There are many good reasons to visit the Field Museum and one of the very best for me is to see an old fellow named Bushman.
He is the most famous animal ever to call Chicago home. Of that, there is some argument and to those who might say, “Hey, what about Mrs. O’Leary’s cow?,” I would contend that the poor beast that was rumored to have started the Great Chicago Fire did not even have a name, variously known as Daisy, Madeline or Gwendolyn.
Bushman has been dead for a very long time, more than 70 years, but he remains firmly embedded in the minds of those who saw him when he lived at Lincoln Park Zoo.
You can still see him, he’s been at the Field Museum since he died. With the aid of taxidermists and artists, he was carefully preserved and encased in glass at the museum’s East Entrance.
He is immortal and it is not difficult to imagine what a sensation he caused when he arrived at Lincoln Park Zoo in August 1930. Bushman was said to be the first gorilla ever seen west of the Potomac River. Over the next two decades he so firmly embedded himself into the hearts and minds of our citizenry that by 1950, Time magazine could accurately write that he was “the best known and most popular civic feature in Chicago.”
I have been drawn back in time due to the recent news that Bushman will be joined at the Field Museum by a new friend named JoJo, a 485-pound gorilla who died a few weeks ago at the Brookfield Zoo where he had been living. He was 42 years old.
There are no plans to similarly display JoJo, who will be studied by the museum’s scientists. But the news of his arrival compelled me to plan another visit to see Bushman and also to consider that there was a time, before the internet put the world and all its wonders at our fingertips, when awe was harder to come by and could be most powerfully encountered up close.
Bushman was born in Cameroon. He was found there by a group of American missionaries and eventually made his way across the ocean, arriving in Chicago as a little thing, only 2 years old and 38 pounds.
A playful and sensitive keeper named Eddie Robinson taught him to wrestle and play with a football. Of course, there were photos taken of his antics and one was seen by Notre Dame football coach Knute Rockne who, ever publicity savvy, sent Bushman one of his first gifts, an autographed football.
During the 1933 and 1934 Century of Progress International Exposition, also known as the Chicago World’s Fair, Bushman attracted the attention of members of the foreign press, who helped to make him an international celebrity. In time, the nation’s zoo directors named him “the greatest of his kind, the most outstanding animal in any zoo in the world and the most valuable.”
A song was written about him in the 1930s. Meant for schoolchildren to sing, it was called “Has Anyone Here Seen Bushman?”
Bushman would grow to a massive 6 feet 2 inches and 550 pounds, making his home an increasingly unpleasant place and tight fit. As was zoos’ unenlightened way at the time, he lived in a stark steel cage. Though he often gently played with the mice that scampered through his cage, his only “companion” was an auto tire that hung from a thick chain. (Rumor had it that one of those tires had come from one of Adolf Hitler’s cars). Though he would act up for crowds, many thought they could see him brooding. And though he was a newspaper staple, he was no fan of the media. One birthday, he tossed his cake at a pack of press photographers.
During his lifetime, Bushman was seen by an estimated 100 million people. More than 100,000 of them came to the zoo on a June day in 1950, as rumors spread that he was dying. He was not, and later that year tasted a bit of freedom when he escaped from his cage — the door was left open — and wandered around the kitchen and some hallways for a few hours. A tiny garter snake frightened him back to his cage, but that only further endeared him.
His death was announced on Jan. 1, 1951. “Bushman is Dead!” came special radio, TV and wire service bulletins into the cold New Year’s morning. Thousands rushed to the zoo, hoping it was, again, just a rumor. What they discovered was the ape’s cage, empty but for a life-size black-draped portrait of Bushman. A brass band played taps. Many fans placed flowers by the cage.
I was born after Bushman died but so strong was his legend that we would pretend to be Bushman in childhood games. At the time, the gorilla at Lincoln Park Zoo was actually Sinbad, an impressive character who lived there from 1948 to 1985.
The zoo now has a spacious Regenstein Center for African Apes, in which gorillas live and at which people stare. Look, people love gorillas. Perhaps that is because they are 98.3% genetically identical to humans. Or maybe it has to do with something less scientific, more primal, as in this, written by Tribune writer Edward Barry, who described Bushman as “a nightmare that escaped from darkness into daylight and has exchanged its insubstantial form for 550 pounds of solid flesh. His face is the one that might be expected to gloat through troubled dreams that follow overindulgence. His hand is the kind of thing a sleeper sees reaching for him just before he wakes up screaming.”
Or smiling.
Bushman can be seen at the Field Museum, 1400 S. DuSable Lake Shore Drive; more information at www.fieldmuseum.org
