Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, August 21, 1995 TAG: 9508210073
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BEN BEAGLE SPECIAL TO ThE ROANOKE TIMES
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Twenty-five years ago, an elephant with an improbable name and history stirred this quality - which may or not be what it used to be.
The same kind of passion for the peculiar caused the city in 1962 to send a huge, very heavy valentine to the wife of astronaut John Glenn - who had enough troubles already.
The valentine was propped up on a downtown street, and a lot of Roanokers signed it in a kind of gentle civic frenzy.
It was shipped to Northern Virginia on a truck and presented to Annie Glenn on the lawn of her home. She seemed a bit puzzled and distraught but remained graceful.
Later she would tell Life magazine that Roanoke's cumbersome valentine was stored on the carport. The wind got up and she was afraid it was was going to fall over and smash the family car - maybe about the time her husband's heat shield was in doubt.
The Glenns were prime news then, and some Roanoke officials may have thought they heard the nation giggling about the world's bulkiest valentine.
Some eight years after Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth, Ringling Brothers-Barnum and Bailey played the civic center in Salem in the spring of 1970.
When the circus was gone, it left behind a kind of diamond-in-the-rough elephant - a gift to the city of Roanoke that would be named Frump-Frump by a 12-year-old in a contest.
There were any number of white elephant jokes when the city accepted the 60-year-old animal. Her tough, wrinkled hide was not white. She was not lovely, but she was supposed to last another 30 years.
The circus said the only reason it was giving Frump-Frump to the city was that she had lost a step and couldn't keep up with the other elephants under the big top.
The naysayers said that even legendary City Manager Arthur S. Owens had turned down the offer of an elephant in 1963 - although Owens loved the bizarre and colorful in city government.
He once equipped garbage collectors with roses to give to housewives unhappy with their city's trash disposal skills, but he said an elephant's keep was too dear.
But, let the cynics bad-mouth a free elephant. That was the way it was supposed to be in Roanoke. Hadn't there been snickering about the Glenn valentine?
Frump-Frump got off to a fast start despite such cynicism. When Paul Caldwell, a teacher, circus fan and the enduring hero of the Frump-Frump story, got her to the Mill Mountain Zoo, attendance went up. Memorial Day, 1970: 7.400 visitors. Same date, 1969: 4,456.
There was optimistic, civic-minded talk that maybe the city needed another elephant to go with what the skeptic claimed was Ringling Brother-Barnum and Bailey's contribution to the city's history of simple-mindedness in such matters.
But these negative thinkers were forgotten when 14-year-old Lee Branch mounted Frump-Frump like a circus girl and led her into her pen on Mill Mountain. Before Lee, the elephant had refused to do that.
And this was the stuff that Roanoke loved. A slim little girl loving an elephant and consequently saving the day. Every normal person has to love stuff like that. Roanokers were overwhelmed.
During Frump-Frump's time, Roanokers learned from an old circus hand who visited on the mountain that elephants cry; cry, as in grief.
They learned that elephants like fresh pineapple and eat a lot of lettuce. They learned Frump-Frump was from India and understood only German.
But, then, even as the big valentine for Annie Glenn had turned sour, the story of Frump-Frump began to take on the look of disaster, debacle and, to some, even tragedy.
It was not true tragedy in the Greek tradition because Frump-Frump had never set herself up to be a big deal to be toppled by fate.
In late August of 1970, Frump-Frump - far ahead of all the bad jokes about television commercials in which elderly persons fall down and can't get up - did just that.
They said she had uremic poisoning and should "be put to sleep" - there being no mention in news accounts of how much of the proper drug might be needed to do that to a 3-ton elephant.
But Paul Caldwell, the circus fan, talked them out of that, and the elephant seemed to be getting better - although she was still down.
They tried to lift her with a crane. They tried everything. But on Aug. 21, 1970, Frump-Frump, who was supposed to have 30 years left, died of heart failure in the middle of all this activity.
It was enough of an event for Vice Mayor James Trout to read an on-the-scene statement that said: "It is the decision and thoughts of the veterinarian consultants that the elephant is dead."
And, so, they buried her on Mill Mountain at 9:30 p.m. on the day she died. And somebody left a bouquet on the harsh, troubled ground the bulldozer left.
And, despite the bad jokes and the suggestions that the circus had scammed the city of Roanoke, many Roanokers, and others, felt the way they would have if the family cat hadn't come through surgery.
There were immediate suggestions that what the city needed now was another elephant. These included an offer from the McDonald's fast-food chain - with the provision that the animal, according to its sex, be named Rodie or Ronald.
Yet, the city has been a quarter of a century without an elephant.
Maybe the city realized it couldn't take another day in which a gentle elephant that had once known the glory of the big top died while they were trying to lift her with a crane.
Maybe it was tired of feeling like laughing at the idea of a crane trying to lift a German elephant on a Virginia mountaintop at the same time it felt like crying about the entire affair.
After Frump-Frump died, N.J. ``Fats'' Dalton, who was supervisor of the zoo at the time and retired shortly thereafter, went beyond all the bad jokes and the sorrow.
He said: "An elephant is not an animal for amateurs."
Ben Beagle covered the Frump-Frump story as a veteran reporter for the Roanoke Times. He's retired now but continues to write a column twice a week for Extra.
by CNB