A smoking dog in 1908. Click to enlarge.
When I was a very little kid, and living for a very few years in Washington, D.C., there was an old circus chimp living in a massive iron cage in a pet store on Pennsylvania avenue near Eastern Market.
This pet store sold puppies in the front window, and lizards and snakes in the back.
The chimp's cage was to the right of the narrow aisle in between these two features, and as you passed by his cage, he would reach through the bars with his hand, his fingers curled, gesturing for a cigarette. This poor old circus chip was addicted to cigarettes -- something he had gotten hooked on as a circus performer. Now it seemed to be his only pleasure.
I never saw that chimp let out of the cage. The thing I remember now, more than 45 years later, was how scary his hands were, with long cracked nails at the end of grasping digits.
1 comment:
Beyond sad, but in those days people did all kinds of things they might not do today. At the same time you were observing the chimp, I was a few miles away in suburban, MD. I had a neighbor across the street who had a Spider Monkey as a pet. She seemed to take good care of him, but I was very young at the time, so who knows? I do recall his cage was in her kitchen and he loved her and hated everyone else. It was all quite exotic, especially as she was a beautiful blonde German with a huge beehive hairdo, whose job it was to stay at home and look beautiful. When she would toddle across her front lawn ALL of the neighborhood dads took notice!
Seahorse ;)
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