Sandy and Sue worked together every day, in the room above the tow shop, with Travis. By then, Sue had divorced her first husband, and she and her young son had returned to Stamford, moving into a spacious loft-style apartment her parents constructed next to the auto-body shop. These were some of the happiest days of Sandy’s life. Even the tow drivers and mechanics melted when they saw him. They installed tire swings, ropes, and trampolines in a giant room above the tow shop. Sandy and Jerry took Travis to work with them every day. Sandy bought him an extensive wardrobe and dressed him every morning. They brushed his teeth, and later taught him to brush his own teeth. Soon he was scooting, then walking on his arms and legs, his knuckles absorbing much of his weight. Sandy bottle-fed him formula, burped him, put him down for naps in a crib in their bedroom. She paid the Caseys $50,000 in cash, and a few days later, with Travis wrapped in baby blankets, the two of them boarded a flight home.īack in Stamford, Sandy and Jerry played with Travis, who absorbed their smells and cues and began learning their language. Sandy cried as his hands and feet grasped at her. Black hair covered all but the interior of his face, which was pink, and the two tiny Dumbo ears that jutted from the top of his head. A day earlier, the Caseys had shot a tranquilizer in Suzy and removed Travis from her cage. Travis was the son of Coco, who’d been snatched from the jungles of equatorial Africa in the early seventies and purchased for $12,000, and an 11-year-old retired zoo chimp named Suzy. In her arms, swaddled and in a diaper, lay tiny Travis-named after her favorite singer, Travis Tritt. “Sandy,” she said, “your baby has arrived. A few days earlier, she had received a call from Connie Casey, a breeder in Festus, Missouri, a rural town 35 miles south of St. Louis International Airport one day in 1995. Jerry was home tending to the businesses as Sandy landed at the Lambert–St. Seemingly all of a sudden, she saw herself and Jerry drifting beyond the outer periphery of middle age. Then each of her parents became sick and died. And so when Sue married an employee from her parents’ shop and moved away, Sandy was bitter and heartbroken. Mother and daughter were engaged in one endless conversation. The two raced side by side, country-line-danced, worked together at the businesses. Sue grew into a platinum-blonde version of her mother. He jumped down, ran on two legs, and leaped into her arms.īetween the expanding businesses, the horses in the yard, and their many dogs, the Herolds lived a happily frenetic life. Later, back atop his horse and wearing a cowboy hat, the chimp spotted Sandy in the audience. One day, Sandy and Charla spotted a chimpanzee dressed in Westernwear who rode a horse around the ring. It was during a stint with the country singer Loretta Lynn’s traveling rodeo that Sandy struck up a lifelong friendship with an 18-year-old runaway named Charla Nash, who was rodeoing her way around the country. Sandy and Jerry opened several businesses in Stamford, including a tow operation and an auto-body shop, that would soon make them unlikely millionaires.įor a time in the seventies, Sandy, Sue, and Jerry towed their horses from state to state so that Sandy (and later Sue) could barrel-race semi-professionally in rodeos. Her life stabilized she, Jerry, and Sue, whom Jerry raised as his own, ultimately settled in the house on Rock Rimmon Road with Sandy’s parents. At 30, Sandy married her third husband, Jerry Herold, who was kind, intelligent, and devoted. Her second marriage was romantic, intense, and desperate-she adored her new husband, with whom she had a daughter named Suzan, in 1961, but they fought violently over his frequent affairs and divorced after four years. She married shortly after high school, then again in 1960. At birthdays, her parents outfitted her in silk dresses and cardigans and had her pose for photographs, smiling, near multitiered cakes, Gretchen standing at her side. As an only child, Sandy spent much of her time playing with her German shepherd Gretchen and tending to the horses on the property. She was born in 1938 to a Jewish mother and Italian father who operated a popular bakery downtown and eventually built an unassuming shingled house on a windy road called Rock Rimmon, to the north of the city. She spoke with a strange accent, a New York–New England hybrid, and spent her entire life in Stamford, Connecticut. She applied bright-pink lipstick and copious amounts of bronzer. She wore it down below her shoulders, her bangs cut straight across. Throughout her life, Sandy Herold had long, straight hair so black it almost looked wet.
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