One day, during a game of hide-and-seek, my 5-year-old called out with concern from the master bedroom: “Mom! There is a skeleton in your closet!”
“Those are Ziggy’s tusks, sweetheart!” I called back, preoccupied with folding laundry.
Ziggy was an Indian elephant who spent most of his life chained indoors at the Brookfield Zoo after a near-fatal attack on his keeper in 1941. As the daughter of an exotic animal veterinarian who took care of Ziggy in the early 1970s, I had grown up with two large portions of his tusks — they had been in the closets, bedrooms and living rooms of every home I’d ever known — and they were as familiar as my reflection.
Setting down a half-folded shirt, I paused. I hadn’t thought about Ziggy’s tusks since my father’s death in 2015.
Pulling them out from behind my wedding dress, I gently placed the tusks on the floor. They were yellowed in places but primarily white; fractured in places but mostly whole. My son ran his fingers down a smooth section of ivory and asked, “Mom, where is Ziggy now?”
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At 7 tons and more than 10 feet tall, Ziggy was one of the largest bull elephants ever in captivity. He changed ownership twice in his early years — including a stint with his namesake, Florenz Ziegfeld — before joining Singer’s midget circus.
At Singer’s, Ziggy bonded with a clown named Charlie Becker who taught him how to play harmonica and smoke cigarettes. When Becker fell ill unexpectedly, Ziggy became unmanageable. He was sold to the Brookfield Zoo in 1936.
George Lewis, a circus worker with a reputation for handling “difficult” elephants, was hired by Brookfield to tame Ziggy. Frustrated with his slow progress, Lewis flew into a rage one evening. In his autobiography, “I Loved Rogues,” Lewis wrote, “I sailed into Ziggy in a fury, and fifteen minutes later, he was laying on his side on the floor.”
Lewis’ moment of domination over the bull elephant resulted in a tentative bond between them. Seeing Lewis calmly walk Ziggy from his enclosure to the exercise yard became a familiar occurrence.
The peace between them changed abruptly on April 26, 1941, however, when Ziggy threw Lewis several feet across his exercise yard in front of horrified zoo visitors, then pinned him down with his trunk. Repeatedly, Ziggy slammed his ivory into the dirt trying to impale his keeper. Miraculously, Lewis escaped when Ziggy wedged his tusks into the ground.
Although this attack is as infamous as Ziggy, few people know the likely reason for it: Earlier that day, Lewis had interrupted Ziggy’s intimate foray with Nancy, a female Asian elephant. Ziggy was understandably upset.
Hours after the attack, Lewis faced Ziggy once last time — to secure a chain around his ankle. Once in chains, Ziggy remained isolated indoors for 30 years.
On Aug. 28, 1971, Chicago schoolchildren succeeded in raising $50,000 for a new enclosure to set Ziggy free. “I had the privilege to cut his chain off and cut him loose,” said Ed Schneider, Brookfield’s lead keeper at the time. “I used a cutting torch to cut right through it. We kept his ankle cool with a hose.” Ziggy was allowed to spend his days in fresh air and sunlight for the first time in three decades.
Yet, just a few years later, in March 23, 1975, Ziggy tragically fell into the moat at the front of his stall in the Pachyderm House. Schneider’s wife, Gail, the curator of Brookfield’s Children’s Zoo, said, “That day is in my mind like yesterday. We all carried two-way radios. We heard this transmission, ‘Ziggy fell in the moat!’ and our hearts stopped.”
With determination and ingenuity, the zoo staff rescued Ziggy. But his freedom was again short-lived. On Oct. 27, 1975, he died from old age. “For the last week Ziggy leaned against the walls of his stall for rest,” my dad, Dr. Daniel Laughlin, told The New York Times. “When elephants get old and death is near, they won’t lie down for fear they won’t get back up. Ziggy had lost more than 1,000 pounds.”
Ziggy was 58 years old, equivalent to 100 human years. The Chicago Zoological Society donated his remains to the Field Museum.
“Ziggy’s skeleton is in a museum in Chicago,” I answered my son. His green eyes looked sincerely into mine, silently asking his next question.
I answered him: “Yes, sweetheart, we will get these tusks back to Ziggy. I promise.”
In life, humans failed Ziggy repeatedly; in death, I intended to honor him. I connected with Adam Ferguson, the Negaunee Collections manager of mammals at the Field Museum.
Ferguson shared that, in 2017, the museum exhibited Ziggy in-house for employees: “They had Ziggy’s entire skeleton laid flat, every foot bone and tailbone — it was a central piece of this exhibit. They had everything except for his tusks.”
Ferguson arranged for the tusks to be transported from my home in Portland, Oregon, to the Field Museum. On Dec. 9, a truck picked up the carefully packed crate containing Ziggy’s ivory.
With a mixture of sadness and joy, I said a heartfelt goodbye to the elephant in my room.
He had lived there for over four decades, and it was time for him to go home.
Lindsey Laughlin is a science writer and freelance journalist who lives in Portland, Oregon, with her husband and four children. She has degrees in physics, neuroscience and philosophy from the University of California.
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