By Jiminy : At 55, Venerable Gentleman Chimp Has Seen It All

Herbert Hoover was still in the White House when Jimmy the chimpanzee first toiled as a zoo entertainer, pushing a baby buggy, riding a bicycle and combing people’s hair.

In 1965, already ancient, he threw a tantrum when zoo keepers put a television outside his cage so he could watch the space flight of Gemini 4.

Today, Jimmy will wrinkle his flat black nose in haughty distaste at goodies like a tulip, a sprig of lilac, a chunk of watermelon or a sip of soda.

“He’s seen it all now, he’s so old,” says Patricia Lowney, one of the keepers at the county-operated Seneca Park Zoo.

Sometime around now--no one knows just when--is or was Jimmy’s 55th birthday. Not counting human beings, he may well be the oldest primate in the world.

Longevity a Mystery

“It’s a bit of a mystery why he’s doing so well,” says his veterinarian, Dr. Jeffrey Wyatt. “Good genes, I guess.”

To the dismay of record-keepers, there is no way of knowing for sure if Jimmy is older than Bula, a chimpanzee at the Yerkes Regional Primate Center at Emory University in Atlanta.

Jimmy was born wild somewhere in the African Congo and arrived at Rochester’s brand-new Seneca Park Zoo in July, 1931. Zoo keepers estimated he was at least a year old at the time. Bula was born on April 27, 1930, on the estate of Madame Rosalia Abreu in Havana.

Marvin Jones, an expert on primate longevity who is registrar of the San Diego Zoo, says he gives the old age honors to Jimmy based on his scrutiny of a photograph taken of the chimp about the time he arrived in Rochester.

“I would say Jimmy’s the oldest,” Jones told a reporter. “I don’t think you’d be sticking your neck out saying that.”

Jimmy and Bula still have a few years to equal the all-time longevity record set by Guas, a male orangutan who died at the Philadelphia Zoo on Feb. 9, 1977, at the age of about 59.

Jimmy is looking a bit threadbare these days. The coarse, jet-black hair is patchy on the back of his neck, his wrists and the front of his thighs.

He seems to have a little arthritis or rheumatism in his legs and he squints a lot. He may be nearsighted. He is too old to be sedated for a manicure and pedicure, so his nails have overgrown, curving as much as an inch past the tips of his leathery black fingers and toes.

Hearing Acute

The hair around Jimmy’s mouth has turned into a white beard, and there are splotches of pink around his mouth where the skin should be black. His movements are a study in simian stateliness.

Nevertheless, Wyatt says Jimmy has the good appetite, bright attitude and basically sound constitution of a chimp 25 years younger.

Jimmy keeps handfuls of monkey chow biscuits always close at hand and munches often on treats of oranges, apples, bananas, lettuce and carrots. (He peels the bananas, eats them, and then methodically eats the peels.)

His hearing is acute and his teeth are strong, especially considering he has never undergone dental work, as most older primates have.

He has fallen victim to none of the geriatric woes that chimps are heir to, such as congestive heart failure, cancer and cataracts.

Even at 55, Jimmy can still swing his 160-pound bulk to the top of his 20-foot-high cage using only his arms, or stamp out a thundering tattoo on his plank perch when the mood strikes him.

And when disturbed by zoo visitors or his nemesis, the giant orangutan in the next cage, Jimmy can still curl out his lips and sound an authentic jungle call: “OO-OO-OO-OO!”

Jimmy has an entry in the Guinness Book of World Records and an annual birthday party put on by zoo supporters at which he receives--and generally ignores--a banana cream pie sprinkled with raisins.

But the zoo itself has done nothing to publicize Jimmy’s senior citizenship. It even subtracted a year from his age on an old sign by incorrectly stating he was born in 1931.

A new sign will be put on Jimmy’s cage within a few months, says Dan Michalowski, the zoo’s director, whose office is adorned with a plastic foam model of a pair of lion’s lungs hanging from the ceiling.

The 14-acre zoo is owned by the city of Rochester but run by Monroe County. It has 550 animals of 190 species.

Jimmy is a crotchety bachelor. Even as a youth, he turned a cold and hairy shoulder to the wiles of every female chimp who was placed in his cage to mate.

Jimmy will drink water only from a bubbling, upturned garden hose and seems to dislike the pattern of the chain-link fence in his outdoor enclosure. He goes outside only when the temperature approaches the 90s, a rare occurrence in Rochester.

Wall Separates Cages

Jimmy regards unfamiliar human beings with a cold eye, especially people in brass-buttoned uniforms and some redheads, because they remind him of the hated orangutans next door.

Once Gambar, the male orangutan, reached into Jimmy’s cage to choke him and only stopped when Jimmy sank his teeth into Gambar’s arm. A female orangutan lost a finger to Jimmy’s incisors. Now a wall separates their cages.

Jimmy has not lived with another chimp or been handled by a human being since 1938, when he went on a rampage in his playhouse and hurled chairs, tables, pots and pans at fleeing attendants. Zoo keepers decided the giant chimp--he weighed more than 200 pounds at the time--was getting too temperamental and too big for tricks.

Wyatt examines Jimmy from afar. He says he won’t give Jimmy a physical as long as he appears healthy because he fears the chimp might never revive if sedated.

Jimmy Goofs Around

Bula, Jimmy’s peer in Atlanta, participates in experiments that researchers hope will shed light on the aging process in human beings as well as chimps. Jimmy, in contrast, just goofs around.

Wyatt said numerous laboratories have asked for sections of Jimmy’s tissues when he dies. Jones, the San Diego Zoo longevity expert, says he expects the Seneca Park Zoo staff will have the presence of mind to put Jimmy in a deep freeze as soon as he dies to preserve the tissues.

For now, Wyatt says, “He’s really in the T.L.C., the tender, loving care stage. We just don’t want to upset anything.”