Legends, ancestral ghosts,
and tales of creation are palpable and exquisite ties to the past in
the Hawaiian Islands. There is another seldom told modern tale which
forever links the International Primate Protection League (IPPL),
Lucky Lindy, the Seven Sacred Pools at ‘Ohe’o Gulch in Haleakala
National Park, Pan American Airlines, and if one uses a bit of
imagination, the great “Kate”, Katharine Hepburn
Sam Pryor
and IPPL: The Hawaiian Gibbon Connection
Article and photos by Georgianne
Nienaber
On the west shore of Maui a
picturesque church, constructed of lava rock and stucco, faces west
over the great Hawaiian waters of the Pacific. The Palapala Ho’omau
Church was constructed in 1854 by Congregational missionaries from
Connecticut. The grounds are lush and look much as they did 150
years ago—shaded by banyan, pine, wild plums, and coconut trees.
Beneath the fertile vegetation an open secret lies buried between
the graves of aviator Charles Lindbergh and his friend Sam Pryor.
That the church and grounds remain in such pristine condition is a
testament to the dedication of Sam Pryor to its restoration. The
fact that “Lucky Lindy” chose the location as his final resting
place is a tribute to the unique bond and life-long friendship
Charles Lindbergh established with Pryor, the one- time CEO of Pan
American Airlines.
Visitors to the church can’t
help but notice that carefully reconstructed detail, supervised by
Pryor, which includes the original church pews. Lore has it that
when Pryor began the restoration, he noticed a church pew under a
neighbor’s coconut palm. Pryor sent out word that he was restoring
the church and would like to know if any more church pews were still
in the area. Within days, all of the original pews were returned, as
if by magic, and remain in surprisingly good condition—burnished
with wax and polish. Soft light filters into the sacristy through a
magnificent window, backlit with a likeness of Christ. He gazes
lingers protectively over the graves of the Pryors, Lindbergh and
Pryor’s pet gibbons—the only non-human primates buried in hallowed
ground.
Charles Lindberg was
introduced to gibbons, a branch of the non-human family tree of
primates, during a visit to the Pryor family estate in Kipahulu. It
was a typically rainy, tropical morning, and Lindbergh was shaving
and covered with lather when he heard a commotion at the door of the
guest cottage. The then-resident gibbon, “Hula,” jumped into his
arms when he opened the door to investigate and remained wrapped in
his arms until late morning, when Pryor noticed “Lucky Lindy”
walking up the hill with Hula clinging to his neck. According to
Pryor’s account of the incident in his autobiography, All God’s
Creatures, the windy night had disturbed the little gibbon, and
she turned to Lindbergh for comfort from the storm. Lindbergh was so
taken with the remote beauty of the setting and the antics of Hula
that he brought his wife, Ann Morrow, to visit on his next trip and
told Pryor that he wanted his help in finding a small cottage with
an ocean view to maintain as a family retreat.
No real estate deal was
necessary, because Pryor recognized that an expensive collection of
nineteenth century dolls Lindbergh donated for the Pryor Doll
Library were worth more than five acres of Pryor family beachfront.
Lindbergh built a cottage there, which was similar in design to the
guesthouse where he first encountered the little gibbon, Hula. As
the two friends grew more comfortable in their friendship,
discussion of the inevitable end of life slowly worked its way into
conversations. Pryor recalls that he was somewhat “startled,” when
Lindbergh sprung the unavoidable question on him and asked where
Pryor intended to be buried. A twenty minute walk down a dirt road
to the Palapala Ho’omau church, which Pryor was in the act of
restoring, convinced Lindbergh that he would not only like to join
Pryor in their restoration effort, but would like also to be buried
there—in a spot he chose on a cliff, with the Pacific roaring
hundreds of feet below. In his memoirs, Pryor writes that as
Lindbergh was looking at the site, the ground began to growl with a
small earthquake. Lindbergh was buried in a simple plot, which, like
the church, faces west over the azure waters. At his request he was
buried in his work clothes and boots in a simple ceremony above the
dramatic cliffs.
