Introduction: During the hullabaloo over the mauling and killing by a tiger that was able to leap out of a dry moat at the San Francisco Zoo, the San Francisco Chronicle mentioned an incident that occurred 40 years ago when a man fell into the lions’ grotto. Neither anyone at the Chronicle nor anyone else but me has ever explained how that happened. I have a 33-page manuscript ready to be the lead piece in a book containing stories of fact, stranger than fiction, about how various individuals got themselves into almost unimaginable scrapes. I compiled the story via interviews with the key persons involved. Because this story has so much in it that is relevant to what happened at the zoo recently, as well as to the plight of the hundreds of thousands of “homeless” and “street people” in the U.S. today, herewith I present a brief summation. - BHW
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His name was Amos Watson. He was 57 years old when he fell into the lions’ grotto at the San Francisco Zoo, still clutching a wine bottle that he had held in one hand while he was taunting two lions sunning themselves in their den.
At times Amos had worked in oil and farm fields and in factories, and for awhile he even ran his own small dairy business. But drinking wine and liquor to excess since the age of 15, and involving himself with quasi-criminal punks, led to time in jail, prison, and a prison work farm established especially for alcoholics. Again and again he would be picked up for public drunkenness, stashed in the local jail drunk tank, and released with the certainty that the never-ending cycle would be repeated. Over a period of 30 years he spent 2,000 days and nights in jail.
He managed to curb his drinking after he found a woman willing to marry him: a woman named Flossy. But after Amos’s mother died and Flossy divorced him, he gave up and became a “street person,” drinking constantly. Amos’s brother tried desperately to convince social workers and physicians at the county hospital that Amos needed guidance, needed therapy, needed help. If help was not forthcoming, his brother argued, Amos would continue to use his welfare money to drink on the streets and be tossed into the drunk tank except on those occasions when he was so ill or injured himself so severely that treatment at the county hospital was necessary. Because Amos’s wasted existence was costing the county money, his brother argued, at least he should get help for that reason, even if nobody in government or medical or social work cared about him.
It did not happen. So, Amos became one of the regulars inhabiting the streets in an aimless, drunken existence.
The Fall into the Lions’ Grotto
On the day it happened, Amos and his street buddies had read a newspaper article concerning the intention of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors to initiate, for the first time ever, a monetary charge for admission to the zoo. They decided they should take advantage of free admission before it was too late.
At the zoo, Amos became separated from his chums. He wound up on the other side of an iron railing and row of hedges separating visitors from the edge of the lions’ grotto. Somehow a wine bottle fell from his pocket into the hedges. Amos climbed over the railing into the hedges to retrieve the bottle. After doing so, he noticed two lions sunning themselves on a deck atop a sloping concrete abutment leading from a dry moat. With the wine bottle in one hand and his other hand in a boxer’s stance, Amos moved across a few feet of soil amounting to the last step before a drop over a steep wall into a dry moat below, and began taunting the lions. Spectators who saw what happened next told news reporters that it seemed more like a deliberate leap than an off-balance fall. Whichever it was, Amos tumbled feet first into the moat, holding his wine bottle aloft. He landed on his right leg, breaking it. The bone ripped through flesh. Blood streamed onto the concrete. But the wine bottle, which Amos had protected, did not break.
Pandemonium
Leaving its female partner named Virginia, the male lion, named Tommy, padded down the abutment to investigate, clamped its jaws onto Amos’s bloodied leg, and began dragging Amos back up the abutment toward its shared den. It was only then that the spectators, who had been watching in a state of dumbstruck silence, activated their lungs in a cacophony of screams and shouts. “He fell in…Help…A man fell into the lions’ den…The lion is eating the man who fell into the den…Help! Help!”
One of the spectators sprinted over the zoo’s walkways, almost knocking down a keeper who was running toward the main office to sound the general alarm, a clamorous system of bells that could be heard a mile away, alerting everyone on the zoo grounds of an emergency. Another keeper working outside the elephant house ran into the lion house to summon the keeper there.
