Penguin has tie to Byrd's travels
And as it is with a lot of things in Wyoming that can't talk, it has quite a story to tell.
The penguin was supposed to be alive when it got here, but life doesn't always work out the way you've planned it, and the hard truth is the penguin arrived dead.
When that was, precisely, is murky, an exact date lost to time. The closest anyone here can come is sometime before 1958, which is when Norma Jean Mandros first reported for duty.
Norma is the youngest oldest person in the front office, a loyal Little America employee for 50-plus years. She plans to retire next month — although she chokes up at the mere thought of it, so we'll see — and all she knows is that the penguin was here when she got here.
"It was sitting in that case, just like it is now," she says. "No one's ever touched it, as far as I know."
Deductive reasoning surmises that it was in the late 1940s or early 1950s when a man named Isak Lystad first delivered the bird to the high plains of Wyoming. It had been requisitioned by S.M. Covey, the founder and owner of Little America, who wanted a genuine penguin from Antarctica as a mascot for his property.
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In 1932, when Covey, a sheepherder from Utah, first opened his way station for travelers, about 60 miles east of the Utah-Wyoming border, he wanted a name that shouted "remote" and "shelter" and "outpost" — and Little America was it.
Byrd led five Antarctic expeditions in all, from 1928 through 1956. Lystad was a ship's captain on the third expedition, in 1939-40. So the penguin definitely didn't show up until after that.
Somewhere in the 10,000 miles between Little America and Little America, the penguin died.
Lore has it that Covey said he'd take the bird anyway. It was something of a long shot that the bird would have made it for long even if he'd arrived alive, given the distance to the nearest ocean (1,000 miles), the elevation (7,000 feet above sea level) and the scarcity of an emperor penguin's preferred diet of squid, krill and crustaceans.
The penguin was stuffed and enclosed in the glass case that it remains in to this day, along with a little plaque explaining the details about going from Plan A (alive) to Plan B (this).
Ever since, interest in the penguin has refused to die.
"Every day, people check out the penguin and read the plaque," says Scott French, Little America's manager. "We have people all the time stop in to see if the penguin's still here. They saw it years ago when they were kids, and they want to see it again."
Just about everything else about Little America has changed. In 1963, Covey sold out to Earl and Carol Holding, who went on to create a small chain of Little America hotels in the western U.S. and then, for good measure, added their crown jewel, Salt Lake's five-star Grand America Hotel.
The two-lane Lincoln Highway out front that used to traverse Wyoming, and America, has become Interstate 80. The original Little America (Wyoming version) might still be a shelter and outpost for travelers, but now you can be in Evanston in 45 minutes, or Green River in 20.
And even as we speak, they're planning Norma's retirement party.
But the penguin mascot remains, a glue to the past and hedge on the future. Whatever else happens, that Little America penguin isn't going anywhere.
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