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It's CBS's "Late Night with David Letterman" and Letterman is grilling his guest Jack Hanna, director of the Columbus Zoo in Ohio, about a bird Jack has brought on the show.

"And how far can it fly?" Letterman asks.

"Oh, they fly real far, Dave," Jack replies, not sure of the answer.

I'm in trouble now, he quickly realizes as Letterman wryly sits back and stares several long moments at the zookeeper. The audience laughs expectantly, waiting for Letterman to move in for the kill.

"You're not a zoo director, are you, Jack?" he pans. "There is no zoo in Columbus, is there?"

No zoo in Columbus—it was almost the truth back in 1978 when Hanna moved with his wife, Suzi, and their three young girls, Kathaleen, Suzanne, and Julie, to Ohio, where Jack had been hired to run the city's financially beleaguered zoo. At the time, the facility was so neglected that on Jack's preliminary visit to the city a cab driver insisted there was no zoo in Columbus.

Today, eighteen years later, the Columbus Zoo is not only on the map; it is internationally recognized for its success in breeding endangered species and for displaying animals in natural habitats instead of traditional cages.

The zoo may be best known, however, for "Jungle Jack" himself, who has become something of a celebrity to the children who follow his nationally syndicated television show "Jack Hanna's Animal Adventures" on ABC (aired on Saturday mornings in most markets) and to the adults who enjoy his good-natured late-night sparring with Letterman or his early morning appearances on ABC's "Good Morning America"—with squirming penguins, baby apes, or red-tailed foxes in tow. (One fox managed to bite GMA host Charlie Gibson. "I was sweating bullets," Jack said later, "because sometimes foxes have rabies. But Charlie never died, so I guess it was okay. Boy, he never lets me forget that.")

Because of Hanna's success in turning around the Columbus Zoo, other zoos and wildlife conservation groups soon began seeking his counsel and his promotional skills for their programs. By 1993, he was on the road twenty-five days a month-from Africa to Antarctica-consulting and hosting his television show.

I caught up with Jack first at a small six-acre zoo in Peoria, Illinois, where he was helping kick off a major fundraising campaign to expand its facilities, and later in Columbus, where I met Suzi and their youngest daughter, Julie, now twenty-one.

In Peoria we were given an out-of-the-way tent to chat while Jack ate his lunch. Before his first bite, however, a mother with three young children spied Jack through the tent flaps and called out, "I know this is horrible to ask while you're eating, but would you mind if I'd take … "

"No problem," Jack answered. With practiced ease he stepped out next to the boys and smiled as the camera flashed. Back inside, he hurriedly downed two Subway sandwiches and a Coke—never once sitting—then headed for his next appointment: a booth where dozens of young families were lined up for autographs.

Local television crews soon arrived and began filming the almost-fifty-year-old zoo director emeritus, dressed in his usual khaki safari outfit and looking exactly like a "Jungle Jack" should look: muscular with an outdoorsman's tan and his hair—which Jack describes as "silver-streaked like a male gorilla"—hanging long and straight over his collar. This was Jack the public man.

It wasn't until I attended church with Jack and Suzi in Columbus—New Hope Reformed Church—and talked with Julie and their pastor, Steve Norden, that I saw another side of Jack Hanna—a husband, father, and Christian believer.

"When hard times strike a family," Norden told me, "family members tend to emerge either deeply embittered or deeply awed at the mystery of God. I've seen Jack and Suzi come through without the least amount of bitterness, with what I would call in Jack a 'quietly beckoned faith.'"

Facing A Deadly Beast
On June 17, 1995, Jack and Suzi stood around their dining room table with a half-dozen people from their church, holding hands and praying fervently with their twenty-year-old daughter Julie. The next morning Julie would undergo surgery to remove a tumor, the size of an orange, growing in her brain.

The tumor, the doctors believed, had formed as the result of an experimental treatment—a rarely used combination of high radiation and strong medication—that Julie had received when she was diagnosed with leukemia at two years of age. The treatments successfully stopped the leukemia.

Now, however, she was the twenty-fourth of those children who had received the experimental treatment to later develop a brain tumor; of those twenty-four, all but two were cancerous.

Another specific concern was that Julie's tumor was touching a delicate area in the brain—if damaged during surgery, it would leave Julie without the ability to communicate clearly—or worse. But if they didn't remove the tumor completely, it might continue to spread.

"As a father it was the worst feeling in the world," Jack remembers. "That night they were cutting off her hair, getting her ready. Suddenly nothing in life mattered anymore—all the possessions, all the television I do …"

The tumor raised an old question in Jack's mind, one he had faced when Julie was first diagnosed with leukemia: had she gotten it from the animals he sometimes had in the house? There was no way of knowing.

If Jack Ran The Zoo
"When I was a boy," Jack says, "I wanted to be a zoo director. I watched 'Wild Kingdom' every Sunday night, and I thought 'Boy, wouldn't it be neat to be like Marlin Perkins and travel all over the world with the animals!'"

Pursuing that dream, Jack spent his summers tagging along behind the local veterinarian, who also cared for the ailing animals at the nearby zoo in Knoxville, Tennessee. At Muskingum College Jack managed for a time to keep three ducks (humorously named Aquaduck, Viaduck, and Ovaduck) in his dorm room as well as a miniature donkey in a small shed behind his fraternity house—until school officials discovered it. Jack moved the donkey to a nearby farm, but not before it was adopted as the school's mascot. During football games, Suzi, a cheerleader (and a minister's daughter), and Jack led the donkey around the sidelines—a partnership that became permanent when they were married their senior year.