The lion house keeper, Don Farrington, grabbed a 30-06 rifle and ran toward the grotto. He had to navigate his way through scores of zoo visitors running toward the grotto and then through a hundred of them crowded before the iron railing and straining to obtain a view of a man being eaten by a lion, as they had been told. Gangs of boys struggled to climb barriers and walls to get a clear view. Farrington’s shouts to be allowed through the mob were mostly unheeded. He had to elbow, shove, and even punch his way through the people. “Damn!” he muttered to himself. “These people are unbelievable.”
The killing of an old friend
When Farrington reached the edge of the grotto and saw Tommy dragging its meal toward Virginia, he tried to call it off, hoping to buy time for animal control personnel to shoot it with a tranquilizer instead of a bullet so that Amos could be carried out of the grotto. But, suddenly regaining consciousness, Amos sat up. Startled, Tommy grabbed him by the neck and began shaking him as though Amos was some kind of rag doll. Now it was too late to do anything but shoot. Farrington yelled at Tommy, hoping to induce the lion to hold still for a second so that Farrington could get a clear shot without hitting Amos. Farrington happened to be a rifle marksman; but he was taking no unnecessary chance of hitting the wrong target.
Farrington had cared for Tommy since a woman, who won it as a door prize five years before when Tommy was just a rickety-legged cub ill from a liver deficiency, had donated it to the zoo. Farrington had nursed Tommy back to health; he and the lion were old friends.
Recognizing the familiar voice, Tommy stopped shaking Amos for a second, as Farrington had hoped. Bracing himself against the hedges, sighting toward Tommy’s eyes, Farrington got off a shot that hit the mark exactly. Tommy keeled over, dropping Amos from its jaws onto the concrete, crumpled like a discarded trash sack.
Fortunately, another keeper had been able to lure Virginia back into the lion house and shut a gate that kept the female lion inside. Farrington would not have to shoot another lion.
Oblivious to the people blocking him and shouting at him to tell them what had happened, Farrington pushed and shoved and punched his way through them, bent upon only one objective: to be alone in the lion house store room, where he collapsed, his body shaking uncontrollably as he cried as never before in his life.
‘Zoo lion mauls tormenter’
That was he headline across six columns of the front page of the daily newspaper. Amos was identified in the story as a “Milpitas man of 701 South Able Street,” the address of a prison work farm which was omitted from the story, leaving the address as though it was that of a private residence.
The following day there was a more productive story. A deputy sheriff and a head shrinker at San Francisco General Hospital, both of whom knew Amos from his visits to their facilities, explained why “nothing could be done” about individuals such as Amos because of budget cuts and court decisions against forced treatment and housing in mental care places.
As Amos recuperated from surgery in the hospital, he read comments about him in the newspapers. One reader wrote that the incident could have been avoided had there been an admission charge set high enough “to discourage the type of people such as the unfortunate victim from wandering about the zoo area.” Others expressed their disgust that it was necessary for a lion to be killed instead of Amos.
Letters sent to Amos at the hospital told him: “The next time you fall into the gutter, please make sure it is a gutter and not a moat at the zoo; I would be sorry to see another fine animal lost because of a mindless drunk…It isn’t right that one drunk that nobody enjoys takes the life of an animal enjoyed by millions; the least you can do is offer to buy another lion…It is my considered opinion that the zoo keeper killed the wrong beast; he should have shot the filthy pig instead of the noble lion; but what the lion could not do the booze hopefully will; lots of luck, all bad.”
The letters were signed by such names as “A Cat Lover, An Animal Friend, Big Tom.” One unsigned writer enclosed a dollar bill, inviting Amos to buy a bottle of wine with it “and go out on a free-way so you can be mashed to the blob you are [so you cannot] destroy a lovely beast who is far better than you, you pig!”
But a churchgoer invited Amos to join the people of her congregation where, through “praying and fasting and praising God for his goodness and mercy,” and through the pastor’s ability to save people from “all the devil’s sinful devices,” the churchgoers were being cured of “cancers, tumors, diseases, all kinds of cases doctors have give up”; and until then, she would pray for Amos.
After reading the letters, Amos decided that the place where he wanted to be was back on the street with his friends. And, once released from the hospital, so he was.