Posts Tagged ‘Houston’

Apr
15

It’s about to Get Wild: The Great Texas Birding Classic

Posted by in Birds

For those of you that are already birders, you know what’s coming: ’tis the season to see unique, remarkable, and incredible birds as they migrate through the Texas Gulf Coast! If you’re not yet a birder, you can be…learn all about it – all you need is a field guide to get started!

During this exciting time of year, Texas Parks and Wildlife puts together a birdwatching tournament called the Great Texas Birding Classic from April 15 to May 15. Are we getting involved? You know it.

Bird keepers from the Houston Zoo (team Jiminy Frigates) are getting together for 24 hours starting at midnight on Sunday, April 21 for a birding marathon: the goal is to identify as many birds as possible in the wild in 24 hours. And that means we can’t cheat and just go to the Zoo and name all our birds! I’ll follow along and bring you updates as they happen, from crazy mishaps to amazing birds to gorgeous scenery.

The Texas Birding Classic isn’t just 24 hours, though…there are lots of different
categories depending on your interest, age, ability, and time constraints. You can be beginner or advanced, a team of one or 5, and you can participate in a tournament for a morning, 24 hours or six consecutive days. You can even do the “Big Sit!” This is where have to identify birds in 24 hours, with all team members sitting or standing within a stationary 17-foot diameter circle!

So what’s our plan? If we told you we’d have to…well, you know. But we can give you some clues on where we’re going, because you might be interested in checking them out sometime. We’ll be searching for owls at the Big Thicket, enjoying the views and birds along the coast, and heading to famous High Island to see what we can see.

It’s going to be a fun adventure, and we hope you’ll join us on the blog for the big day. And while registration’s almost over, it may not be too late for you to jump in and have your own team!

Photos by Megan Neal, Houston Zoo Bird Keeper and Member of Team Jiminy Frigates

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Apr
15

There’s a hippo on a what?

Posted by in Uncategorized,Zoo History: Memories, Looking Back

Over the Houston Zoo’s 90 years, we’ve answered many calls for assistance from law enforcement agencies and animal care agencies.  The Zoo answers the call from our area sheriffs’ departments (Harris, Montgomery, Brazoria) for  exotic animal emergencies. We also have a long history of assisting the Houston SPCA with exotic animal cases providing expert evaluations of animals’ conditions and assisting with veterinary care.

But the call the Houston Zoo received on a December morning in 1986 was unique.

Houston Zoo Mammal Curator Richard Quick considers his options during a ‘hippo’ round up south of Houston in December 1986.

No, your eyes are not fooling you. This is not trick photography.  Yes, that is a young hippo standing on the front porch of a house south of Houston.

Former Houston Zoo Children’s Zoo Curator John Donaho tells us that for a time in the 1980s a circus maintained its winter quarters near Alvin. At the time, there was nothing terribly unusual or unique about that.  Houston’s relatively mild winters had made the area attractive as winter quarters for various circus operators since the 1890s.  The Christy Brothers Circus made its winter home near the city of South Houston from 1920 to 1930.

But John says when the phone rang that December morning, the Houston Zoo staff learned this call for help was a bit different. This circus had hippos and they had managed to escape their containment and were roaming free after eluding the best efforts of the circus staff to round them up.

After getting the OK from Houston Zoo Director John Werler, Houston Zoo Mammal Curator Richard Quick enlisted John and several other Zoo staff and the team took off for Alvin.  As John recalls, it took  the Zoo staffers and several members of the circus staff more than 4 hours to collect all the hippos and return them safely to their winter quarters.

We don’t know if the Zoo staff listened to Christmas music on the radio on the way back to Houston.  Maybe they all joined in a chorus of “I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas.”

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Feb
21

Werler’s World

Posted by in Zoo History: Memories, Looking Back

A Houston Chronicle op-ed on Sunday, February 10 included a bit of previously unknown history about the Houston Zoo and the late Zoo Director John Werler.

Janice Van Dyke Walden’s op-ed (Camp Strake property deserves to remain a natural oasis amid suburban growth) included the notation that “the first Canebrake rattlesnake to be registered in Montgomery County was presented in 1964 by an Eagle Scout to Houston Zoo Director John Werler, caught at Camp Strake.”

For those who worked with him and for those who knew him, it isn’t surprising that the discovery would have been ‘presented’ to John.

Born in Oldenberg, Germany in 1922, John came to New Jersey with his parents at the age of 3.  Graduating from high school in 1940, John was a biology major at William and Mary College and served in the Coast Guard during World War II from 1941 to 1945 stationed on Kosrae Island in Micronesia, now the Federated States of Micronesia.

