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Well, Suzanne, there's only one more for the road.

4. In the middle '50s J.P. Cahn -- a man from Stockton,
Montezuna prep school and Stanford University -- was
promotion manager of The Chronicle. He was· an enormous
fellow with a deep and compelling voice and was an
accomplished blues singer.

For some reason or other, J.P. was convinced that some
of the lesser primates in general, and an old chimpanzee
named Bimbo in particular, had a native sense of jazz
rhythm and could be taught to play the drums. And so
I decided to research Cahn's theory and bring this
quasi-scientific theory to a conclusion, once and for
all, and then we could get on to more) traditional jour-
nadistic investigations.

Consequently, one early morning J.P. Cahn, and a friend
of his named Hal McIntyre who was,I think, a San Francisco
disc jockey, a professional magician and an accomplished
clarinetist, and I -- the three of us drove out to the
beach and took up a position immediately behind Bimbo's
cage on the ocean side of the Fleishhacker Zoo's ape
house.

The weather was scrofulous, foggy, with mist dripping
from the tree branches. Bimbo was already up and swinging
around in his cage. This particular Fleishhacker suite
was furnished with a rubber tire swing, an old tree trunk
with some worn and desiccated limbs, and a gathering of early
ape house decor items. Bimbo swung back and forth; he
did in fact seen to bang on the pots or his walls in a
kind of random rhythm -- or despair -- I am not sure
which.

I don't think I shall ever forget this bizarre scene -- the
three of us naked apes standing there, cold and uncomfortable
in the miserable low-hanging San Francisco fog, with Bimbo
rattling the furnishings and knocking around morosely
in his lodging house. It was a somber moment when Hal
McIntyre finally managed to fit his clarinet together,
and in the misty shroud of inclement Golden Gate fog began
to tootle -- not play, but tootle -- about five choruses
of the "Tiger Rag". Not another sound out there in the murk
but the godforsaken strains of "Hold That Tiger!", the
drip, drip, drip of the fog, and an occasional thwack,
crack, bump, and thump from poor old Bimbo, swinging back
and forth in his cell.