Tuesday, April 15, 2014

Missing Mayo Monkey Means Mayhem -- April 15, 1955

Bushman, the Gorilla
(chuckmannostalgia.files.wordpress.com)
Have you seen this one . . .

When you pay too much for cable you feel down.
When you feel down you stay in bed.
When you stay in bed they give your job to someone new.
When they give your job to someone new he has a lot to learn.
When he has a lot to learn mistakes are made.
(Insert scene of lowland gorilla escaping cage while new keeper’s back is turned.)
And when mistakes are made you get body slammed by a lowland Gorilla.

That commercial might have been filmed, for real, 59 years ago on this date, April 15, in the middle of the Chicago Loop.  Here’s what happened, according to The Tribune.

A monkey (okay, so it wasn’t a lowland gorilla), one of six being shipped from Tappan, New York to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, got loose after a La Salle Street Station attendant (when he has a lot to learn he makes mistakes) opened the cage door for a clean-up.  Leaving his five simian companions huddled in the back of the cage (the monkey, not the attendant), “the adventurous one dashed out and leaped east across the tracks, followed by six Railway Express employees, a porter, and a fireman.”

Here it might be fun to insert a clip of some random madcap scene from It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World).  In fact, I will . . .

The little guy began to monkey around on La Salle Street (sorry).  At that point pedestrians joined in the chase, which ended at 536 South La Salle at which point the monkey climbed a pipe on the exterior of the building to the fire escape and took that route up to the roof.

By the time the elevator carried the agents, the porter, the fireman and all of the individuals picked up along the way to the roof, the little guy was gone.  Vanished.  The chimp was off the old block.

The building engineer at the ten-story government office building, Marvin Johnson, said, “Everybody in the building thinks they have seen the monkey.  They have got him p to the size of Bushman now.”

No details on whether the monkey was ever recovered although I would imagine that officials at the Federal Reserve on the corner of Jackson and La Salle hardly reassured the public when they reported that there was no monkey in the bank.

Thank you and good night.

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