Marlin Perkins

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Richard Marlin Perkins (March 28, 1905 – June 14, 1986) was a zoologist, best known as a host of the television program Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom.

[edit] Biography

Marlin Perkins was born on March 28, 1905 in Carthage, Missouri, and attended public school there through eighth grade. In the fall of 1919, he entered Wentworth Military Academy, where he kept two blue racer snakes in his room. One afternoon, while exercising them on a lawn back of the barracks, he was spotted by a faculty officer and got in trouble for handling them. He briefly attended the University of Missouri, but quit school to become a laborer at the St. Louis Zoo. It was the start of a brilliant zoological career. He rose through the ranks, becoming the reptile curator in 1928. He was hired as a curator of the Buffalo Zoological Park in Buffalo, New York in 1938, and eventually promoted to director. He served as director at the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago, Illinois from 1944 until 1962, then returned to the Saint Louis Zoological Park as director in 1962. Perkins joined Sir Edmund Hillary as the zoologist for one of Hillary's Himalayan expeditions in 1960 to search for the legendary Yeti.

Perkins was the host of Zoo Parade, a television program that originated from the Lincoln Park Zoo when he was the director there.^[1] During his career, Perkins suffered multiple bites from venomous snakes. During a rehearsal of Zoo Parade, he was bitten by a timber rattlesnake. In other incidents, he was also bitten by a cottonmouth and a Gaboon viper.^[2] Later he became host of Wild Kingdom when it debuted in 1963. Through his fame on television, he became an advocate for the protection of endangered species. He retired from zookeeping in 1970.

Although Walt Disney had fabricated footage of a mass suicide of lemmings in its film White Wilderness,^[3] Marlin Perkins punched a reporter, Bob McKeown, who asked questions about whether wildlife films were inaccurately staged.^[4] Perkins died of cancer in 1986. In 1990 he was inducted into the St. Louis Walk of Fame. A statue of Perkins also stands in Central Park in his hometown of Carthage, Missouri.