After graduation they moved to Jack's father's farm outside Knoxville, where Jack had grown up. There he collected llamas, deer, lions, chimpanzees, and other exotic animals, which he purchased mainly through mail-order (still legal at the time). The young couple wasn't rich, but they were happy, and Jack gained valuable experience managing his little zoo.

Then tragedy struck. A small boy, looking at Jack's animals, was mauled by a lion and lost his arm. (To this day no one is sure exactly how it happened.) The subsequent lawsuit was settled out of court.

"That's when I quit," Jack says. "It was one thing after another—Julie's leukemia, the little boy losing his arm; I even got hepatitis."

Jack tried several small business ventures that didn't involve animals, but all of them left him disheartened and usually poorer.

"My parents," Jack recalls, "kept saying, 'Jack, you love animals. You ought to stick with it.' And a friend pointed out that I would never be happy unless I was working with animals."

And God, it seemed, was closing the doors to Jack's business ventures and opening them-even when Jack had lost hope in his boyhood dream-to working with animals.

Jack applied for a position at a tiny zoo in Florida. There, at least in title, he would be called a zoo director, even if he spent as much time shoveling manure as giving direction to the zoo's program. Jack slowly transformed the zoo into one that earned the respect of the community—preparing him for what he would do on a larger scale several years later at the Columbus Zoo.

"We moved to Columbus not so much because of the zoo itself," says Jack, "but because of Columbus's first-rate Children's Hospital, which we wanted for Julie's checkups."

Julie was taken again to that hospital in the summer of 1995 for her tumor operation. When the surgery was over, the doctor, a Christian, had good news for Julie and the Hannas: not only had the tumor been removed completely but it was also benign.

"It was prayer that pulled us through," says Jack.

"I remember her doctor looking down at her when she came out of surgery," Suzi adds. "He said to her, 'Julie, your heavenly Father was looking over you.' We will never forget that moment. When you're going through a situation like that, it sometimes seems hopeless, except you have Jesus Christ and eternal life. As a family we had no control over the situation and just had to leave it in God's hands. We were blessed."

Boy At Heart
After church we drove to the zoo, where Julie now works. Her hair, full and black, reveals no signs of the surgery, and her smile is her mother's. As we walk from exhibit to exhibit, I see Jack place his arm around Julie and pull her close as they chat.

"Jack's always had a special place in his heart for her since she got leukemia," Suzi comments, "but since her tumor you can see he wants to be with her as much as he possibly can."

We enter a new dinosaur exhibit with life-size models that move, and I see one more side of this world-famous zoo director.

"Did you see that little boy jump when that Brachiosaurus moved?" Jack asks his wife almost gleefully. "Boy, these things sure look real, don't they?"

Then, suddenly bending down to the boy's level, Jack becomes a kindergartner again as he asks, "What's your favorite dinosaur?"

This genuine childlike enthusiasm for animals is what makes Jack a great promoter of the Columbus Zoo. At times, however, it has gotten him in trouble. He has never lived down an early episode at the zoo involving monkeys moved into a new outdoor habitat specially designed with a water-filled moat to contain them.

"Had I done my homework first," he says with a chuckle, "I would have known these monkeys are superb swimmers." Four of the monkeys immediately paddled across the moat, then climbed a hose being used to fill the moat with water. For the next several months they were periodically spotted moving northward toward Lake Erie through farm country and backyards. Eight months and a lot of red faces later, Hanna was able to capture the elusive primates and return them to the zoo.

Suzi tells of another time the two of them were dressed up and strolling arm-in-arm. When she slipped her hand into his pocket, she was startled to find three rubber cockroaches. Jack laughed sheepishly. "Honey, do you think I'll ever grow up?"

In Awe Of God's Creation
Jack's faith is similarly childlike. He is not afraid to question God after seeing starving children on a trip to Africa or when his daughter is diagnosed with a tumor, but the last thing he does at night, he says, is pray.

For years he has put on a special children's church at New Hope, bringing in a baby tiger or a kangaroo to illustrate the marvels of God's creation. And each spring he opens the zoo's grounds for an Easter sunrise service, which draws a crowd of over 400 worshipers.

But his faith, if childlike, is active. One of his zoo workers pulls me aside to tell me how Jack gave him money and invited him to stay in his house during a time he was in financial difficulty.

Julie explains that while she sometimes missed her father when he was traveling, he never let his public image get in the way of her and her sisters' relationship with him. And Suzi, who for 27 years has trekked through jungles, deserts, and swamps with her husband, says simply: "I'm literally behind him all the way."

Jack's next trip is to the San Diego Zoo, where he uses his daughter's story to shed light on a piece he is filming about a gorilla diagnosed with a brain tumor that came through surgery successfully.

"So here I am traveling all over the world, seeing animals, and being a zoo director for 23 years," Jack says as we walk back to the zoo's entrance. "How many people get to have their dreams realized? Mine have been realized beyond expectation. If I died tomorrow, I'd have lived 50,000 lifetimes."

Last Updated: October 18, 1996

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