This month in 1927, a lot of people were fawning over an animal headed to the National Zoo in Washington: a presidential hippo!
The president back then was Calvin Coolidge, and while Silent Cal wasn’t exactly a charismatic, Teddy Roosevelt type, people still loved to read about life in the Coolidge White House.
That was in large part thanks to the many animals living at the Executive Mansion.
For a couple years, First Lady Grace Coolidge’s pet raccoon Rebecca was a big hit.
When she went off to live at the National Zoo, people figured the Coolidges needed a new exotic pet: they sent lion cubs, antelopes, bears, all sorts of stuff.
The hippo came as a gift from the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company, which had apparently turned the beast’s habitat in Liberia into a rubber plantation (!)
The First Family decided the hippo, like the other live gifts, would probably be happiest at the Zoo, and that’s where he went when he came to the US that June.
He was known as Billy (his full name was William Johnson Hippopotamus) and in the late 1920s, he was a big attraction.
The New York Times said Billy was “as frisky as a dog.”
“Even the antics of the monkeys go unobserved,” the paper wrote, “when the keeper opens the tiny hippo’s cage and cuts up with him.”
I don’t know about “tiny,” since Billy was six feet long and weighed like 600 pounds, but people of the day definitely thought he was a personality.
The Coolidges made regular trips to the zoo to see him and the other animals sent to the White House.
Billy stayed famous long after his presidential patrons had left DC; he lived at the Zoo until 1955.
When he wasn’t entertaining human visitors, he was, um, “entertaining” lady hippos.
Billy’s offspring populated zoos across the country.
All of them were named Gumdrop; zookeepers gave each of them a Roman numeral to tell them apart.
The youngest was named Gumdrop XVIII.
Starting today in Elizabeth City, it’s the North Carolina Potato Festival.
In addition to rides, games, live music and dancing, there will be a road race nicknamed the “Tater Trot,” free French fries on Saturday AND the National Potato Peeling Contest.
Sounds like some good and chip entertainment.
The Presidential Hippopotamus at the National Zoo (WETA)
North Carolina Potato Festival
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Photo by New York Zoological Society – Library of Congress, via Wikicommons
