Judd Esty-Kendall (JEK): It started with farm animals; pig, chickens, guinea hens and we had some crows we raised, ravens or crows. We had a pony for a while that my sister Elizabeth rode.

Michael Garofalo (MG): That’s Judd Esty-Kendall — and if the name sounds familiar to you… it’s because he’s the father of one of the producers of this show.

Jasmyn Morris (JM): And you’re hearing a StoryCorps interview they did together about all the animals Judd lived with growing up…

JEK: We had a flying squirrel that my brother and I kept in our room. His name was Peanuts. It ran free, no cage, no nothing, just lived in our room. I had a friend over to spend the night and the flying squirrel got under his covers. He was quite shaken.

Jud Esty-Kendall (JEK 2): (Laughs)

MG: This was in the suburbs of St. Louis… during the 1950s. Judd’s father, Henry Kendall, was a World War II veteran, a salesman, and an obsessive collector of animals.

JEK: You had to be careful of the otter. The neighbors in the fall would stop putting chlorine in their swimming pool and, um, we would swim with the otter, although it would nip sometimes. 

We had a skunk for a little while, descented skunk.

JEK 2: How did that work?

JEK:That worked fine. It was an intelligent animal. 

There were a number of birds of prey. My father would carry them all around. The hawks were in and out of the house, often hooded.

JEK 2: And he trained them to hunt, right?

JEK: You don’t train a hawk to do anything. 

JEK 2: (Laughs)

JEK: But my father had the goshawk in the house one day. And my younger brother was probably two…two and a half. The goshawk must have thought he looked tasty. And he nailed him in the pantry. He wasn’t hurt but that’s when my mother made the rule, no more birds of prey in the pantry.

JEK 2: (Laughs)

JEK: That’s a family rule.

JEK 2: (Laughs)

JM: I’m Jasmyn Morris.

MG: I’m Michael Garofalo. 

JM: And this season on the StoryCorps podcast from NPR… stories about people who’ve found unique… and some might say peculiar ways of living their lives. 

MG: But if that person is someone you love…what’s it like being on the other side… and having to live with them every day?

JEK 2: I’ve heard that he got along better with animals than humans.

JEK: That’s in fact true.

MG: Now of all the animals that Henry Kendall took in and cared for… he definitely had a favorite.

JEK: We got a full-blooded wolf as a young pup. We would all take turns giving the wolf a bottle. And it grew up beautiful, strong, large, intelligent. We were instructed to call it a malamute—a northern dog that looks a lot like a wolf—but it was named Peter, which was a clue, not a very subtle one.

JEK 2: And so why weren’t you allowed to say it?

JEK: My father was worried about what the reaction would be with our thirty neighbors and the other little subdivisions around them. And Peter was fine with the family, but it was my father that he looked forward to seeing.

And my father, his business was a small industrial supplying company. And I think this was soul-killing work for him. And so he would come home in his suit from the city, after working all day, strip into old clothes, and go out in the backyard and wrestle with the wolf. But I cannot remember any times when he came home and did anything with the kids.

JEK 2: Do you think his military service had anything to do with that? 

 

JEK: Yeah. He never talked about his war experiences until much later in life. He was a pilot. He was in the Pacific and my understanding is that his job was mainly strafing runs, and so he would be shooting at people running on the ground. 

 

He suffered from fairly serious PTSD untreated. He was really very nervous about being with people. The wolf was his best friend and he was, I’m sure, the wolf’s best friend. And it was his way of having a bond with a living being that did not make him anxious.

JEK 2: What is the happiest you ever saw him?

JEK: Probably wrestling with the wolf.

JEK: We had Peter for several years, but then some neighborhood kids came onto our property who shouldn’t have been there and he scared the bejeezus out of them and that’s when the wolf had to go.

JEK: My father found a rich man in Michigan who had quite a few acres fenced in and wanted a real wolf to run free in his woods. So the wolf just was gone one day.

JM: After a short break… we’ll find out what happened to Peter the wolf. Stay with us…

 

<BREAK>

MG: After he was forced to get rid of Peter…  Henry tried to forget the wolf. He turned his attention to his hawks and falcons… But it wasn’t so easy to let go.

JEK: We did see Peter one more time. 

A few years after he was sent off to his woods where he could run, my father went on the adventure of his life, which was to go up to the high Arctic with permits to get two gyrfalcons and two peregrines. I was probably a young teenager, and he chose me to go along with him, which was an odd choice because it wasn’t much of a relationship. But I went with him; It was just him and me. 

