Dorney Park's Zoo History

[The Interpreter]

http://www.mcall.com/news/local/allentown/...alallentown-hed

Mommy's Telling the truth  Dorney Park once had its own zoo

Animals were kept there until 1983, when the attraction closed.

Q: When I was a child, Dorney Park had a zoo. I still recall the seals, ''KoKoMo'' the gorilla, the monkeys, the alligators, etc. It was wonderful. When I speak to people about the zoo, no one remembers. My son Nicholas tells me that mommy is making it up. Please prove to my 6-year-old that mommy is not making it up. I miss my old Dorney Park.

Maria M. Straka

A: Well, Maria, you can tell your son that Ask Frank says there was a zoo at Dorney Park. Although it was closed in 1983, and suffered a bad fire in 1964, it was in its heyday one of the most popular attractions at ''The Natural Spot,'' as Dorney used to be called.

Animals, at least in the form of fish, were a part of Dorney from the days when it was established in 1860 as a fishing resort. But because most of them ended up as someone's dinner, it probably is not fair to include them as part of a zoo.

Ask Frank was able to find a reference to animals at Dorney as far back as 79 years ago. A brochure produced by the park in 1927 noted ducks, swans and other types of fowl and that the park's ''two lovely swans have a fine family of six little ones.'' Added to them were a peacock, pheasants and quail, and ''on the acre hilly section near the dancing pavilion is a herd of eight fine fallow deer, brought from the Poconos.''

Those deer, or their descendants, were soon to cause quite a stir. On June 6, 1937, The Morning Call reported that 10 of them had broken loose and were roaming about Allentown. Some were later seen in Cetronia, Wescosville, East Texas and Minesite.

Sharp-eyed police officer Wallace Yeager found their hoofprints behind the Heilman boiler works in the First Ward. This was far from the last time that this occurred. Articles from the 1940s and 1950s also talk about deer ''escapes.''

On Sept. 7, 1937, The Morning Call noted that a popular attraction at Dorney was ''Billie'' the deer. According to the newspaper, Billie was known ''coast to coast because of his tameness and voracious appetite.'' It was an era before people really understood that you did not give human food and drink to animals.

One evening, while band leader George Olsen and his orchestra were playing, Billie showed up at Castle Garden, supposedly seeking beer. ''Before Olsen could get rid of him,'' said The Morning Call, ''the deer had consumed three high balls, eight glasses of beer, two cigars and a pack of cigarettes.''

In 1940, Dorney owner Robert Plarr announced the park was adding Chinese ducks to its zoo collection that included Maggie the bear, a raccoon, a coyote and other animals. Surrounded by trees, shrubbery and greens, the animals, though in cages, ''appear to be in their natural habitat rather than captives,'' The Morning Call wrote.

In the post-World War II era, Dorney Park's zoo grew. On May 26, 1963, the Sunday Call-Chronicle announced that Dorney was to become the home of Zoorama.

''Made up of a wide variety of wild animals,'' the Zoorama would be ''a free feature coming direct from Madison Square Garden, New York City'' and would include a fully grown hippopotamus and ''cavorting'' sea lions, the newspaper said. Leopards, mountain lions, cougars, bears and kangaroos were also said to be part of Zoorama's animal collection.

The Zoorama opened in June 1963. Its owners were brothers Bob and Ralph Deitch of Fair Lawn, N.J., who operated a menagerie of more than a thousand animals, The Morning Call noted.

On Aug. 15, 1964, tragedy struck. The 63-year-old wood frame building  that had been the park's former bathhouse  that housed Zoorama caught fire. The fire, according to the account in The Morning Call, apparently began in the living quarters of Bob Deitch. Firefighters from nine companies responded.

''Park maintenance men and firemen smashed a wall of the building with a railroad tie in order to get the cages out,'' noted The Morning Call. Deitch and park employees dragged them with chains to a nearby field. Only two small monkeys and several turtles were lost in the blaze.

Most of the animals were in panic. But one reportedly took it all in stride.

''During the height of the fire, only the hippo seemed placid as he stood in his pool of water adjacent to the buildings, watching the goings-on with apparent equanimity,'' The Morning Call said. When the fire was over, one young girl, whose name was not given by the newspaper, is said to have showed up to make sure her Easter rabbit  that she had given to Dorney's children's zoo  was safe.

The Zoorama came back and was more popular than ever. On July 11, 1970, The Morning Call said this about Ralph Deitch's job: ''On call 24 hours a day, he starts at 7 a.m. and rarely finishes before 11 p.m. In that time, he and seven other employees feed, water, clean and talk to the 300 animals encaged in the Zoorama area.''

But times change. Robert F. Ott, former Dorney Park owner, notes that by 1983, attitudes about zoos had changed. ''There were growing concerns among some people about keeping animals in cages behind iron bars,'' he says. ''They were well taken care of, but a cage is still a cage. ... We know people enjoyed it, but the zoo had served its time, and it just seemed time to close it.''

Ask Frank appears on Wednesday. Have a question on local history? E-mail questions to frank.whelan@mcall.com. Letters can be sent to Frank Whelan, The Morning Call, 101 N. Sixth St., Allentown, Pa. 18105.