Helen Martini

The only daughter of Matthew and Alice (Fitzpatrick) Delaney, Helen had two brothers. Matthew Delaney, of English-Irish ancestry, was an adventurous merchant seaman. Unlike many parents who tell their children this, she really did walk several miles to school daily, including through the snow. Helen was born with an eye affliction that doctors said would result in blindness, but when her beloved father died, her mother brought her in 1925 to New York for a series of eye operations. The fact that her vision became normal may have helped to lead Helen to realize that hard-luck cases should never be given up as lost. But a different sort of unhappiness struck after she married Fred Martini and they tried to have a child; when the baby was lost, doctors told her she would never have another. Instead, she turned her mothering instincts to animals. Fred was a jeweler, but they visited the Bronx Zoo regularly; they both loved animals, and with Helen's encouragement he quit his job to become a zookeeper. When Fred was put in charge of the Lion House, their lives changed forever, and for the better. A lioness refused to mother its cub, so Helen brought it to their New York apartment and raised it herself. She named him after war hero General Douglas MacArthur. Because of her successful care, the cub was returned to the Zoo at the age of 2 months, and next the officials asked her to rear a litter of tiger cubs. Again Helen saved their lives, and the story was followed closely in the news media, until at the age of 3 months they went back to the Zoo. There was no going back now. Unstoppable, she converted a storeroom at the Lion House into a nursery, where she could care for cubs whose mothers were too freaked out by captivity to nurse them properly.

Helen was officially hired in August 1944 as the first and only woman keeper in the Bronx Zoo. Helen continued to treat cubs at home when necessary, as in the case of the black leopard Bagheera (named after the famous leopard in the Jungle Books by Rudyard Kipling). Helen Martini grew famous in New York for treating animals in her apartment -- sometimes despite the complaints of neighbors -- including gorillas, marmosets, baby deer, antelope, squirrels, and skunks. She did all of this without any special training, simply relying upon books that she read and her own instincts and love. The public got to share when one of the tiger cubs she had raised had problems with a baby in her own (seventh) litter; Helen allowed zoo-goers to watch as she fed the sickly little cub she called Fer (Hindustani for tiger), along with the first jaguar cubs the Bronx Zoo had ever exhibited.