Fascinated by the study of herpetology from an early age, upon discharge from the Coast Guard in 1945 John took his first zoo position at the Staten Island Zoo as a reptile keeper.  In 1947, John moved to the San Antonio Zoo as Curator of Reptiles. He became assistant zoo director in 1954 and came to the Houston Zoo as general curator in 1956.  He was appointed zoo director in 1963 upon the retirement of then-Zoo Director Tom Baylor.

Over his long career, John wrote numerous papers in scientific journals, published The Venomous Snakes of the Pacific for the tenth Pacific Science Congress, and also wrote Poisonous Snakes of Texas for the Texas Parks and Recreation Department.

Should you have one of these or are fortunate enough to find one, please hang on to it.  It’s as informative today as it was in the early 1960s when it was published.

John knew the subject matter well, having had several encounters with the venomous snakes of Texas during various collection expeditions.  One such experience was recounted in a Houston Post story by Marge Crumbaker on June 13, 1965 (below).  John was attempting to place a 4 foot rattlesnake in a cloth bag during an outing near Matagorda when the snake struck the little finger of his left hand.

As he told Ms. Crumbaker, on the two hour car trip from Matagorda to Hermann Hospital, John administered his own first aid using a snake bite kit. When Ms. Crumbaker interviewed him, he was in his sixth week of recovery.

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Feb
13

Sisters of the Skillet and other diversions

Posted by in Zoo History: Memories, Looking Back

The Houston Zoo was a popular destination for Houstonians almost from the day it opened in 1922.  As word of head zoo keeper Hans Nagel’s ‘showmanship’ began to spread, attendance steadily climbed.  His Sunday afternoon big cat training demonstrations in The Arena drew large crowds through the ’20s and into the ‘Great Depression’ days of the early 1930s when Zoo admission was ten cents for adults and five cents for children.   That might not sound like much, but remember the average personal annual income in 1933 was slightly over $1,500.

So, if you didn’t visit the Houston Zoo during your free time in the early ’30s, what did you do?

Well, you could take in a movie at one of the downtown movie palaces.  If the movie ticket was a budget buster, there was always the radio. And that’s where the title of this post comes in.

Sisters of the Skillet, performed by Ed East and Ralph Dumke was a popular NBC radio show from 1930 to 1938. From 1930 to 1931 it was sponsored by Lava soap.

As part of the marketing plan for the show, the sponsor printed and distributed a pamphlet giving youngsters directions for creating Shadowgraphs – shadow puppets. Here are two samples if you’d like to try this at home.

 

 

In 1931, when Sisters of the Skillet was popular there were 5 radio stations on the air in Houston – KPRC (which carried Sisters of the Skillet as an NBC Red Network affiliate), KTRH, KTLC, KFLX, and KXYZ.

If shadow puppets weren’t your style, maybe you were lucky enough to know someone who had one of these.

Lindstrom Tool and Toy Company of Bridgeport, Connecticut made mechanical toys and games from pressed steel and tin from 1913 into the 1940s when war era metal rationing stopped production for a time.

 The game shown here, from the early 1930s was a simple pinball style game.  A player fired off 7 marbels one at a time from the spring loaded shooter on the left side. Players wanted to get their marbles in the ‘horseshoe’ in the middle of the playing field to double their scoring possibilities.

When Sisters of the Skillet got to silly, and shadow puppets lost their alure, a friend with a Gold Star game could save a rainy day.

In upcoming posts we’ll explore the history behind some of the art work on Zoo grounds and explore the John Werler scrapbook.

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Jan
22

Ride ‘em Hans!

Posted by in Zoo History: Memories, Looking Back

The maintenance and expansion of the Houston Zoo in the early 1920s has been characterized by one former Zoo facilities director as requiring an effort equivalent to the 12 tasks of Hercules.  Fred Maier wasn’t exaggerating when he wrote those words for a Houston Chronicle feature article on the occasion of the Houston Zoo’s 75th anniversary.

Hans Nagel, the Zoo’s first ‘head keeper’ all but slept with his animals.  The Zoo’s budget in the mid 1920s was barely $2,000 a year.  Acquiring animals required a combination of begging, borrowing and mounting expeditions, occasionally with borrowed equipment, to ‘bring ‘em back alive’ from the wild.

But the day famed animal dealer and adventurer Ellis Joseph showed up in Hermann Park with a wild zebra for the Zoo was a decidedly different occasion.

By the mid 1920s, Joseph had built a reputation providing animals for zoos around the world. He’d embarked on his career at the age of 18.  By the 1920s his roster of clients included Carl Hagenbeck’s Hamburg Zoo.  You may remember from earlier posts that the ship captain who fished Hans out of Hamburg harbor after he went AWOL from the German navy was headed to Africa on a Hagenbeck safari.

Whether there was an ‘old boy’ connection between Nagel and Joseph related to Hans’ first Africa trip is admittedly speculation. What we do know is that Joseph felt comfortable enough that day in Hermann Park to make a friendly wager with the Zoo’s head keeper.

