the next thirty years, Ziggy was removed from public sight, chained away inside a barn. Then, in the late '60s, the zoo got a new director, who started a PR campaign to get a new large elephant area built. Lewis was called back for an all-is-forgiven reunion event. On September 23, 1970, Lewis led a reluctant Ziggy back into the sunlight, amidst great fanfare. After forty minutes, the pachyderm turned around and went back inside

But the idea caught fire in the Windy City. Newspaper articles were written. Children held parades to benefit The Ziggy Fund. According to one account, "Billboards sprang up all over the Loop to save Ziggy and soldiers in Vietnam identified with his plight and sent money." Hundreds of thousands of dollars were raised to build a private outdoor enclosure. A book "Ziggy: The World's Greatest Elephant" was eventually written. The official coming out party was held a year later.

In March,1975, after four years of living in the new enclosure (where he was handled from a distance), Ziggy severely injured himself after falling into an eight-foot moat designed to keep him from zoo visitors. Trapped in the moat for more than a day (because no one wanted to get near him), a ramp out of the moat was created with gravel, and Ziggy walked out. But he never fully recovered, and on October 28, 1975, he died. He was 58.

The official storyline says Ziggy fell in while flirting with a female in the next enclosure. But according to Lewis in his book, "I Loved Rogues," "Stretching as far as he could, he lashed at a keeper across the moat, lost his balance and pitched in headfirst."

After he died, Ziggy slowly passed from the public's consciousness. His bones were delivered to the Field Museum in Chicago. But his pelvis was so big, at 5-feet-by-5-feet, that it wouldn't fit into a case. For a period it could be found leaning against a wall at the end of a hallway. Today they are in storage -- no photos allowed.

08 January, 2007 22:04
Anonymous said...

Ziggy wasn't out of sight for thirty years but he didn't go out in the yard. Ziggy was in the first stall of the Pachyderm House (then the largest zoo building in the US), chained close to the back wall. I heard when the building was closed he had more room to move about but always chained. In his last few years he was unchained and got outside.

09 January, 2007 06:57

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