I’m Rachel Hopkin – host and producer of How Curious - and this episode is about a local girl with a belter of a voice, several hippopotamuses, some zoo history, and a hit song.
The song is called “I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas.” The Jonas Brothers sometimes perform it in concert and it’s been recorded by multiple artists, including LeAnn Rimes. But by far the best known version remains the one cut by a young Oklahoman named Gayla Peevey in 1953 - 70 years ago this year.
Despite the maturity of her voice, Gayla was just 10 years old at the time of the recording, but she’d already been singing professionally for several years – first around Oklahoma and then for national audiences via NBC’s Saturday Night Review. It didn’t take long for a Columbia Records record producer to sign her up. His name was Mitch Miller and “I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas” was the first song he brought to Gayla. “Luckily,” she said, “it was a really good song.” And although she never met its composer – John Rox - but she nonetheless appreciated his skills: “It’s surprising – the interesting chord changes and chord progressions that aren’t typical in a novelty song.” Not only that, but Mitch Miller took Gayla’s own stylistic suggestions seriously: “I’m the one that came up with hippopota-mus-ses-ses. And that scooping thing of hi>>>ppopotamuses, that was me. And I was singing with a full orchestra live and it was very fun.” Gayla was such a confident performer, in fact, that she was invited to debut the song on the most popular Saturday night show of the era: The Ed Sullivan Show.
Amy Stephens has written several books about the history of the Oklahoma City Zoo and Candice Rennels, is the Zoo’s PR Director. I met them together at the Zoo where Amy picked up the story: “So Ed Sullivan invited her to come and sing the song on his show, national television. And Gayla went in and not only did she sing but she danced and marched around and was just as charming as could be. Well, Julian Fraser, our Zoo Director, said ‘That will sell. And we need a hippo.’ And they kicked off this big campaign and the community really rallied behind it.”
By Christmas of 1953, enough money had been raised to purchase Matilda the hippo from the Central Park Zoo and she arrived in Oklahoma on Christmas Eve. Gayla was there to meet her: “They presented her to me as a Christmas gift. So I actually got a live hippo for Christmas. And of course the Zoo was nice enough to provide it with housing.” The following day, the Zoo invited the local community to come and see their newest resident, and – according to Amy Stephens – “even though it was snowing, ten thousand people showed up and stood in line to go in and get to see the hippo. It was a huge deal.”
Matilda was by no means the OKC Zoo’s first celebrity animal. Its earlier stars included elephants Luna and Judy. Indeed, zoos around the world already a long history of using these so-called "charismatic megafauna" to draw in crowds. After all, animals can be very expensive to maintain. In fact, modern public zoos like the one in OKC have roots in bygone displays of wealth by European royals.
Daniel Vandersommers is an environmental historian who’s written about zoo history, including in his recent book Entangled Encounters at the National Zoo: Stories from the Animal Archive (University Press of Kansas). I asked him about how zoos got started. He said that “European zoos emerged out of princely menageries of the 1600s and 1700s. Every king had a menagerie. They showcased your wealth, your empire, your military might, etc. So when the nation-state rose in Europe, slowly – one at time – they got donated to the public-nation state and rather than being funded by the coffers of the prince or princess, they were funded by public tax dollars.”
When the London Zoo opened in 1828, much of its collection came from the royal menageries at Windsor and the Tower of London. Europe was dotted with equivalent institutions. And despite subsidies, they still needed to pull in a paying public. Therefore welcome, in 1850, Obaysch – arguably history’s first celebrity hippo. According to Daniel: “Obaysch was a hippo traded by the Ottoman Viceroy of Egypt to the British Consul General for some hunting dogs and then very quickly is donated to the London Zoo, where he, almost instantly, will double the ticket sales, more than double. Obaysch becomes so common that his name is all over newspapers in England, used as advertisements for all sorts of things. There’s these anthropomorphic images of Obaysch standing on two feet dressed up as a gentleman so British print media is filled with British rhymes and songs.” For example, on the cover sheet for the score of the Hippopotamus Polka composed in his honor by L St. Mars, Obaysch is depicted standing upright, wearing a suit, and hand in hand with a young lady. And thanks to filmmaker Alan Franks’ HippoCollective.com website, I found a rendition of the tune performed by Franks’ Aunt Gayle.
When Obaysch arrived at the London zoo in 1850, there were no equivalent institutions in the US. But by the he died almost thirty years later, several had been constructed very much with European models in mind, as Daniel recounted. “The very first zoos had more grandiose plans – the Philadelphia Zoo, the Cincinnati Zoo, the National Zoo – they set out to establish large zoos like the ones in London or Antwerp. However, once that process got going, the city park that turns into a zoo explodes all around the United States.”