The bet? That Nagel could not saddle and ride the zebra.  Unaware of Hans’ past experience as a bronco buster, Joseph watched in disbelief as Nagel rode the pitching zebra across the Park and a film camera captured the moment.  The prize for Nagle was the saddle seen on the zebra’s back in the photo below. As we’ve said before, the era of the 1920s was a different age and a demonstration such as this would never be considered by a modern zoological institution.

From left to right, Hans Nagel, the recently saddled zebra and an unidentified man (Ellis Joseph?) in Hermann Park. From the collection of Gale Rendon to whom we owe a deep debt of gratitude. We’ll examine other vintage photos from the Rendon family collection in future posts.

Thanks to a Houston gallery owner and a nonprofit dedicated to preserving Texas’ film history, this film can be seen today. Story Sloane, owner of Sloane Gallery at 1570 South Dairy Ashford in Houston recently added the vintage nitrate film taken that day in Hermann Park to the online collection of the Texas Archive of the Moving Image (TAMI).  See the film here, find out more about TAMI and their growing collection here, and how you can support their work.

A post script. We don’t know the exact date of Hans’ zebra bet and ride. But the April 25, 1925 issue of the Rice University student newspaper carried a brief story headlined ‘Hans to Mount Zebra’ on its front page and set the date of the ride as Monday, April 27.

 

 

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Jan
15

It wasn’t always a Rice owl

Posted by in Zoo History: Memories, Looking Back

As we’ve noted in previous posts and mentioned in last year’s special historical issue of the Houston Zoo’s member magazine Wildlife, the Zoo’s first director, Hans Nagel was a bit of a showman.  And that’s a colossal understatement.

We recently had the good fortune to meet Lee Pecht, University Archivist and Director of Special Collections at the Woodson Research Center at Rice University’s Fondren Library.

Lee wrote us seeking a history of the Houston Zoo and information about the early animals on the property.  “Rice had ties with Nellie the elephant in the 1920s and we would like to explore the story,” said Lee.

As it turns out, Rice had very close ties to Nellie. In fact, Nellie became the unofficial mascot of the Rice student body for a time in the 1920s, appearing with Hans at several football games in the 1924 and 1925 seasons.

You can read more about it here at the Rice History Corner.

Doing our own digging through past issues of The Thresher, we’ve found a story indicating that one of the first (if not the first) owl mascots arrived at Rice University by way of a train crew, some compassionate Rice students and Hans Nagel.

According to the December 9, 1927 issue of The Thresher, it all started the day before the Thanksgiving football game between Rice and Baylor when a train crew rescued an owl that had been caught between the tender and the baggage car of a Missouri Pacific train that ran the route between Dallas and Houston.

As the paper recounts the tale in a story headlined “Thresher Obtains Lucky Bird; Name Wanted” (see the front page below) a Missouri Pacific vice president contacted The Thresher editor and offered to donate the owl to the school.  The students took the owl to Hans so that “he might receive the best of care and be in tip-top condition for football games in the future.”

 

 

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Jan
04

Zoo Tube

Posted by in Zoo History: Memories, Looking Back

If you were near a TV on November 23, 2012 you may have seen what an incredible job KPRC-TV did with their one-hour live special broadcast from TXU Presents Zoo Lights at the Houston Zoo.  The special, from 7 to 8 p.m. not only covered all aspects of Zoo Lights, its creation and production, but the Zoo’s animal care and enrichment programs as well.

The Houston Zoo has been featured in many film and television projects almost since its founding in 1922.

Pathe newsreel photographer William Deeke captured one of Hans Nagel’s cat training sessions in The Arena in April of 1930.  The session sent Nagel assistant Tom Baylor to nearby Hermann Hospital for treatment of bites and scratches from a decidedly uncooperative leopard.

From the scrapbook of Houston Zoo Manager Tom Baylor.

Four years after that shoot, Deeke would board the burning ocean liner Moro Castle shooting 300 feet of film  before the blaze became so hot the soles of his shoes began to melt.  In 1937 Deeke was among the newsreel photographers capturing the Hindenburg disaster in Lakehurst, New Jersey.  Those assignments make climbing into The Arena with an angry leopard look easy.

The Houston Parks and Recreation Department’s 1957 annual report notes that Zoo Manager Tom Baylor and then-Zoo Curator John Werler made a total of 83 appearances on local Houston TV stations in 1956.

By the 1960s, John was a frequent in-studio guest at Houston TV stations more often than not accompanied by an array of ‘special guest’ animals. TV cameras were also seen on-location at the Zoo.

Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Houston Libraries. UH Digital Library.

