Horace H. Rackham Memorial Fountain
aka “The Bear Fountain” at the Detroit Zoo.
Located in the center of the 125 acre Detroit Zoo (actually in Royal Oak, at 10 Mile [now I-696] and Woodward, 2 miles north of the Detroit city limits), the Bear Fountain was sculpted in 1939 by Corrado Parducci and formally named after the first president of the Zoological Society, Horace Rackham. Rackham was a Detroit industrialist (and a lawyer for and one of the original stockholders in Ford) in the days when Detroit was a far different city than it is today. He sold his 50 shares of stock for $12.5mil in 1919. Mr Rackham died in 1933. His widow provided the funds to create the fountain.
Parducci commented: “I didn’t like that. I made it against my will. They wanted, Mrs. Rackham was sold on that, bears“
(He may not have liked it, but I’m willing to bet he liked the commission …)
The two 10 foot tall bronze bears stand in the middle of a 75,000 gallon pool. The pool – a bit larger than 3 Olympic pools – is a splash pool in the summer and an ice skating rink in the winter. It is one of the more popular items at the zoo.
My grandparents lived within walking distance of the zoo; I spent a lot of time there. Admission was free back then … not now.
Turtles and Frogs, oh yeah.
The bears are named Atlas and Benjamin.
Atlas is holding up the entire fountain.
Lazy Benjamin is pretending he’s helping.
A cute little book that’ll take an hour or 2 to read.
(free pdf download)
It’s about a situation in my wife’s hometown of Shelbyville, IN.
The bears of Blue Riverby Major, Charles, 1856-1913
Publication date 1908
https://archive.org/details/bearsofblueriver00majoiala
I noticed the little turtles and frogs too.
Parducci may have created the sculpture unwillingly but he did a good job. Thanks for the tip on the bears of blue river.
DT, as always, has provided a neat little story with his wonderful photo.
There is another famous Rackham I know of, Arthur Rackham, who was a superb illustrator of books of Fairy Tales, Shakespeare and Peter Pan, to name just a few, during a time when England was a place to be proud of and people like Tolkien and CS Lewis were producing great literature. I’ve attached one of his drawings
scary
If you seen the pik below 50 years ago would you have guessed this calamity of clowns were the top echelon of law enforcement in the US?
(they look like an assembly of thugs and their maws in a 3rd world country)
You can look at every facet of gov’t today and see this same sort of people that, in the free market, would be complete failures.
Only in the criminal world of gov’t can such a collection of misfits succeed, at great expense to the rest of us.
This country desperately needs to fail hard.
Maybe the next go around will be a little better.