Today’s theme was strange. I found an escape gone awry, maybe the first ‘kianager’ born at the Bronx Zoo, and a safari trip to catch wildebeests that has a little bit of everything.

First up, a jump gone wrong.

Police raided a bootlegging operation in Washington, a hundred-gallon still running full tilt, 168 quarts of liquor, and a stack of forged tax stamps. They posted one revenue agent downstairs to guard the door. Upstairs, a man named Julian Studds decided he'd rather not wait around to be arrested. He climbed out a window, intending to drop quietly to the ground and disappear. He missed the ground. He landed directly on the agent stationed below, who walked away without a scratch while Studds broke his arm, fractured his hip, and cut his eye badly enough to spend the night in the hospital. He made it out the window. He just didn't get away.

Dr. William Mann ran the National Zoo in Washington, which is exactly the kind of job that gets a man nearly killed by the animals he studies… and attempts to capture.

Leading a Smithsonian expedition through East Africa that summer, Mann found himself in the path of two hundred stampeding buffalo after his own guide fired a shot that spooked the herd. He and a native boy ran for a swamp, sinking ankle-deep in mud with every step, saved only when the herd split and thundered past on either side of them.

A few days later, Mann went back out on purpose. His crew surrounded a mixed herd near Lake Manyara and roped six wildebeest calves by hand, one nearly dragging a man down with it, then rigged carrying slings from burlap sacks and hauled the calves back to camp for the trip home to the zoo. It's the kind of expedition footnote that read as a triumph in 1926 and reads very differently now. Roping wild calves to ship overseas is exactly the practice modern conservation rules exist to prevent. Nobody in Mann's letters seems to have wondered whether they should.

Up at the Bronx Zoo, keeper William Wright and director W. Reid Blair had spent time trying to breed a kiang, a wild ass from Tibet, with an onager, a wild ass from Persia or India, a cross most zoologists on record considered impossible.

It worked. The result stood about two feet tall, was described as "mostly all legs," and got saddled with the name kianager for lack of anything better. The keeper was reportedly quite taken with its singing voice. First of its kind ever recorded, born and raised in the Bronx.

Gertrude Ederle's Channel swim was still making headlines four days later, and at this point they were just reaching for things to cover about her.

Her own family had to publicly clarify how to pronounce their last name (EH-der-lee) after the entire world got it wrong (not sure what they were saying, maybe eh-DERL?). Her trainer credited the disappearance of corsets and petticoats with making the feat physically possible in the first place.

Suffrage leader Carrie Chapman Catt held the swim up as proof that women's physical strength and women's rights were the same argument. And through all of it, her mother told reporters her daughter has no boyfriend, doesn't smoke or drink, and is, by her own description, thoroughly old fashioned.

See you tomorrow. – Chris

Sources:
Evening Star, August 8, 1926
The Cedar Rapids Republican, August 8, 1926
Sacramento Union, August 8, 1926