Category: default || By jt3y

You've all seen the ad here on the front page of the Almanac for at least a week, and the big day has finally arrived --- today is National Gorilla Suit Day. Despite the cold temperatures, I sure hope you're celebrating with someone you love by dressing up in moth-eaten monkey suits and going from door to door, asking for bananas and singing gorilla carols.

In the Mon Valley, "Go Go Gorilla" by The Shandells has long been the favorite traditional National Gorilla Suit Day carol, though some younger children find it easier to sing the theme from the Banana Splits, with its immortal words: "Tra-la-la, tra-la-la-la, tra-la-la, tra-la-la-la."

Los Angeles-based screenwriter and historian Mark Evanier has been the nation's leading chronicler of National Gorilla Suit Day since the death of artist and social commentator Don Martin. While I'm hardly qualified to add to Evanier's body of scholarship, I can elucidate briefly on gorilla suiting traditions in the McKeesport area.

Gorilla suiting was introduced to McKeesport by George Washington when he visited Queen Allequippa, chief of the Seneca Indians, who had her headquarters village at the mouth of the Monongahela and Youghiogheny rivers. Legend says that when Washington first called on Allequippa in 1753, he presented her with a hand-sewn imported English gorilla suit and a bottle of rum.

According to Washington's diary, Allequippa and the other natives "greatly enjoyed the rum," but they were mystified by the gorilla suit --- gorillas not being native to Western Pennsylvania --- and even more puzzled when Washington jumped inside and began cavorting around, going "Eeek, ooop, eek."

The Indians called Washington "Anneygityurgun," which they told him meant "future statesman from far away," but actually means, "Man with wooden teeth who may be a furvert."

After he left, some seamstresses in the village turned the gorilla suit into a neat pillbox hat, mittens and matching fur-lined moccasins for the Queen, which she wore until her death from non-gorilla related causes.

But the gorilla suit tradition returned to McKeesport in 1755, when the first permanent white settlers arrived from Ireland. David McKee and his family were trying to escape religious persecution after the Roman Catholic Church banned gorilla suiting as "being of low moral character and frankly, a little bit weird."

(Many Catholics still practiced gorilla suiting in the privacy of their homes, often buying them from back-alley gorilla suit dealers, though the official prohibition would not be lifted until the Second Vatican Council, when Pope John XXIII issued the landmark encyclical "Ad Vestitum Gorillum.")

After McKee established his ferry across the rivers and erected his new town of "McKee's Port," the village grew rapidly, and many of the early Scotch-Irish settlers brought their own gorilla suiting traditions with them. The establishment of iron furnaces and rolling mills in the mid-19th century brought with it a wave of immigration by Italians and Slavs, and this created inevitable culture clashes.

Many of the Roman Catholic immigrants objected to the idea of gorilla suiting on religious grounds, while Byzantine and Russian Orthodox immigrants celebrated National Gorilla Suit Day a week later than the Protestants, on Feb. 7.

The tensions finally boiled over on Jan. 31, 1891, when a gang of gorilla-suit clad Scotch-Irish rowdies wielding clubs and pitchforks rampaged through the lower First Ward, smashing windows and beating Italians and Slavs who were still dressed in street clothes.

Sporadic street fighting and raids continued for several days until Governor Robert Emory Pattison (who had taken office only a few days earlier) called out the state militia to put down the insurrection.

Before the bloodshed was over, three people had died and dozens had been injured, many of them when anti-gorilla suit protesters had rushed a line of Coal and Iron Police guarding the W. Dewees Woods Iron Works.

Until the redevelopment of the First Ward in 1960 to expand U.S. Steel's National Tube plant, a plaque commemorating the deaths was on display at the corner of First Avenue and Market Street. The present whereabouts of that plaque are unknown.

It would take many years before anti-gorilla suit feelings would subside in the Mon-Yough area. As Chicago Sun-Times technology columnist Andy Ihnatko has documented, Italian immigrants had another reason to dislike National Gorilla Suit Day --- fascists back in Italy had co-opted many gorilla suit traditions to repress the working classes. "In my household, a rubber mask trimmed with tufted black acrylic and a set of floppy black latex gloves will always represent baseless human evil, and the triumph of greed over compassion," Ihnatko says.

But by World War I, public gorilla suiting was accepted by all ages and creeds in the McKeesport area, and some of the city's most fashionable and wealthy residents proudly paraded down Fifth Avenue in their gorilla suits each Jan. 31.

Dressmaker Mary Ann Cox, whose descendants went on to found Cox's Department Store, had a booming trade crafting fine gorilla suits (some trimmed in ermine) for men like Edwin R. Crawford, founder of McKeesport Tin Plate Company, and Mayor George H. Lysle.

(Ironically, until 1911, Mrs. Cox could not sew gorilla suits for her usual clients, since state law and local ordinance forbid women from gorilla suiting. Bans on female gorilla-suiting were struck down by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court in the landmark case Magilla v. Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.)

Others, like prominent local physician Dr. J. Clarence Kelly, purchased their gorilla suits from haberdashers like Henry J. Klein. Most middle-class residents and poor laborers contented themselves with cheap gorilla suits from five-and-10s like G.C. Murphy Co..

Some National Gorilla Suit Day commemorations and pranks became quite famous. Gilbert Myer, Port Vue real-estate developer, created a sensation on National Gorilla Suit Day in 1920 when he purchased a live gorilla and drove him through town in the back of a Hupmobile touring car. The next day's Daily News reported that the gorilla --- clad in a morning coat and bow tie --- "doffed his top hat and waved at passing ladies in a manner so convincingly human that all of the passers-by were greatly amused."

The Depression and World War II greatly curtailed gorilla suit activities in McKeesport, and the effort to modernize and "redevelop" the region in the 1950s and '60s led to a lack of interest in National Gorilla Suit Day. The city's last official National Gorilla Suit Day Parade, held in 1958, attracted only a smattering of spectators and didn't even receive any coverage in the newspaper.

According to unpublished reports, the final National Gorilla Suit Day Parade in the Mon Valley area was held in the Dixon Hollow section of North Versailles of 1961, but since that neighborhood was later demolished to expand the East Pittsburgh-McKeesport Boulevard, no record exists of the festivities.

Indeed, National Gorilla Suit Day has been forgotten for so long in the Mon-Yough area that many residents are unaware of the significance of Jan. 31 --- or even that the holiday exists.

Last year, Tube City Almanac was pleased to commemorate this holiday, and we hope that by giving you some of the background of National Gorilla Suit Day, that residents of McKeesport and surrounding communities can create some new gorilla suit traditions that will endure for years to come.

And we hope that when you bring your gorilla suit out of mothballs this year, your neighbors will echo the words of Queen Allequippa, who said to her chief of staff back in 1753, "Etgay atthay othmay-eatenway agray outway ofway erehay" (loosely translated, "Get that moth-eaten rag out of here").