Helen Martini(1912-1994)
The only daughter of Matthew and Alice (Fitzpatrick) Delaney, Helen had
two brothers. Matthew Delaney, of English-Irish ancestry, was an
adventurous merchant seaman. Unlike many parents who tell their
children this, she really did walk several miles to school daily,
including through the snow. Helen was born with an eye affliction that
doctors said would result in blindness, but when her beloved father
died, her mother brought her in 1925 to New York for a series of eye
operations. The fact that her vision became normal may have helped to
lead Helen to realize that hard-luck cases should never be given up as
lost. But a different sort of unhappiness struck after she married Fred
Martini and they tried to have a child; when the baby was lost, doctors
told her she would never have another. Instead, she turned her
mothering instincts to animals. Fred was a jeweler, but they visited
the Bronx Zoo regularly; they both loved animals, and with Helen's
encouragement he quit his job to become a zookeeper. When Fred was put
in charge of the Lion House, their lives changed forever, and for the
better. A lioness refused to mother its cub, so Helen brought it to
their New York apartment and raised it herself. She named him after war
hero General Douglas MacArthur. Because of her successful care, the cub was
returned to the Zoo at the age of 2 months, and next the officials
asked her to rear a litter of tiger cubs. Again Helen saved their
lives, and the story was followed closely in the news media, until at
the age of 3 months they went back to the Zoo. There was no going back
now. Unstoppable, she converted a storeroom at the Lion House into a
nursery, where she could care for cubs whose mothers were too freaked
out by captivity to nurse them properly. Helen was officially hired in
August 1944 as the first and only woman keeper in the Bronx Zoo. Helen
continued to treat cubs at home when necessary, as in the case of the
black leopard Bagheera (named after the famous leopard in the Jungle
Books by Rudyard Kipling). Helen Martini grew famous in New York for treating
animals in her apartment -- sometimes despite the complaints of
neighbors -- including gorillas, marmosets, baby deer, antelope,
squirrels, and skunks. She did all of this without any special
training, simply relying upon books that she read and her own instincts
and love. The public got to share when one of the tiger cubs she had
raised had problems with a baby in her own (seventh) litter; Helen
allowed zoo-goers to watch as she fed the sickly little cub she called
Fer (Hindustani for tiger), along with the first jaguar cubs the Bronx
Zoo had ever exhibited. This was in 1954. Helen got vindication for her
mothering when, again in front of the public, she approached the Lion
House and the 600-pound Bengal tigers flung themselves on the floor,
rolled, purred and begged to be petted. The newspapers also reported
that Bagheera "streaked to the bars" and clutched her around the neck,
as "the crowd gasped and fell back," then patted her cheeks with
"desperate affection." Helen never claimed to be particularly brave.
She was simply taking care of her little ones.