West With Giraffes(96)

Giraffe Hum

Giraffes have been caught on tape by biologist researchers humming at night on a very low, rich frequency. Speculation abounds, such as the hum being a giraffe snore, a sound made when they dream, a sound made when they are content, or even a way to communicate with each other like dolphins or elephants.

Hobo Cards

Despite public perception, hoboes weren’t just tramps who happily rode the rails. They began as nomadic workers who roamed the United States, taking jobs wherever they could, and never spending too long in any one place—enjoying the freedom of the traveling life. To avoid police harassment, a group decided to form a union, which created hobo cards to flash, touting a hobo pledge. Dues were a nickel a year.

Hoovervilles

Shantytowns pieced together by the homeless in the United States during the Great Depression, nicknamed after Herbert Hoover, president during the onset of the Depression.

James Fenimore Cooper

Considered the first true major American novelist, he most famously wrote adventures of the frontier American life. They were called collectively the Leatherstocking Tales, about a wilderness scout named Natty Bumppo, known as “Hawkeye.” While they tend toward old-fashioned verbosity, they still endure in our culture, his most famous novel being The Last of the Mohicans, a tale that included the last two members (both male) of the Mohican tribe and now is a common phrase used to connote the last of a type, which resonates for our tale.

Lloyd’s of London The legendary insurance group, established in 1688 by a seaside coffeehouse owner named Edward Lloyd to insure ships, is famous for insuring the uninsurable (such as giraffes being driven across the entire USA). Interestingly, it’s able to do that because it is not an insurance company but a “market” of financial backers, underwriters, corporations, and single members who pool and spread risk.

Lee and Lincoln Highways The Lincoln Highway was the earliest transcontinental highway route for automobiles across the United States, running through northern states and finished in 1913. The Lee Highway followed, finished in 1923, running through southern states starting at Washington, DC, and ending at the Pacific Highway in San Diego.

Mann Act

Signed into law by President Taft in 1910, the act, named after its author, Congressman James Robert Mann, made it a crime to transport women across state lines “for the purpose of prostitution or debauchery, or for any other immoral purpose”—the last phrase allowing liberal, often racial interpretation. Celebrities such as Charlie Chaplin, Frank Lloyd Wright, Chuck Berry, and Jack Johnson were caught in it. Johnson, the first African American heavyweight boxing champion, was among the first to be charged under the act after a road trip from Pittsburgh to Chicago with his White girlfriend.

Rube Goldberg

An early twentieth-century American cartoonist, inventor, and Pulitzer Prize winner, best known for his popular and often hilarious cartoons depicting complicated gadgets performing simple tasks in convoluted ways. The cartoons led to the expression “Rube Goldberg machines” to any invention that looked overly complicated, and continue to inspire national competitions for fun to this day.

SS Robin Goodfellow The merchant marine ship carrying the giraffes was famous for surviving the Great Hurricane of 1938. It didn’t survive World War II, though, when it was torpedoed and sunk by a U-boat in the South Atlantic on July 25, 1944, with all crew lost.

Sundown Towns

After Reconstruction and before the civil rights era, signs like the one in our story popped up on the outskirts of thousands of small towns across the country, warning “colored people” to keep moving. This created a huge problem for the Black traveler and inspired an annual publication guidebook from 1936 to 1966 for African American motorists, called The Negro Motorist Green Book, or just the Green Book, after its editor, Victor Hugo Green. It also inspired the title of the Academy Awards’ 2019 winner for Best Picture.

Tin Lizzie A nickname for the Model T Ford that dominated the early automobile industry, being cheap and dependable, especially by the time of the Great Depression, after many of the earliest ones became dilapidated yet were still roadworthy.

WPA/CCC

The Works Progress Administration (WPA) and the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) were two New Deal programs created by President Roosevelt in 1935 to combat the Great Depression. The WPA employed mostly unskilled men to carry out public-works projects, creating new school buildings, hospitals, bridges, airfields, zoos, and roads, as well as planting an estimated three billion trees. The CCC was a public work-relief program for unskilled, unemployed young men, ages eighteen to twenty-five and later twenty-eight, that offered shelter, clothing, food, and a small wage. The young men lived in work camps most prominently in the country’s national parks. They planted more than three billion trees and constructed trails and shelters in more than eight hundred parks between 1933 and 1942.





ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Every book is a bit of miracle, and I’m deeply, humbly grateful for this one.

I will miss hanging out with the giraffes, Woody, Red, and the Old Man. It’s been a wild ride—a wild yet uplifting one that I got to share with you because of all who helped make this literary trip happen and who deserve my profound thanks.

Most exceptionally:

Jane Dystel, who may love giraffes more than I do and whose skill as well as attention continues to be a thing to behold. And Miriam Goderich, who so quickly saw the potential of this unusual story.