the abbreviated reign of “neon” leon spinks

ACCENTUATE THE POSITIVE 25
dictionaries. Jumbo, unfortunately, was struck and killed by
a speeding freight train in St. Thomas, Ontario, Canada, on
September 15, 1885. For a while, local hucksters charged gawkers
a small fee to see the famous carcass as it lay on a trackside
embankment. Barnum later sent taxidermists to reclaim Jumbo’s
skin and skeleton, which later were displayed at Tufts University
in Medford, Massachusetts. Recalled writer Peter Unwin in a
2003 article in Canadian Business and Current Affairs: “All that
remained was a flood of elephant grease, bottled and sold as a
curative ointment for aches and pains.” A hundred years later,
the St. Thomas town council commissioned a concrete elephant
sculpture so large that its legs had to be removed so it could pass
beneath bridges along the Trans-Canada Highway while being
trucked to St. Thomas.
• Big Mary, aka Murderous Mary. After the circus elephant
stomped a malicious trainer to death in Kingsport, Tennessee,
in 1916, the town fathers decided that Mary had to go. Unable to
find a gun large enough to do the job, they approached the neighboring
town of Erwin, which had a railroad crane hefty enough
for a hanging. A crowd estimated at five thousand watched the
hoist chain break during the first attempt, sending the elephant
to the concrete and knocking her unconscious. Justice was done
on the second attempt. No memorial exists (“The town is not
real proud of it,” explained the local museum curator), but the
episode is chronicled in a 1992 book by Charles Edwin Price,
The Day They Hung the Elephant.
• Norma Jean. The 6,500-pound star of the Clark and Walters
circus was struck by summer lightning on July 17, 1972, while
chained to a tree in the town square of Oquawka, Illinois.