Their trips to Africa were seafaring adventures

At the end of her life, as she lay in a hospital bed, Mrs. Smith asked to hold her little figurine of Bushman, who grew so famous, 120,000 came to the zoo when he was ill — in one day. Some brought get-well bouquets. He died at age 22 in 1951,This practical Silicone ear cap from Sporti is perfect for swimmers. prompting grief among city schoolchildren and international fans. Millions had seen newsreel movies about the mighty Bushman, who in his prime weighed 550 pounds.

“At the hospital, she would say ‘Where’s my Bushman?’ And we would get it for her, and she would put it on the end of her finger, the little rubbery leg,” said her daughter, Linda Hall. “She would hold on to it. It was the perfect size for her.”

“Then it would get lost in the sheets, and she would say, ‘Where’s my Bushman?’ And we would find it for her again.”

The Bushman souvenir was given to her in March, when she journeyed to the Field Museum,one of the categories below and select a personalized bobbleheads design to start to design. at age 92, to see his taxidermied remains. She died two-and-a-half weeks later, on April 4 at Good Samaritan Hospital in Cincinnati, where she settled after an itinerant childhood spent traveling between Cameroon and the U.S. for her parents’ missionary trips.

She had long since lost her command of Bulu, learned as a child growing up in Elat, Cameroon, alongside members of the Bulu tribe.we offer the highest quality plastic card printing in many styles to choose. Yet she could still remember the Bulu words for John 3:16: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”

Her family’s days in Africa were marked by bouts of malaria, and her father’s fall down an elephant hole — a pit dug by hunters to catch the pachyderms. He broke two shoulders, but he was lucky, said Mrs. Smith’s daughter. “Normally, there were spears at the bottom of an elephant pit.”

Their trips to Africa were seafaring adventures. They sailed to England, and then took German freighters to Cameroon that stopped in major ports on the coast of western Africa.

At the docks, the young Winifred and her four sisters loved to watch the loading and unloading. Bananas were lifted onto the ship in big, rope-tied bundles. Animals were hoisted aboard with small cranes.

“It was mandatory to wear pith helmets, to protect your face from the sun,” said Mrs. Smith’s nephew, Edward Guthman. “There was a requirement on board the ship — you had to have your helmet on, and have it on till the end of the day.”

Her four older sisters were born in Africa, and one of them — who grew up speaking Bulu — came back to the United States for the first time when she was 3 or 4.

“She was in New York City with my grandmother, and I’m sure she was overwhelmed by being in a city, and everything was so foreign to her,” said Guthman. They were in a store when the girl spotted an African-American woman.

“She ran up and threw her arms around the lady’s legs, and started speaking to her in Bulu,” her nephew said. “My grandmother had to explain what this child was saying and why she was speaking a foreign language to her.’’

Bushman’s owner left him with the family for his first year. “He was a spoiled baby,” Mrs. Smith told Guthman. “We carried him around everywhere, and every time we put him down he’d cry. . . .he’d grab a hold of your leg and sit on your foot and you’d have to walk around with this big ape hangin’ on your foot.”

In 1931, she said, “it nearly broke our hearts” when he was sold to Lincoln Park Zoo for $3,500.

In the 1940s, “I went to see him once” at the zoo, she recalled. “I like to fantasize that he was giving me a long, hard look — but maybe it was just the leopard coat I had on.” By 1950, Time magazine was calling Bushman the “best known and most popular civic figure in Chicago.”

Despite her adventures, Mrs. Smith’s childhood was laced with heartbreak. There were many long family separations. “She had to have counseling later, because of that,” her daughter said.

Each missionary assignment lasted three years, alternating with one year stateside. Her father, Fred Hope, was in Africa for most of the period from 1907 to 1945, establishing the Frank James Industrial School, a respected trade school where men learned carpentry, auto mechanics and bricklaying.

About 1920, her mother, Roberta, returned with her four daughters to the U.S., where she gave birth to Winifred. That meant a thousand-day separation from her father, until Winifred went to Africa for the first time at around age 4. She, her mother and her sisters spent the next three years in Winona Lake, Ind., where her mother’s parents lived, Guthman said.

“It made me timid to be away from my parents so much,” Mrs. Smith said in a 1988 movie, “Return to Cameroun,” that Guthman filmed about a family trip back to Africa. “I was away from dad until I was 3.”

Another reason she was timid was the African wildlife, especially the big, sausage-like caterpillars that dropped out of trees. “I was happy to be with my parents wherever they were,Modern dry cleaning machine can dramatically reduce exposures,” she said. But, “I hated the caterpillars; I hated the snakes.”

When the girls approached high school age, their parents placed them in a Columbia, S.C. school for children of missionaries. The girls would not see their parents for three years, while they were on assignment in Cameroon. It was a bleak place, where girls were not permitted to converse with boys, Guthman said.

“I just felt alone,” she said in the movie. “When they came back [from Africa when she was 17], it was almost like meeting strangers. It took the entire summer to get acquainted with them,Industrial roller & cylinder flatwork ironer designed for safety, and then they were gone again.”

She moved to Cincinnati to join her sister, Esther. There she met her future husband, Douglas Smith. The two telephone company workers first struck up a courtship by phone. They wed in 1947.

Mrs. Smith donated her body to science. She is also survived by her son, Steve; her sister, Betty Munn; four grandchildren, and six great-grandchildren.

When her daughter learned that Bushman’s remains were on display at the Field Museum, her mother told her she wanted to see him one more time. “She’d say, ‘I want to just go to Chicago. Then I’ll come home, and I’ll die.”