Strange Times 107: He Was Never Caged

Strange Times is a newsletter that explores the weirdest news of 1921, one day at a time.

Before we dive into the strangeness, please take a moment to check out the Kickstarter for my new game Lost Ship. It doesn’t really have anything to do with 1921, but it’s still pretty cool.

Today brings a melancholic gorilla and a city swallowed by gum! Start chewing on…

April 17, 1921

• After stealing and crashing a spiritualist medium’s automobile, a gang of car thieves escape without noticing the $10,000 in jewels left on the floor of the car.

• Accused bigamist stock broker Herbert Thornton Andrews disappears in search of his now-estranged second wife, saying, “I am inconsolable, and I want Esther, that’s all.”

• Mrs. Norman Gurling, who yesterday saved her fifteen-year-old son from drowning in a well, said there was nothing heroic about her actions: “Any mother would have done the same.” Mother and child are both in good health, although the shock appears to have delayed the birth of her new child. Just to emphasize this, because it wasn’t mentioned in the last issue: this woman was 40 weeks pregnant when she climbed down that well!

• The Weather: Rain and colder today; Monday fair, continued cold; strong south winds becoming northwest.

The story of the first gorilla to visit the country has taken a tragic turn. This story is incredibly sad, and I fear that isn’t going to change.

John Daniel, the sick and disconsolate gorilla, which has been pining away in Madison Square Garden because he has been shut in a cage for people who visit the circus to look at, would have cheered up yesterday and eaten three hearty meals if he had known the good fortune that is coming to him. His companion and friend, Miss Edna Cunningham of London, whose father captured John Daniel when he was a baby gorilla, is coming to see if she cannot make life happy enough for John to keep him from dying.

John Ringling has been worried about his pet animal, which is worth many thousands of dollars to the circus, and as a last resort sent a cable dispatch to Miss Cunningham saying:

“John Daniel is pining and grieving for you. Can you not come at once? Needless to say, we will deem it a privilege to pay all your expense. Answer at once.”

And Miss Cunningham wired right back that she was sailing on the Celtic, which is due in New York the first of this week.

Miss Cunningham is the niece of Major John Penny of the British Army. When her father brought John Daniel back from the jungle, a tiny black mite of almost human personality, she made a pet and friend of the strange ape. He was never caged and moved at will about her home, even playing with the children who visited there.

Last January he was purchased by John Ringling and brought to this country a few days before the opening of the circus season. Since then John Daniel has steadily grown more and more miserable. He refused to eat, became weak and lethargic and would creep wearily into a corner of his bed and hide under his blanket when curious crowds came to gaze through the bars at him. But sometimes when only a few persons were there John would come out to the front of his cage, sit on his haunches and look at them so reproachfully and sadly that it seemed as if the poor beast must be suffering the pangs of loneliness and humiliation. At least that is the way the circus folks, experts in handling animals, interpreted John’s melancholia.

He was so ill last week that yesterday he was taken to a room at the top of the garden to be by himself and be able when he wishes to look out of the window and see the clouds and the sky. When they moved his bed up there and took John along he grabbed his blanket from the bed, climbed up in a closet of the room and spread the blanket out on a shelf. He wanted to get as far from people as he could. But after the door had been closed a while and he was left in peace, he brought his blanket down, spread it on the bed and went to sleep comfortably for the first time in several weeks.

When I first moved to New York, it blew my mind to learn that the black spots that litter the pavement are hardened gum. I couldn’t believe that so many people were lazy enough to just spit their gum out when there are trashcans on literally every corner. I later grew to appreciate the litter when I learned that you can predict where a subway car doors will open by looking for the spot on the platform covered with the most black spots. If you want to learn more about this pernicious pest, click here.

Oh, and about this little story—I really appreciate how much of it is devoted to telling an incoherent anecdote that completely undercuts the subject’s main point.

Chewing gum appears to have a very firmly established place with Americans, but now it has its objectionable features, just like all fads, according to Mrs. M.L. Heath, manager of the Travel Information Bureau of the Boomer Hotels. Mrs. Heath says that unless the vogue of gum-chewing passes or unless city, State and national laws are passed and funds appropriated for a special sidewalk cleaning department, with chemical outfits and scrapers, the city of New York may become totally enveloped in refuse chewing gum in the course of time.

“Few people realize what it means to have this refuse chewing gum lying about on the sidewalks and pavements,” said Mrs. Heath. “It is deposited in enormous quantities and at first it is extremely unpleasant to walk over, although this is lessened by the absorption of dust and it gradually works into the pavement. But, of course, what is bad for some is good for others and it applied this case the other day when a young Latin-American couple returned to the McAlpin Hotel after a sightseeing trip about the city.

“They came in to tell me how much they had enjoyed the trip, and remarked that they had never seen such delightful walks as were found here in spots. ‘Soft to the touch, yet very firm,’ they said, ‘much of the paving seemed to be of a spotted material and in other places is a solid brown or black. We walked for miles and never tired, and neither of us are good walkers.’ I explained to them it was chewing gum, and that we thought it was something of a menace—that business houses and tenants fight against it with scrapers and gasoline, but it keeps ahead of them—but the South Americans could not get my point of view.”