Here’s what I remembered:
When I was little, the monkeys at the Southwick Zoo (back then Southwick’s Wild Animal Farm) somehow ripped my new coat, which made my mother angry.
I thought the monkeys were intentionally uncaged and running around, which makes sense because the zoo has an amazing deer forest where you can feed deer from your hands, and many birds sit atop perches in open-air spaces.
In my six- or seven-year-old mind, the monkeys were just as free as the deer. Wandering the park unfettered.
But we visited Southwick Zoo with my sister last weekend, and when I asked her about the story, she told me the more accurate version.
I remember my childhood exceptionally well, but my sister’s mind is a steel trap. She remembers everything.
It turns out that the monkeys weren’t free-range after all. Instead, we arrived at the zoo early that day and were one of the first guests to enter the park. When we reached the monkey cages near the park entrance, my father noticed one cage still hadn’t been locked.
The padlock was in the lock but unclasped.
So he opened the door and began handing each of us — my brother, my sister, and me — our very own monkey to hold.
The monkeys weren’t angry or aggressive, but their tiny claws tore into our new jackets, which made our mother angry when we arrived home.
Money was tight. Jackets torn by monkey claws put a dent in the budget.
So no, the monkeys weren’t running around the zoo. My father took them out of their cage and handed a monkey to each of his kids.
My sister and I found the exact rock and tree where we were sitting when this happened more than 40 years ago.
It sounds crazy, but a few things make it a little more understandable:
- It happened to me. When I told one of my friends this story, he said, “Of course your father handed you a monkey from a cage at the zoo when you were a boy. Crazy things happen to you all the time. This tracks perfectly.”
He’s not wrong.
- It was the 1970s. Things were different back then. The world wasn’t quite so buttoned-up and tragically safe as it is today.
- My father routinely tossed his kids atop horses without saddles and told us to hold on tight. He once brought a horse into the dining room for kicks. When he was a teenager, he and his brothers would buy old cars, get them running, and then hold demolition derbies in the back field behind his father’s garage.
He wasn’t exactly a cautious or rule-abiding man.
In fairness, the zookeepers were very upset when they found us holding the monkeys. Though I had forgotten about my father removing the monkeys from the cages, I remember zoo officials being quite angry and threatening to throw us out of the park.
They didn’t, of course.
Three small, wide-eyed children still wanted to see the elephants, giraffes, and alligator, and it was the 1970s. I probably drove to the zoo unbuckled in the way-back of a station wagon or in the bed of a pickup truck. Bike helmets didn’t exist. We played on construction sites on the weekends, drank from garden hoses, and swam in ponds without adult supervision.
A small incident involving a few monkeys hardly deserved to ruin a child’s day at the zoo.
