Last Laugh

Ah, the bold and often foolhardy things we do as kids. For my part, at ages 6 and 7, I could be found gymnast-walking along backyard wooden fences, scrambling onto my neighbors' roof and eating peaches off their overhanging tree. My own daughter reminded me of such derring-do when at age 3, she climbed into a clothes dryer, and then a year later when she decided to dance on the roof of my car.

Obviously, impetuosity is inherited, and it can be traced to my father, Bernie. At 11 years old, Bernie, a redheaded rascal, was the chief of a “tribe” of boys ages 8 to 10 years old. They lived in the Boyle Heights neighborhood of East Los Angeles, a multicultural neighborhood filled with Italians, Russians, Mexicans, Germans, Armenians, French, Japanese and people of other nationalities.

One day in 1927, my dad, his 9-year-old brother, Gerry, and six other boys who lived nearby decided to visit Lincoln Park and go for a ride on the carousel.

“Each one of us had about 30 cents. Of course, 30 cents at that time would buy a lot. The merry-go-round was only about 3 cents,” my dad recounted. “After we spent our money, we didn’t know what to do. So we decided to go to the Selig Zoo.

“People all over Southern California came to that zoo because it had a large menagerie of animals,” dad recalled. “But we didn’t know exactly how to get in. There was this huge fence all around the zoo. A portion of it was metal, and the bars were quite high.”

Searching for a way in, my dad noticed that in the back portion of the zoo, there was a high wooden fence with eucalyptus trees growing beside it. So my dad, being the leader, climbed up the tree, carefully maneuvered himself from a thick tree branch onto the fence, saw what looked like barns, and crawled along the fence to a wooden structure. He climbed onto the wooden structure and then leaped down into what he thought was an open area. He had made it into the zoo, scot-free—or so he thought.

As he turned around, he discovered he had become part of the animal menagerie—seems he was in an open-topped cage and within that cage just a few feet away were several hyenas relaxing in the afternoon sun. One of them got up, looked menacingly at my father, began moving its cow-bone crushing jaws and started towards him. With adrenalin coursing through his body, Bernie jumped up and over the metal cage with lightning speed “before the hyenas could get near me.” He leaped to the fence, climbed onto and down from the tree, and then walked out of the zoo as if nothing had happened and around the back to his buddies.

Now, one would think that would be enough excitement for the day—not for my dad, the Peter Pan of Boyle Heights. He would not shirk his designated mission—getting his tribe into that zoo. He again climbed the tree and scooted along the fence until he identified a safe route.

“I directed the kids to another spot, where they could slowly make their way down from the fence and sneak into the zoo,” my dad said. “We spent the entire afternoon there.”

The 32-acre zoo was an amazing place. It had been created in 1913 at a cost of $1 million by “Col.” William Selig, one of the first film producers to build a studio in Hollywood and to create feature-length films. When Selig produced “Captain Kate” and “Lost in the Jungle,” he bought the animals used in the films from a showman called “Big Otto,” and had the animals sent to Los Angeles. They became the nucleus of the zoo’s menagerie. Eventually, there were 700 animal species residing in the zoo, including 32 lions, 18 Bengal tigers, 14 leopards, 14 panthers, seven bears, five Asiatic elephants, 14 camels, three dromedaries, two giraffes, 10 sacred cows of India, three water buffaloes, 50 monkeys, four kangaroos, three golden eagles and one yak.

Once Bernie and the “tribe” had seen everything they wanted to see, they realized it was starting to get dark, and they needed to get home. It was about four miles from the zoo to their Boyle Heights homes, so by the time the boys returned to their neighborhood, all their frantic mothers were in the street, agonizing over what could have happened to their “lost boys.”

“I was such a liar. I told them we had been kidnapped and that we all had gotten a chance to run away. The Hickman kidnapping was the only thing I could think of as an excuse,” dad sheepishly admitted.

The infamous Hickman kidnapping in Los Angeles at that time stoked fears in the hearts of parents. William Edward Hickman kidnapped an 11-year-old girl from her school after fabricating a story about her father being injured and needing her. Hickman demanded a ransom of $1,500 (equivalent to more than $27,000 in today’s dollars). The girl’s father paid the ransom, and then Hickman drove away, tossing her mutilated body out of his car. A few days later, Hickman was caught, and eventually, he was tried, convicted and executed.

My dad’s elaborate kidnapping fabrication didn’t work. “My mother and sister knew that I was a good little liar, so they started asking my brother Gerry about what happened. He confessed there was no such thing as a kidnapping. He told them that we had snuck into the zoo and had a good time. So, then I had to tell them the truth, and we all caught hell.”

While he paid dearly for his zoo visit and fibs, my dad never lost his love of the zoo. He returned there often with his brother and father.

When he was about 13 or 14 years old, Bernie, Gerry and their father Louis went to the zoo and actually paid the admission price to get in (30 cents for adults, 10 cents for children).

“We were standing by the lion’s cage,” dad recalled, “and I’ll be damned if those lions didn’t started pissing on us.”

Just retaliation, pop, for disturbing the hyenas’ afternoon siesta. Perhaps, the animals really did get the last laugh.

A final note for LA history lovers like me: the Selig Zoo was also known as Luna Park Zoo and California Zoological Gardens. When the zoo was finally closed, the zoo animals were donated to the city of Los Angeles and became the nucleus of the famed Griffith Park Zoo and later the LA Zoo.