DAILY BREEZE (Torrance, California) 02 October 05 It's Gator Vu all over again - Seems a Reggie cousin made a similar commotion in San Francisco in 1996. When the "golden gator" invaded the city's Mountain Lake, out came the crowds and the T-shirt vendors. And the story has a happy ending. (Donna Littlejohn)
It was, to be sure, a strange story. But just remember, this is California.
Back in the balmy, slow-news days of late summer, throngs of spectators began streaming into a local park, jockeying for position behind yellow police tape as they licked ice cream cones and peered through binoculars. The television cameras followed.
The attraction?
An alligator. Swimming loose in a public lake.
Yeah, yeah, we know what you're thinking. Enough already about this story. Old news, you say.
And you're right. But wait -- this all happened back in 1996 in San Francisco.
It took 10 weeks, an October heat wave and $1.47 in raw fish dangling from a fishing line before two zookeepers were finally able to pluck little "Golden Gator," as he was named by his adoring public, from Mountain Lake near the Presidio in San Francisco. As it turned out, Golden Gator was pint-sized, only about 3 feet long and weighing 7 pounds.
But his story grew as big as the Loch Ness Monster in those waning weeks of the summer of 1996.
One local newspaper later called it one of the "oddest sagas" to ever grip San Francisco.
"Nowhere else but in San Francisco would you get so many people so excited about a little alligator," said one Walnut Creek resident of all the alligator fuss back in 1996.
Nowhere else except Harbor City in 2005, that is.
The parallels between Golden Gator in San Francisco and Reggie the alligator in Harbor City are remarkable -- from the crowds and the TV cameras to the unsuccessful but colorful gator wranglers dispensing homespun quotes but managing to miss their prey.
The Great San Francisco Alligator Hunt even took place at the same time of year -- August through early October -- as the zany melodrama that is still being played out on the shores of 53-acre Machado Lake at Ken Malloy Harbor Regional Park (the Reggie pursuit is at seven weeks and counting).
"The fact that we had an alligator in San Francisco, first of all, was so beyond everybody," said Nancy Chan, spokeswoman for the San Francisco Zoo, who remembers the city's frenetic 1996 outbreak of gatormania. "One of the newspapers had T-shirts made up; a local artist did cartoons. For me it was just funny. It was one of those stories that really had legs. ... The whole town was mobilized for an alligator."
So how did it all end?
This is important, so listen up, L.A.
Surprisingly, it all ended rather quickly, with very little fanfare and no cameras -- and the credit goes not to any professional gator "wrangler," but to two San Francisco Zoo workers.
Sitting in a restaurant one night -- 10 weeks after Golden Gator's presence was first confirmed and after numerous failed capture attempts -- associate zoo curator John Aikin and administrative assistant Woody Peterson took note of an unusual early October heat wave.
Gator weather, they thought. On a hunch, they stopped by the park after dinner.
Spotting Golden Gator almost immediately, they drove to a local supermarket to buy some fresh bait and then returned to the park, now emptied of gator-watchers and television crews that had grown weary of the story.
Within moments, Aikin and Peterson managed to attract Golden Gator's attention with the food. They hooked him near his tail using a three-pronged gator hook left behind by the Florida gator trapper who couldn't catch the gator more than a month earlier.
It was a rather unremarkable end to it all, although the little gator later would attract hundreds of visitors to the local zoo, where he was a special exhibit for three months.
But reading through the news accounts of the 10 weeks leading up to the capture, San Francisco's Mountain Lake foreshadowed almost exactly the scene that unfolded this past summer at Machado Lake where authorities are still pursuing the Harbor City gator.
San Francisco's gator caper officially began on Aug. 12, 1996, when the summerlong rumors about an alligator swimming in Mountain Lake were finally confirmed. (Los Angeles park rangers confirmed Reggie's existence in Machado Lake after similar rumors on Aug. 12, 2005.)
Park officials said they saw "a long snout with mean eyes swimming back and forth in Mountain Lake," reported the San Francisco Chronicle on Aug. 13, 1996.
" 'I couldn't tell how big it was, but it looked to be about this big,' said officer Edward Chow, spreading his arms and then spreading them a little wider," Chronicle reporter Steve Rubenstein wrote.
"After the 3 p.m. sighting, a dozen cops converged on the lake's edge, rolled yellow police tape hither and yon and shooed dozens of onlookers away from the shore," Rubenstein wrote.
Crowds began to gather, including one woman wearing an alligator suit. An 80-voice children's chorus gathered on the shore to sing "Puff the Magic Dragon," hoping to coax the shy gator out from hiding. A pet psychic announced that the gator told her his real name was "Fred." Poets read tributes from the shore.
And all the while, authorities were wringing their hands, trying everything they could to catch the alligator to no avail as the hide-and-seek game played on, day after day.
They tried snares and nooses and rowboats and nets. They tried to figure out the animal's routines. They tried chasing it, they tried leaving it alone.
Late-night forays with flashlights yielded nothing.
Meanwhile, professionals scoffed from afar. A week into the effort, a Florida wildlife official sniffed to a newspaper reporter that such a lengthy search for a 3-foot alligator was "completely unheard of. Sounds like amateurs out there," he said.
Exasperated, and by now embarrassed, San Francisco authorities turned the hunt over to someone who surely could catch the alligator: a professional Florida gator trapper.
Trapper Jim Long said the job should take 15 minutes -- "Maybe 30 minutes. Depending."
The gator man, as the newspapers dubbed him, boasted of snagging 1,000 gators. He had a southern drawl. He wore tooled leather boots and a big, shiny brass alligator belt buckle. He delighted the gator-struck Californians by bellowing out his authentic gator calls: Araagh, auraaaw -- Hunh, hunh, hunh," said the gator man.
But the gator man could not catch the alligator either.
After three days, the gator man was glad to leave California.
In the end, it was the local zoo workers, earlier derided as "amateurs," who accomplished what seemed like the impossible.
After he was caught, Golden Gator was showcased in a temporary exhibit at the San Francisco Zoo. Everyone seemed surprised by how small he was, but they snapped up the zoo's $13 "I Saw the Mountain Lake Gator" T-shirts anyway.
Eventually, Golden Gator was loaded into a crate and whisked off on a Boeing 737 to a natural wildlife habitat in New Orleans, where he was released into the wild. He was given a smashing farewell party at the zoo, complete with "crockadile tears" shed by zoo workers, a goodbye cake for the humans and a live rat feast for Golden Gator, who was allowed to attend the festivities in his honor in a securely locked cage.
"See ya later, alligator," wrote someone on Golden Gator's goodbye card.
No one knows whatever happened to Golden Gator once he was set free.
"You hope he would have survived and had stories to tell his young ones," said zoo spokeswoman Nancy Chan. "In retrospect, it would have been nice if we had kept him here so people could actually see him. People still bring it up every once in awhile, 'Do you remember when ... ?' "
It's Gator Vu all over again