She smoked cigarettes and had to be careful not to set a cigarette down and turn her back or the chimps would pick it up and start smoking it. And they wouldn’t take small puffs they would inhale it all at once and the cigarette would burn all the way down to the filter in less than two seconds.
Captain Harry was in charge of the Animal Department on the show and sometimes the chimps would act up and run up the center pole and refuse to come down. Then it would become a good cop bad cop routine between Norma and Captain Harry to try to get the chimps down, Norma would be saying, “come down my sweet baby”, and if that didn’t swerve them Harry would be there saying , “come down you rotten sonofabitch or I’ll break your stupid simian neck”. Sometimes it would be worse than that and Norma would tell Harry, “Remember there are children present Harry” . That would be difficult for Harry when he had a hold of the chimps arm and the chimp was sinking his teeth into Harry’s hand.
Chimpanzees as they grow older become more unmanageable, I’ve been told their brains grow faster than their skulls and this causes them to get crazy. I don’t know if that’s true but I do know they get very hard to handle and eventually they have to be permanently caged.
They had a pit show on the Cristiani show featuring the “wild man from Borneo” , It had a double cage on one side was a kid dressed in a loin cloth like Tarzan and on the other side was an unmanageable large chimp. The kid would put up the pit show then change into his costume until it was time to tear down the show, then he would drive the truck to the next town.
One night as we were getting ready to settle up in the concessions wagon I a lot of screaming and looked out of the concession office door to see the chimp had escaped its cage and was running down the midway. It jumped up on the counter of the hot dog stand and grabbed about a dozen hotdogs and bit into them.
I had the popcorn stand at the time and was in the office with my friend Pat who had the cotton candy stand and the concession manager, Never Worry Murray.
“I think the hotdog stand may come up short tonight”, I told Murray.
We kept counting the days take when suddenly the chimp ran up the steps and entered the office with us. Suddenly the door slammed and I heard someone say, “we got him trapped inside”.
It was a terrifying scene, the chimp was scared and screaming because he knew he had done something wrong. We looked at him and he looked at us, he screamed and bared his fangs, they looked like Count Dracula’s to me, all three of us crept into a corner as far from the chimp as we could get. To no avail, the chimp grabbed a box of cracker jacks and bit right through the box. “Let him have anything he wants, boys”, said Murray.
I could just imagine that chimp biting me, I started looking for an escape route, there weren’t any. I saw a barrel of peanuts in the corner I said, “Hey Murray, how about if I empty that barrel and put it over my head?” “Leave the peanuts alone”, said Murray”
The concession truck had shelves on both sides with concession equipment and stock, I climbed up on the shelves as high as possible in hopes of getting away from the chimp, the chimp followed me whining and screaming as if to say help me, help me. I climbed down and got back behind the peanut barrel.
The office door suddenly flew open and the chimps owner came in and the door slammed again before we could get out. The chimps owner had a rope and a club in his hand. “Come here, nice monkey”, he said.
The chimp wasn’t going for that line of talk, he knew better, he ran screaming to the far end of the truck. He was really wild now. “If I cant’t catch him I’ll whack him,”, said the owner. He raised the club and the chimp started screaming.
I’m beating on the door, yelling “let us out of here”.When someone outside, it turned out to be Congo the bigtop hand, cracked the door open and said, “What’s going on in there?”
That was what we were waiting for, Murray, Pat and myself hit the door and sent Congo flying. They slammed the door and left the chimp inside with his owner.
As we were brushing ourselves off, Steve the balloon man came by, he didn’t know what was happening, he asked Murray, “wheres my balloons”. Murray told him, “one things for sure, you will not be selling any balloons tonight”. I said, “Murray, we left all the money laying on the desk in there”.
“Let the monkey have it “, he said, taking a big drink from a half pint of rum he had in his coat.
Finally the owner managed to get a rope around the chimp and return him to his cage but it was a night long remembered by many people .
Later on I heard Pat telling someone,”Bob’s a regular spiderman, you should’ve seen how fast he climbed to the roof of the office.”
We had another chimp that had to be caged all the time, we went into winter quarters in Florida and the caged animals were kept in the back part of the grounds where Captain Harry would go around and feed them every day. We were painting trucks and repairing equipment when a friend said , “look at that”. I loked over to see Harry at the chimps cage, he would open a door at the bottom of the cage just big enough to get a tray of food through. He opened the door after setting the tray down, then leaned over to pick up the tray, we saw the chimps arm come out the tray slot and slap Harry right on the top of his bald head and down he went. Harry jumped up with his fists balled up., the chimp jumped to the back of his cage, probably grinning.
“You…you…you.. “ said Harry, all red faced and in a rage, “I’ll show you, I won’t feed you for the rest of the winter, you rotten no good asshole, you're gonna starve” .
Everybody that saw it was dying laughing.
We were in winter quarters and had a month before hitting the road again. My friend Gary the snake show operater decided to get a room at the hotel across the street from winter quarters. I went over to see him one afternoon and as I neared his room I saw his spider monkey chained to a post out front. I knocked on his door and he opened it and said, “Hey Bob, come in and have a drink”. I told him I didn’t think the motel owners liked guests having pets and the monkey would probably create heat for him. Gary grinned and said, “I like heat”.
I sat down with a rum and coke and while we were watching the evening news we heard a horrible screeching scream. We ran out the door to discover the monkey had climbed the pole he was chained to and had grabbed the neon sign on the rooftop. Blue sparks and smoke was flying off the monkeys fur. Gary was aghast, “my monkey, my Monkey”, he yelled. He looked around and saw a mop leaning against a wall, he picked it up and swung at the monkey knocking it loose from the neon sign , breaking the M on the motel sign.
We took the monkey in and gave it some water and after a few minutes it seemed to be recovering. “Well, you said you like heat, looks like you got plenty now”, I told him.
Gary, scratched his head and said, “Guess I’ll have to pay for the neon sign”. The sign now said “OTEL”. I returned to winter quarters, the next day Gary came over, I asked him, “Did you have to pay for the sign or did they tell you to get out”?
“Neither”, he said, “they said oh, the poor monkey, we hope its ok.”
But after that we could hardly get near the monkey it would try to bite us if we got close to it, I guess he associated us with that jolt of electricity that surged through his brain.
There was a cute waitress at the hotel who had a crush on Gary, he told me a few days later that she had come by his room and he was in bed with her giving her a passionate kiss when the monkey came flying across the room and landed on his bare ass.
The waitress said,”Isn’t that sweet, he’s trying to protect me”.
Shortly thereafter we were leaving winter quarters for our opening spot. I saw Gary and asked him where his monkey was.
“I gave that little trouble maker to the waitress at the motel”, he said.
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