When a lion called Milwaukee's main library home
The New York Central Library may have famous marble statues of lions gracing its entrance, but Milwaukee's main library had an actual living, breathing, purring lion padding down its halls.
Ninety years ago this Saturday, Simba, an African lion cub, arrived in Milwaukee with public museum director Samuel Barrett and a team from the museum. The cub, whose name means lion in Swahili, was found burned and hungry following a wildfire in Tanganyika, now Tanzania, and sold for two shillings, the equivalent of around $7 in today's dollars.
Nicknamed Sim, the cub warmed to the humans and became a companion as the Milwaukee Public Museum team traveled through Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda.
When the museum team returned to Milwaukee, Sim lived in the building now housing the Milwaukee Public Library's Central Library, 814 W. Wisconsin Ave. (Until the early 1960s, the Milwaukee Public Museum was in the same building.)
A lion house was built for Sim on the museum's roof. The house on the roof was designed to be a place for Sim to get fresh air and exercise, but the lion preferred spending time with humans in their offices on the fourth floor.
"I think it's one of the lesser-known stories about Milwaukee that the public museum had a pet lion who lived in this building," said librarian Dan Lee. "When people hear about that they say, 'No, there's no way a lion lived at the library.' But, of course, for almost 70 years, the museum and the library shared the building."
In honor of the 90th anniversary of Sim's arrival, the Milwaukee Public Library has scheduled a free two-hour event Saturday at the central library featuring a program of historic photos and a tour of Sim's home on the fourth floor, now used for storage but still looking like it did in the first half of the 20th century.
The novelty of a lion cub living at the museum and library was not lost on local media, which featured photos of the cute feline on the front pages of The Milwaukee Journal and Milwaukee Sentinel. Thousands turned out to see Sim.
Sim enjoyed roughhousing with museum employees, though never with his claws unsheathed, and his favorite toy was a wooden bowling ball. The lion preferred to have company and seemed happiest when museum workers rolled a bowling ball down the long hallways on the fourth floor so he could chase after it, Barrett wrote in an account of Sim's life.
A few months after Sim's arrival at the library and museum on April 13, 1929, Sim moved to the Washington Park Zoo, the precursor to today's Milwaukee County Zoo. He sired six cubs, though none survived infancy.
"When he went to the zoo, there was less press coverage because he was just another animal at the zoo," said Lee, who with librarian Maria Burke is organizing Saturday's event.
Sim was supposed to stay at the museum eight to nine months, but the wooden bowling balls he used as chew toys resulted in swelling in his lower jaw. He was sent to the zoo for emergency veterinary care of two abscesses in his mouth and ended up staying there.
On July 6, 1943, Sim was euthanized because of pain caused by poor teeth. But that wasn't the last of him.
He was stuffed and mounted by museum taxidermist Walter Pelzer, who created the well-known bison hunt diorama on the second floor of the current museum, and displayed in the African mammals area. When the museum moved to its new home in stages during the 1960s, Sim moved, too.
Today, he can be seen in the African savanna diorama on the third floor of the museum.
"Sim is the only animal to be displayed alive and dead in our (library) building," said Lee.
IF YOU GO
A free program about Sim, the African lion cub who lived at the Milwaukee Public Museum, will be held from 2 to 4 p.m. Saturday at the Milwaukee Central Library's Lucile Krug Rare Books Room, 814 W. Wisconsin Ave. Seating is limited. Registration is required online at mpl.org or by calling (414) 286-3011.
Contact Meg Jones at (414) 224-2064 or firstname.lastname@example.org. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram at @MegJonesJS