Well, they probably get wet, maybe it’s good for them to get wet, so he tried with the holes first and Bushman loved it, and so then he had, had a sprinkler system put in, where like a shower bath up at the top of the cage, and he used to turn that on every morning and give him a good, good wrench down, and of course that’s kept him clean, and his hair always looked fine, luxurious and beautiful, and I think it was good for him. Well, wasn’t there a fairly famous escape Bushman. Yeah, that had to do when, well, let me tell you about Bushman at the beginning, because Ed used to take him out all the time, and one day he took Bushman out on this rope, the deal, and he’d not seen or gotten out on the grass, when another keeper came, and said, Ed, we have a monkey loose in the building, you better hurry right back, so Ed went in with Bushman, put him in the cage, got in the cage with him, took the collar off, started for the door, Bushman beat him to it, and it was quite obvious that Bushman was going to jump out if he opened the door. Well, so he played with him for a few minutes and tried it again, Bushman beat him to the door, and well, Ed spent two hours in that cage with all kinds of subterfuge, getting the food from the keeper and throwing it in the other cage, and even when he did that, Bushman was back in time so he could grab the door and keep Ed from getting out. So finally after two hours, they were able to close the sliding door between the two big doors, one time when he threw food in there and Ed was able to get out, and then Ed went to Floyd Young or Parker, whoever was director at that moment, and said, I’m not gonna go in with Bushman anymore, I’m not gonna take him out, so he realized that he was much, Bushman at that time weighed about 180 pounds, and so it was too too much for Ed to handle and he realized that he couldn’t force him to do anything anymore, so that was the last time Bushman ever had a chance to go outside. Well, years later we had a new animal keeper here when I was director, and Ed was breaking him in, and they had been in Bushman’s cage, he had a two compartment cage, a double cage with a sliding door between, then there was a sliding door just on the other side of that second compartment, and that led to a smaller cage, it wasn’t a permanent cage, but it was a cage you could put Bushman into temporarily, so they could clean both of these big cages, one right after another, that’s what they had done, and as they stepped out of the door to put the big heavy, great heavy padlock, four way key padlock onto the door, Ed said to this guy, the phone rang, Ed said, I’ll answer the phone, you put the padlock on, so he did, and when he came back, he looked at the padlock, it looked all right, and so they slid the door and let Bushman into the big double cage, again, closed the door to the little cage, and then they went into the kitchen, and Ed started showing him how to prepare the food at the sink in the kitchen, and this man, this new keeper was facing the corridor, and Ed was working at on the side of the sink, cutting vegetables, and this new keeper said to him, my God, there’s Bushman, and Ed says, I was just about to hit him in the nose for pulling such a lousy so-called joke on me, he knew that Bushman wasn’t there, but he couldn’t help himself, he turned around to looking by, and actually it was Bushman, he was in the room with him, and so Ed walked over to him, took him by the hand, says, come on big boy, we’re gotta go back to the cage, and he started to walk with him and he got to where the door was, and Bushman didn’t want to go and says, and Ed tried to force him a little bit, and says, come on now, up in there, and Bushman bit him in the arm, then of course Bushman was loose, Ed was bleeding very badly, but they secured this double doors from the public corridor, and Bushman was then in the kitchen area and had access to the corridors behind all of the cages, clear up to the office of that building, there was, he couldn’t get out the window because there was security bars or diamond mesh wire on those, so, we tried everything, I of course got involved with this thing immediately, and we got surrounded, closed the building, got all the people out, closed the building, locked all the doors. The Chicago park district police department was in charge in those days, and they were a fine force, and they surrounded the building and they all had all kinds of weapons, not only, they had rifles and shotguns, and I kept going around from one to another say, please don’t shoot, don’t shoot, because we’re gonna catch that animal, and I kept pleading with all these people. Well, finally, Leo Grimmer was my assistant, and he always wore hush puppy shoes, which had rubber souls, so he went down in the other side of the building and walked down into the basement, walked through the basement to the east side of the building, which was directly below the kitchen, and there was a refrigerator there that had a fruit in it, it was a kind that you normally have in stores where you just open the door and reach in and get what you want.
