A True Pioneer
Many exceptional people helped in shaping Brookfield Zoo’s early years. One of them was curator Grace Olive Wiley.
 
On December 1, 1933, Wiley became the zoo’s first curator of reptiles. Previously the curator of the Museum of Natural History at the Minneapolis Public Library, she wrote to Chicago Zoological Society president John McCutcheon in 1927 expressing interest in a position at the new zoo. Six years later, she sold her collection of 330 reptiles to zoo director Ed Bean and he hired her on, at a salary of $1,800 per year.
 
Wiley’s career was marked by accomplishment. She was the first person to breed western diamondback rattlesnakes in captivity and subsequently wrote a paper on the topic. More importantly, she was something much rarer than some of the reptiles she handled: a woman of authority, a curator no less, in the zoo business of that era.
 
Unfortunately for Wiley, her true legacy may be that her achievements are overshadowed by her uniqueness of character. She strongly believed that venomous snakes were no more dangerous to handle than nonvenomous ones. This idea probably led to her absentmindedly leaving enclosures open on occasion.
 
Wiley left Brookfield Zoo’s employment in 1935, not even two years after she began. Thirteen years later, a cobra struck her middle finger. She succumbed to the poison 90 minutes later.