And that’s exactly what happened in OKC starting in 1902. Amy Stephens has documented its history: “After the land run happened in 1889, there were about 30 years of just establishing Oklahoma. Towns were growing, people were still trying to clear their land, so there were a lot of things that happened before we became a state in 1907. And Wheeler Park was a lovely beautiful place for people to go and spend their Sunday afternoons. And someone donated a deer to the park and it became a sensation. And you’re thinking ‘Really? A deer?’ Well, at the time, deer were almost extinct and it was drawing people from across the country. And so there was this mentality of ‘oh, people like to see animals, let’s get some more.’ And so a farmer who had a fox that kept eating his chickens thought ‘I’ll donate a native fox.’ They were very quickly calling it a zoo and it was mostly native animals. It was a few years before they got any exotics.”
This got me wondering what makes a zoo a zoo? I asked Daniel if he happened to have a working definition. He replied: “Good question. I guess I’ll say how zoos defined it is that zoos believed that they were institutions for education, for science, for entertainment, and for conservation, and those four missions together rebranded animal collections as zoos and also separated zoos from circuses. But they did have an older history of collecting, showing, and displaying animals that was also central of course.”
And exotic animals, as already noted, were a very important part of that - but also presented numerous challenges. As Daniel explained: “Exotic animals were very, very expensive, they were hard to come by, and they were hard to care for, so it took zoos a while to develop the skill set to take care of wild animals.”
Fortunately, by the time Matilda arrived in Oklahoma, the Zoo here – which had now moved to its current Lincoln Park location - was able to draw on decades of accumulated hippo-care knowledge. As a result, Candice Rennels told me, “Matilda lived a very long life here at the OKC Zoo, and she did have a mate, Norman. Together they had nine offspring.” “And considering they’re endangered species,” Amy chimed in, “the fact that they had that many babies is really important to their conservation.”
Those hippo offspring were sent to other zoos, often to become part of local breeding programs. Unlike Obaysch, who was captured in the wild, most zoo animals today are captive bred. And there have been other changes in zoo trends over the past century plus. “There has been a push,” said Daniel, “across the last several decades for zoos to keep fewer animals and certainly to have much larger enclosures.”
This is the case with the Oklahoma City Zoo. In the 1990s, it was decided that it should focus on what Candice Rennels described to me as "the ABCs: apes, bears, and cats" – and to create for them specially designed naturalistic settings. Meanwhile Matilda and Norman were relocated to a zoo in Florida. Very sadly Matilda died en route. She was by then very elderly by hippo standards. Fortunately Norman did make it and actually went on to father several more hippo offspring.
There are no longer any hippos at the OKC Zoo, but there are plenty of other animals to see, including in its Oklahoma Trails section which – rather in a return to its origins - showcases flora and fauna native to this state.
And speaking of native Oklahomans - what of Gayla Peevey? Like some zoo animals in earlier times, she also found the public attention hard to bear, so much so that even attending school became almost impossible. In addition, Gayla had no say in the songs Columbia gave her to record and despite being only 10, she knew what suited her voice and what didn’t: “I like a melody to really have a range and some dynamics so that you can belt out the chorus Luckily ‘I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas’ was just a great song, but subsequent songs that they brought to me to record were just little kiddie songs. In retrospect I wish we’d said no. Almost all the songs after the hippo song were just awful: ‘Kitty in a Basket’, ‘Wish I Were a Whisker on the Easter Bunny’s Chin.’”
I feel like the title alone of that last one should have relegated it to the dustbin. In any case, Gayla stopped singing professionally, and largely withdrew from the limelight. Given that her rendition of the hippo song has become a Christmas classic, she will occasionally make public appearances but otherwise rarely refers her early fame. Her husband, on the other hand, is a different matter. Gayla said that “Cliff, wherever we are, he’ll strike up a conversation with somebody and he’ll say have you ever heard the song ‘I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas?’ And most people say ‘oh yeah’ and my husband says ‘well, that’s my wife. She sang that when she was ten years old.’ And I used to get after him because it was embarrassing to me. But when he was very sick and in the hospital about five years ago, I said ‘Cliff, if you make it, I’ll never complain again when you tell people I sang that song.’ Well, he did survive and now I just have to let him say whatever he wants to about it, and that’s fine, because it makes him feel good.”
What a relief to be able to end this episode – and this series – on a happy note.
For more information about the Oklahoma City Zoo, visit https://www.okczoo.org. Gayla will be making a special appearance there on Thursday 9th November, 2023. Contact the Zoo directly for details.
How Curious will be back in 2024 but if you want something to listen to in the meantime, check out its back catalogue of almost 50 episodes. Look for it where you get podcasts or stream episodes online at https://www.kgou.org/podcast/how-curious.
How Curious is a KGOU Public Radio production. The Producer/Host is Rachel Hopkin. The Managing Editor is Logan Layden. The theme music is composed by David Graey.
If you’ve got an idea or a question for How Curious, please send it to the team at curious@kgou.org.