The beginning stage, we drove through Michigan, and I remember my father saying we were going to take a little detour. I remember being off the beaten path a little bit and then a long driveway going through a forest. We pulled up to a large house. We knocked on the door and there was an actual butler that answered the door. My father asked about the wolf. And I remember him saying that, “Oh, he sold that wolf to a tourist zoo a year ago.”

So my father found out where the tourist zoo was and we went there. It was one of these little rural Midwest local zoos. The largest pen was the wolf, and it was Peter. And he was lying on the cement floor just looking bored. And I remember my father started saying, “Peter…Peter…Peter.”

JEK: At first, the wolf just growled, and then, probably he smelled and recognized the scent. The wolf was on his feet and was just overjoyed; I mean, just was right at the fence and my father was sticking his hands through the fence.

And then in what would seem to be an impossible turn of events, my father convinced the people of the zoo to let him go in the cage and play with the wolf. 

And so for probably half an hour, he was in the cage with the wolf, and they were wrestling like they used to in the backyard. I just remember the delight in my father and in the wolf in being together and playing again. 

The problem became getting my father out of the cage, because the wolf saw exactly what was happening. And the wolf was not about to get separated from my father by an inch. And I remember one of the keepers hitting the wolf from the back with a pole. And the wolf turned to snap at him, and my father went out the door. And then we had to leave.

JEK: He was silent in the car afterwards, but we didn’t talk much anyway because I wasn’t really, frankly, interested in talking with him at the time. I sincerely wish that my relationship with my father had been better ‘cause I was not in the least empathetic to him. Because there really was no relationship except anger within me from really having grown up with him there but without him. Um, but it must have been incredibly hard for him, knowing that his best friend was being left behind in a cage.

 

JEK 2: When you think of that whole experience with Peter now, like, what does that tell you about your dad?

JEK: Thinking about it now, of course, is a lot different than thinking about it then but for years, he didn’t call; we didn’t call and talk. He didn’t write. When your mother and I got married he didn’t come to the wedding. Um, I don’t think it occurred to him.

 

JEK 2: Yeah, I mean, I don’t have many memories of him.

 

JEK:Yeah, and when you were young, I probably didn’t talk about him all that much. 

 

JEK 2: No.

 

JEK: I don’t know.

 

JEK 2: I mean, a little bit, but not really. 

 

JEK: But he did visit Maine once. I remember we picked him up in Portland and he wanted to stop in Brunswick, because he had attended Bowdoin College for a year and a half.

 

JEK 2: Right.

 

JEK: And he specifically took us to the fraternity house where he had lived. We went in and he showed us what step on the stairs he was standing on when he heard that Pearl Harbor had been bombed; because he dropped out of Bowdoin right after that.

 

JEK 2: To go fight?

 

JEK: Um, join the Marines. At Bowdoin, he was studying birds. If the war had not come, he probably would’ve ended up a professor of ornithology somewhere; which is what he probably should have been doing. World War II totally changed his life. 

 

I wrote a verse to a song about him once: 

 

JEK: I’ll tell you the story of my father, who was born with all the gifts the gods could give. But they sent him off to fight a great war, even though he had his whole life to live. And it’s not that he came home wounded, but he came home strangled up inside. And his only friends were the falcon and the wolf, who couldn’t understand the fear he’d had to hide.

MG: That’s Judd Esty-Kendall with his son, also named Jud in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. 

JM: Henry Kendall died in 2007. And we’ll never know what became of Peter the wolf.

MG: Ok, so this week’s question…who is YOUR Peter the wolf? Maybe it’s an animal that got you through a tough patch… or one you had to walk away from. Let us know by leaving a voicemail at 702-706-TALK. 

JM: The number again is 702-706-TALK. Or you can email us… at podcast AT storycorps DOT org.

Next week, a mother and son who have always been honest with each other, have their most difficult conversation yet.

Scott Miller: I worry that you’ll never know how scary it is for me sometimes to imagine life without you.

 

Jackie Miller: That’s something I can’t make better for you. And I don’t doubt it’ll be tough but you’ll be okay.

 

MG: This episode was produced by Max Jungreis and Jud Esty-Kendall. Our Technical Director is Jarrett Floyd. Amy Drozdowska is our Executive Producer. And our fact checker is Erica Anderson. The art for this season was created by Liz McCarty.

 

JM: Special thanks to Jo Corona and Von Diaz.

 

MG: I’m Michael Garofalo. 

 

JM: And I’m Jasmyn Morris. Thanks for listening…