From Eric Beheim #1

Black Leopard-1, originally uploaded by bucklesw1. Seeing the 1938 Ringling-Barnum black leopard poster reminded me that back in the early 1950s when I was about 6 or 7, the CLEVELAND PRESS ran a wire service photo showing a Los Angeles policeman shining a flashlight into a crawl space under a house. The caption read that he was part of a massive search for an escaped black leopard believed to be at large somewhere in the city. (Even though my mother assured me that the distance between Los Angeles and Cleveland made it unlikely that the escaped leopard would enter my bedroom and devour me while I slept, my next few nights were fraught with apprehension.) Nothing more was heard about the escaped leopard and I soon forgot about it. Then, a few years later, this incident was dramatized on DRAGNET, the famous cop show that would always open with the announcement, “The story you are about to hear is true. The names have been changed to protect the innocent.”