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According to her paternal granddaughter Laurel Benchley Costello who resides in San Diego: \u201cAfter the turnover of several male directors or secretaries, Dr. Harry Wegeforth, the founder of the zoo, gave up looking for the right man because he knew who he wanted, even though there had never been a woman head of a zoo, he chose my grandmother.<\/p>\n
\u201c\u2018You might as well run the place,\u2019\u201d Costello said he told her grandmother, “You’re already doing it anyway.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
And she did.<\/p>\n Benchley was the only female zoo director for all her tenure, which included \u201cguiding the zoo through the Great Depression and the Second World War,\u201d Costello said.<\/p>\n Who was Belle?<\/strong><\/p>\n In 1925, Belle J. Benchley was a divorced homemaker with a son to raise. She returned from Fullerton to her parents in Ocean Beach and decided to find work with the city of San Diego. She was later hired as a temporary bookkeeper by Wegeforth, who at the time had a home in Bankers Hill, and \u201cnever let her leave.\u201d<\/p>\n During her time at with the zoo, she was the executive secretary (basically director) where she became immensely proud of her work, the San Diego Zoo and of the staff. In this role, she ran the operations of the zoo, did the public relations and public speaking, which Dr. Harry hated, and wrote and edited ZooNooZ for many years, her granddaughter said.<\/p>\n Benchley also toured the entire grounds of the zoo daily by car looking for any problems. She nurtured a staff dedicated to the zoo and most importantly in her mind, the animals.<\/p>\n \u201cAs the only woman zoo director during her entire career, she became world-famous. She guested on many radio shows and traveled to meetings of zoo directors,\u201d Costello said.<\/p>\n Benchley also had a great sense of humor unless she thought the zoo was being short-changed in some way. She was a great businesswoman, and according to Costello, Benchley kept the zoo afloat through the Great Depression and World War II by sharp trading and watching the budget like a hawk.<\/p>\n When she retired, the city of San Diego gave her a retirement party with 800 people and a trip around the world where she got the gift that meant so much to her \u2014 \u201ca watch from the zoo staff with the inscription \u2018From your fellow employees.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cShe believed she was the coordinator and coach of a team, not a dictator. Although she was not shy about making the hard decisions, her door was always open,\u201d Costello said.<\/p>\n Staying in the area<\/strong><\/p>\n In the 1940s, her grandma moved to a house in Mission Hills at 4127 Palmetto Way, which is still standing among its four neighbors, at least one of which qualifies for Mills Act status.<\/p>\n A strong woman who Benchley Costello always looked up to, she saw her grandma often when she was growing up in the San Diego area.<\/p>\n \u201cWe saw her several times a month. When I was a child in Julian, we drove down to Mission Hills to see her. When we moved to Ocean Beach, it was probably about the same amount, but the drive was less memorable,\u201d Costello, now 72, recalled.<\/p>\n Costello said she would describe her grandmother as \u201cintelligent, articulate, spine of steel, no-nonsense, had tons of friends both in the industry and socially.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cShe loved and understood animals and they loved her, especially the primates. When I was a kid, she would take me around the zoo. At the old chain link monkey cages, they would get excited at her approach. She would get close to the cage and talk to them in baby talk. They would get close to her and then they would start showing off and doing all their tricks. Visitors would be looking from the monkeys to her in amazement,\u201d Costello said.<\/p>\n When asked what made her grandmother so independent and strong, Costello said it was perhaps being the next oldest in a family of eight children with a strong mother.<\/p>\n \u201c\u2026 And I think San Diego was not as closed-minded about women’s roles as more civilized areas. She was born on a farm and when my grandmother was a child on Point Loma, most of it was open land with only a dirt road connecting it to the rest of San Diego [the historic Jennings House on Rosecrans and Talbot was owned by her uncle and her family may have lived in it at some point].<\/p>\n \u201cShe must have been a great multitasker because she never knew what the day would bring,\u201d Costello said.<\/p>\n Benchley died on Dec. 17, 1973, after about five-six years of dementia but did leave a wonderful legacy, Costello added.<\/p>\n \u201cHer legacy at the zoo would be that the animals are more important and valuable than the visitors. She worked to get rid of the circus atmosphere and attitude of early zoos, to treat the animals with dignity and as individuals, except for the sea lion shows, which she instigated in 1928.<\/p>\n \u201cThe zoo was one of the first to be successful in breeding many types of animals. In the early 1950s, she tried to get some pairs of the California condors, which were already in trouble. They had successfully bred Peruvian condors.\u00a0 Opposition from certain groups prevented the zoo from rebuilding the species.<\/p>\n \u201cUnder her watch, the zoo became the biggest and one of the best in the world and was world-famous,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n Costello added her grandmother was well known in San Diego and remains so.<\/p>\n \u201cEven in the \u201960s, people would ask me if I was related to her when they heard the name \u2018Benchley.\u2019 She was the original Joan Embry. She would talk to any group that asked her and often took Bong the cheetah or another animal with her by herself,\u201d Costello recalled.<\/p>\n In addition to her zoo role, her grandmother wrote three adult books about the zoo and one children’s book: “My Life in a Man-Made Jungle,” “My Friends the Apes,” “My Animal Babies,” and “Shirley Visits the Zoo.”<\/p>\n \u2014 Jill Diamond es una escritora independiente local con una predilecci\u00f3n por la historia.<\/em><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" By JILL DIAMOND | Uptown News Among the many memorable strong women in San Diego over the decades was Belle Benchley, a former bookkeeper for the San Diego Zoo from 1927 to 1953 and who later became the zoo\u2019s first female director.<\/p>","protected":false},"author":939,"featured_media":255082,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"11555","_seopress_titles_title":"Granddaughter recalls San Diego Zoo\u2019s first female director","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"jnews_override_counter":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[11547,11551,11550,11555],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-255081","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-features","category-news","category-top-stories","category-uptown-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/255081","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/939"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=255081"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/255081\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/255082"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=255081"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=255081"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=255081"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Granddaughter](\"https:\/\/sduptownnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/11\/Belle-w-baby-cat-1930-ish-188x300.jpg\")
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