HEROES: Akeley

As it must to all men, Death came to Carl Ethan Akeley, 62, sculptor, hunter, taxidermist, engineer. It found him where he had often been before, in the heart of Africa. Weakened by fever and a nervous breakdown some months ago, he died last week of hemorrhage attendant upon pneumonia at Kabele on Mt. Mikeno, Uganda, Belgian Congo.

A book on taxidermy, advertised in the Youth’s Companion, was what started the Clarendon, N. Y., farm boy on his notable career. At 19 he was hired by a Rochester, N. Y., museum keeper to help stuff skins. Young Akeley knew animals too well to tolerate the straw-and-stick effigies contrived by his employer. He proposed and developed the plaster cast method used today by all museums. Later he evolved perspective backgrounds, painted in oils, to show specimens in their natural surroundings. His “Fighting Bulls” (elephants) at the entrance of the Field Museum, Chicago, brought him wide fame.

The death of Marshall Field interrupted the Field Museum’s projects and Akeley was engaged by the American Museum of Natural History, Manhattan. Again he procured elephants and other African fauna, narrowly escaping with his life when a bull elephant gored him and kneeled on his chest and head (his wife rescued him, mulilated); when, his rifle empty, he had to throttle a wounded 80-pound leopard; when he contracted “Black Water,” vilest of tropic fevers. Gorillas were the subject of his latest studies, pursued in the gorilla sanctuary he had been instrumental in having set aside by Belgium. He embarked on his last trip last spring with George (“Kodak”) Eastman, Rochester, N. Y., camera maker, who was financing his work for the American Museum’s African Hall.

Serving the Emergency Fleet Corp. as consulting engineer, he invented the cement gun. For his African field work he invented a cinema camera. In 1924 he caused a ripple in sculpture and religious circles with his bronze, The Chrysalis, allegorizing mankind’s evolution, from the ape. He married twice: Delia T. Donning of Beaver Dam, Wis., who divorced him in 1923; Mary Lee Jobe, mountaineer, of Manhattan, who was with him at the end.

Sculptor Harold P. Erskine, of Manhattan, also an habitué of Africa, tendered to the American Museum a bust of his friend, Akeley, gaunt of jaw, shaggy of head with elephant scars on his cheek.