Six diminutive, weathered
cement markers lie between the graves of Pryor and Lindbergh in the
historic church cemetery located on the edge of Kipahulu town.
Access from the Hana highway is easily missed—marked only by a
battered sign which points the way down a narrow driveway. More
easily missed is an understanding of the deep friendship which led
to Lindbergh’s burial near the Pryor family plot, including the love
and rapport the two aviators had for a branch of the primate family
tree Sam Pryor called the “gibbon ape.”
Pryor’s first gibbon was “Kippy,”
whom he acquired from the director of the Animal Research Institute
of Japan. He found the gibbon in a pet store in Tokyo when the two-
month-old creature reached for him with two tiny arms from its
temporary sanctuary in a wicker basket. Immediately entranced, Pryor
inquired about the price of the animal, but was told it was already
promised to the aforementioned director. Somehow, Pryor was able to
convince the director that the infant ape was destined to become a
member of the Pryor family and menagerie of pets. For the rest of
his life, Kippy traveled with the Prior family from Maui to
Greenwich, Connecticut and even managed a small “role” in a Tarzan
movie, before he was buried in the cemetery of the old Hawaiian
mission church outside of Kipahulu. Along the way, Kippy literally
“hung out” with movie stars and politicians, including Edie Albert
and Vincent Price.
The latest biography of
Katherine Hepburn (Kate, by William J. Mann) notes that the
fascinatingly narcissistic actress was fond of wandering the streets
of Los Angeles with a gibbon draped around her neck! The Hepburn
hide-away, “Fenwick” was near Pryor’s home in Greenwich, so it is
plausible that the great Kate’s wardrobe accessory was one of his
gibbons. Indeed, taking a comparative look at the publicity still of
the great Kate with a gibbon, one cannot help but notice that the
unnamed gibbon looks very much like the picture of Pryor and his
favorite gibbon, “Keiki,” which is featured in Pryor’s
autobiography. Hepburn’s official biography lists a pet gibbon,
“Amos,” that she took on her RKO tours. It seems gibbons, rightly or
wrongly, Pryor’s or not, were an accessory of the Hollywood wardrobe
and PR machine!
Unfortunately, on a trip to
the Seven Sacred Pools on Maui, Kippy devoured a tropical flower of
unknown etiology and died shortly thereafter. The pools are located
in Haleakala National Park at ‘Ohe’o Gulch, where a series of
twenty-four pools cascade down to the sea. The Pryor family estate
was nearby, and like many families before and after them, the Pryors
would enjoy an afternoon swimming in the lowest of the pools, which
are said to have healing properties.
 The
weathered marker in the Palapala Hoomau graveyard is almost
illegible, but if one looks closely, you can read ‘Our Devoted
Friend, Kippy.” The gibbon graves were not an afterthought, but a
calculated effort on the part of Pryor that the gibbons be “a part
of posterity and there for my grandchildren to see.” Tour operators
have offered many inaccurate explanations for the tiny graves. Some
call them “monkey graves,” or the “family pets,” and tourists
traveling alone have been heard to mutter that they are
“inappropriate graves for children.”
Pryor would not acknowledge
a difference between people and animals. Once, while on a trip to
Alaska, Pryor was stopped by a perplexed security guard as he tried
to bring his pet gibbon, “Keiki Auli’i,” (cute or perfect child)
into a shopping center. The story goes that Pryor very simply
explained to the officer that “I’m a human ape, you’re a human ape
and he’s a gibbon ape.” For Pryor, animals and people were all God’s
creatures, but animals got along better than humans….”
As all good stories go, this
one does not end at the graves of “Kippy,” “George,” “Keiki,” “Ganza,”
“Hula,” and “Blackie.”
One day in the early 1980s, Shirley McGreal of
the International Primate Protection League (IPPL), received a call
from a man identifying himself as Sam Pryor. Pryor asked if IPPL
would provide a home for his remaining gibbons when he died. McGreal,
who at that time was a friend of the world-renowned primatologist,
Dian Fossey, of Gorillas in the Mist fame, gave an
enthusiastic “yes.” The only caveat was that Pryor please put the
request in writing; McGreal explained that IPPL did not have extra
funds for the gibbons’ care.