Here we see John (he’s the one to the left of the camera tripod holding microphone cables) with a film crew from KUHT-TV preparing to shoot a segment in front of what was then the Zoo’s lion exhibit, probably in the early 1960s. John became Zoo Director in 1963 upon the retirement of Tom Baylor.

In early Feburary 1963 Houston was buzzing when 5 18-wheelers and a crew of 60 arrived to shoot 2 eipsodes of the TV series Route 66. One of the episodes, titled The Cage Around Maria featured several scenes at the Zoo with series regular Martin Milner and episode guest star Elizabeth Ashley.

The story had Milner’s character in Texas working as a tour guide at the Houston Zoo, driving one of the Zoo’s rubber tired ‘train’ trams. Assisted by Zoo staff, including Tom Baylor, Milner rescues a dazed young woman (Ashley) from the bear “pit.” Later she explains  that she made a spectacle of herself in order to find someone to help her. She suspects her penniless stepfather has attempted to kill her wealthy mother and will try again.

The Zoo didn’t charge admission in 1963 and director George Sherman had no trouble rounding up extras for the rescue scene at the bear exhibit.

You can see the opening minutes of the episode here

The episode was shot in six days and made it’s CBS network debut on March 15, 1963.

Aside from being shot in part on location at the Houston Zoo, the episode is notable for one nonprofessional cast member.  Then At-Large City Councilmember Johnny Goyen had a couple of lines on camera in his role as an HPD desk sargent for a scene that was filmed at HPD’s Beechnut Street substation.

Spotted on the set at the Beechnut substation, by Houston Chronicle TV-Radio Editor Howard Stentz’s story the next day included a line that described Councilman Johnny Goyen as “garbed like a Houston cop and looking as pleased as a 5-4 vote at City Hall.”

Houston had just 8 City Councilmembers in 1963. Mayor Lewis Cutrer was the 9th vote.

 

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Dec
19

Let’s Talk Food!

Posted by in Zoo History: Memories, Looking Back

We’re all about food around the holidays.  So, I thought we’d take a look at what Houstonians were eating in in the 1920s when the Houston Zoo first opened in Hermann Park and in the years that followed.

From what we know right now, there probably wasn’t much for food and beverage concessions at the Zoo in the mid-1920s.  Many Zoo guests packed a picnic lunch at home and found a shady spot in Hermann Park to enjoy home cooking outdoors.

A Henke & Pillot coupon issued shortly before the chain closed for good.

They found the makings for that picnic feast at Henke & Pillot grocery stores downtown on Milam, Louisiana, Congress or Travis or the ABC Stores on Main or West Alabama. The Cut Rate Store on Washington Avenue touted Rice Hotel Products (“recognized as the standard for quality everywhere”) and ample free parking.  Yes, Houston had a traffic problem even then.

What Houston shoppers were buying then wasn’t much different from the brands we see today – Del Monte, Armour, Maxwell House.  There were Hostess Cakes, Wonder Bread, Welch’s Grape Jelly, Wheaties and Jello.

In many Houston area homes the kitchens in the 1920s may not have been much different from what General Electric presented as a ‘before’ image in a 1933 booklet touting ‘modern’ electric kitchens.

 

Dining out had taken hold in America in the 1920s and Houston embraced the idea. Houstonians who didn’t want to cook at home had a wide variety of restaurants from which to choose.  There were restaurants and coffee shops in downtown hotels such as the Rice Hotel and the Bender.  The Ponchartrain Cafe at Fannin and McKinney touted fresh seafood shipped daily from New Orleans.

As Houston developed its ‘car culture’ in the 1920s, one restaurant advertised its “Auto Service.”  Boysen’s at 2120 McKinney served up homemade chili, chicken tamales, chop suey, and fried chicken to customers in their cars.

Fast forward to the war years, and Jello was still on Houston’s menu, this time promoted by the company’s wartime Victoriana cartoon character as homefront tool to make “food fight for freedom.”   

In the 1950s as air travel took off, Houstonians dined in style aloft. In closing, we offer an entre from the 1954 United Airlines booklet “Favorite Recipes of Mainliner Chefs.” United, now the official airline of the Houston Zoo, had opened its first airline kitchen 16 years earlier and by the time this booklet was published was operating 12 flight kitchens across the country.  United promoted it’s inflight food service with the tag line “For the finest in meals aloft fly United” and referred to its chefs whose recipes were featured in the book as “artists of the flight kitchen.”

The recipe offered in this post is for Mountain Trout Saute and the photo below the recipe is from the United booklet.  Conrad Kung at the time was Chef at United’s flight kitchen in  Denver.  The chefs and their menus were even featured  on postcards by United, a common airline promotional device at the time that was also used by other airlines including Northwest,  Eastern, and Pan Am.

Bon Appetit!

 

 

 

 

 

 

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