Happy Birthday Miss Fancy: Avondale Remembers the Queen
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| Postcard from the Birmingham Public Archives, file # 1081.3.99 |
Today would be Miss Fancy's 145th birthday.
Miss Fancy, the legendary Queen of Avondale, may be Avondale’s most famous local celebrity. She’s the cover girl for the Avondale Brewing Company, where she has a special ale named after her. A restaurant on Fifth Avenue is named Fancy’s on 5th in her honor. A current fundraising campaign is raising money to put a life-size statue of her in Avondale Park.
She is the subject of a subplot in Fannie Flagg’s novel Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café, a short documentary Mr. Todd’s Fancy, and Miss Fancy, a play featured in Theatre Downtown’s 2016 season.
If you don’t live in Avondale or were born after 1930, you may not have heard of her, but for those old enough to remember her, Miss Fancy was beloved. Whenever my father meets people around his age from Avondale, he immediately asks if they remember Miss Fancy. They all do.
Miss Fancy (1871-1954) was a gentle Indian elephant who served as the star attraction at the Birmingham Zoo (when it was located in its original site at Avondale Park) from 1913 to 1934. She was known to routinely stroll through the streets of Avondale, Forest Park, and Woodlawn. Children loved to ride Miss Fancy; she would carry 5 to 7 on her back at a time. She sometimes visited the Avondale Elementary School, where the children would run outside to feed her their lunches. She would sometimes wander through the neighborhood eating out of her neighbors’ gardens. One little girl fondly recalled waking up to find Miss Fancy peering in her bedroom window.
My dad was 4 years old when he met Miss Fancy, shortly before the financial pressures of the Great Depression forced the city to close the zoo and sell the animals. Afterwards, he used to dream about riding an elephant all over Shades Valley. When I told him that, after a brief return to the circus, she had lived out the remainder of her life in a zoo in Buffalo, he said, “I wish I had known that when she was still alive. I would have gone to visit her. I loved that elephant so much I would have hopped on a bus to go see her.”
Mr. Todd’s Fancy is a short documentary about Miss Fancy and her trainer, John Todd.
Some of the interviews were filmed at the Avondale Library.
Read about Miss Fancy's life in Avondale through newspapers of the day at Birmingham Public Library's Digital Collections. More information about the campaign to raise money for a statue of Miss Fancy in Avondale Park is available at http://queenofavondale.com/.
Ellen Griffin Shade
Avondale Regional Branch Library
Comments
Cheerful Todd was born 8 December 1891 in Hackneyville, Tallapoosa, Alabama, a son of Louis and Emma Thomas Todd. About 1915, he relocated to Birmingham with the family and remained there for the rest of his life. He found a job with the city government, working in the city parks. Until the mid-1930s, he worked at the Birmingham City Greenhouse. Then, he started working at the Avondale Zoo, the first African-American to do so. At the Zoo, he started out cleaning animal cages. To do this safely and effectively, he had to learn how to manage the animals there. He developed such a rapport with the animals that he became their keeper, a position which he held for 50 years. Again, he achieved another milestone for an African-American in the South by becoming an animal keeper.
Avondale Zoo was segregated, meaning African-Americans could not visit the Zoo. Cheerful would take Miss Fancy on rides through Avondale, Woodlawn and Southside sections of Birmingham where Blacks lived, including Cheerful's extended family. My mother and her cousins remembered Cheerful and Miss Fancy walking through their neighborhood. In fact, Miss Fancy paid a surprise visit to my 105-year old cousin Vaddie Todd when she was a child. Vaddie writes about Cheerful and Miss Fancy in her book, Looking Up, Moving Forward (available on Amazon.com).
Cheerful served in the U.S. Army. He was inducted on 31 July 1918 in Birmingham and was transferred to Camp Sheridan in Montgomery, Alabama for basic training and before being assigned to Company D-326, Quartermaster Corps. He served overseas from 19 October 1918 until 1 July 1919. He was honorably discharged on 10 July 1919.
The video portrays Cheerful as a drunk in typically Southern stereotypical ways. He did have a drinking problem, for sure. But he successfully performed his duties and was honored by city officials for his long and honorable service to the city. He helped to support his elderly father and kept his family connected after they were all grown. He represented a role model for Black children of what they might accomplish in a city that denigrated and devalued them.
Cheerful retired from his position with the Parks and Recreation Department in 1959 due to poor health. He passed away on 6 May 1967. His remains were interred in Shawdowlawn Memorial Park in Birmingham.
If you are going to tell Mr. Todd's story, I wanted to be sure that you had an African-American perspective that is even more valuable because it comes from people who knew him as more than Miss Fancy's handler or yet another Black man to be politely ridiculed. It comes from a proud African-American family that still honors the contributions that Cheerful and his contemporaries made so that we could enjoy the lives we live more freely than they could.