McGreal heard nothing further about Pryor or
his gibbons for many years. Then one day in 1994, Lucy Wormser of
the Pacific Primate Sanctuary on the island of Maui called IPPL to
report about a gibbon kept alone at Maui Zoo in substandard
conditions. The gibbon's name was Sammy. IPPL learned that Sammy had
been kept as a pet by Sam Pryor. He had regularly been taken to the
Hana Hotel's lunch buffet where he had a special fruit plate.
However, Pryor had unfortunately never put in writing that his
gibbons were to come to IPPL when he died—and as a result Sammy
ended up living in isolation at the Maui Zoo.
Wormser and her colleagues campaigned for
Sammy to come to IPPL, and the gibbon arrived in South Carolina in
May 1995. McGreal maintains that she “never knew a gentler, sweeter
gibbon than Sammy, but he clearly was not a healthy animal.” From
the start, Sammy had a bad cough. Tests showed that he had dilated
cardiomyopathy, a serious condition not heard of before in gibbons,
but which can be caused by exposure to the Coxsackie virus. Named
after Coxsackie, New York, where they were discovered, the coxsackie
viruses are part of the enterovirus family of viruses (which also
include echoviruses, polio, and hepatitis A viruses) that live in
the human digestive tract. Sammy was very cooperative and allowed
the IPPL staff to medicate him, but his heart muscle was damaged
beyond repair and there was no cure. Poor Sammy passed in October
1997.
Later, Maui Zoo had a regulatory conflict with
the U.S. Department of Agriculture and a decision was made to close
the zoo down. The zoo's remaining gibbons were sent to IPPL; they
were Boy, Jade, and their young son, Maui. IPPL immediately changed
the name "Boy" to "Palu-Palu," which means "softly-softly" in the
Hawaiian language.
McGreal was always curious about the
background of the Maui gibbons and found an answer in Pryor's
autobiography. Memorable tales include memorable twists. "Boy" had
also been a pet in Sam Pryor's home. He and his mate Kamie had
produced a black baby gibbon that was taken away for hand-raising.
"Boy" was IPPL’s Sammy’s father!
In his new "incarnation" as Palu-Palu, Sammy's
father has lived at IPPL since 2000. His mate Jade still lives here
with him. Maui is the father of the IPPL youngster, Courtney, making
Palu-Palu and Jade grandparents.
Pryor was steadfast in believing that all of
God’s creatures have an intimate connection. How else is one to
explain the strange story that links Lucky Lindy, the CEO of Pan
American Airlines, Dian Fossey, Hollywood, the sacred grounds of
Hawaii, and a primate preserve located in the low country of South
Carolina? Truth is indeed stranger than fiction, and all life on
earth is connected in ways we cannot imagine. Or as the Hawaiian
Creation Chant, the Kumulipo, instructs:
“Born were the plants...born were the fishes
of the sea and the animals that swam the air. Born were the creeping
things, the birds and the crawlers... Still it was night. For such
was the time of Po, where it was still dark. Tranquil was the time
as night pressed....”
Hawaiian historian, Herb Kawainui Kane
comments on the Kumulipo in the PBS series, The Hawaiians,
"The entire universe was an orderly, fixed whole in which all the
parts were integral to the whole, including man, himself. Man was
descended from the Gods but so were the rocks, so were the animals,
so were the fish. Thus man had to regard the rocks, the fish and the
birds as his relatives. It's an ecological point of view which
western man is only beginning to discover now."
Pryor and Lucky Lindy would agree.
Author’s notes: Pryor’s autobiography uses the
spelling, Keiki Alii, which would be the phonetic
representation of the Hawaiian “Keiki Auli’i.”
Georgianne Nienaber is an investigative writer
and the author of
Gorilla Dreams: The Legacy of Dian Fossey, an account of the
life and death of the famed gorilla researcher, Dian Fossey. For
more information visit
www.thelegacyofdianfossey.com.
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