Kershner: Chongo thrived on monkey business

A few weeks ago, in our “This Day in History” column, we learned about the escapades of Chongo the spider monkey.

In 1961, Chongo slipped her chain in north Spokane, sauntered boldly into someone’s kitchen, frightened a pair of sisters and then rudely stuck her little monkey fist into a butter dish.

After that story came out, Judy Pellow Fleming of Spokane phoned me and said, in essence: You want some Chongo stories? I got some Chongo stories.

Chongo belonged to her family from the early 1960s to the mid-1980s – and Fleming has the scars to prove it.

“Most of us have stitches from monkey bites,” she said.

Chongo came into her family a year or two after the butter dish incident. Fleming’s father, Dr. Tom Pellow, had an office in north Spokane. Chongo was bequeathed to him by a neighborhood family, probably in lieu of payment on a bill.

“My dad would take anything – pianos, fruit, monkeys,” Fleming said.

Pellow wanted to provide a better home for Chongo, who had been chained to an apple tree in a front yard and probably tormented by neighborhood dogs and kids. He was convinced that his 500 acres in the Nine Mile area would be more suitable habitat for a monkey. So one day Pellow drove home with Chongo in the car. His wife greeted the doctor and the monkey with some tough questions, along the lines of: Are you serious? Are you kidding me?

Fleming, who was a little girl at the time, had a less complicated reaction.

“I’m going, ‘I don’t care! I’m just glad we have a monkey!’”

She soon learned that Chongo was a very, very touchy young monkey. You did not “play” with Chongo. Nor did you make any sudden or threatening moves.

“In fact, she would not look at you,” Fleming said. “We gave her a hand mirror and she would turn her back and follow you with the mirror. She would never look you in the eye.”

Her dad built an elaborate Chongo enclosure, one that would have made Tarzan’s Cheeta envious. It was high up in a tree – a big 10-foot-by-4-foot treehouse with a heater. It also had a doggie door, which opened onto a big screened-in area stretching from the trees all the way to the ground. It gave Chongo plenty of room to cavort.

Yet, inevitably, Chongo got loose. Once the family came home to find every cupboard in the kitchen emptied out. Chongo had dumped everything that wasn’t edible – ammonia, cleaning products – disdainfully on the floor. They found Chongo, satiated, with an empty jam jar.

A little archival sleuthing reveals Chongo’s origins. A 1956 story in The Spokesman-Review announced that a young Spokane couple had purchased two baby spider monkeys, Chi Chi and Chongo, for $5.20 in Mexico and brought them home to Opportunity. The monkeys were still youngsters.

By 1961, Chongo must have been adopted by a north Spokane family, when the butter-dish escapade occurred.

The Pellows had her until the mid-1980s when they gave her away.

Fleming doesn’t know what became of Chongo. She does, however, remember the last thing they heard about Chongo: “She was drinking Coca-Cola, eating Hershey bars and getting fat.”