BALTO, TOGO, AND ME

WRITERS’ CHAPTER STORY-OF-THE-MONTH – AUGUST 2017

BALTO, TOGO, AND ME

by Mary Grasso                 

        I can’t remember a time I did not love Balto, meaning, I have loved the bronze statue of him in Central Park since I was very young. On a rock outcropping just past the Zoo, I found a creature so glorious to my child’s eyes that he seemed a canine demi-god: heavily muscled, ears alert, harnessed, ready to lunge forward into immortality. I used to sit on Balto’s back frequently enough that my mother claimed I had single-handedly honed his shiny patina but I knew better; all the children loved him, and every one of us climbed up there ofteN as possible. In my case, for the better part of a decade, that meant just about every day.

         The Central Park statue dates to December 1925, close upon the incident that made Balto famous. Early in February of that year he led a sled dog team into the town of Nome, Alaska, with 20 lbs. of diphtheria anti-toxin needed to stem a developing epidemic. Stated that simply there is little drama to the story, but in fact the team’s appearance in the dark of a winter night, on the back end of a raging blizzard with temperatures that hovered at 60 below zero, seemed to the people of Nome to be a miracle. And in many ways it was. The serum originated in Anchorage and had been shipped by railroad as far as it could go. Before the advent of snowmobiles and airplanes with closed cockpits, when the last railroad stop in the Alaskan interior was 670 miles short of Nome, the only way to complete the trip was by dogsled on the existing but heavily snowed-in trail.

         Dogsledding is an ancient means of getting around Alaska, perfected by the Athabascan natives; the sled teams and mushers called up for the ordeal were all veterans of this interior mail-and-freight route, referred to as the Iditarod Trail. Their lead dogs knew the trail by scent from prior and less urgent runs on it. In the media of the day—newspaper and radio—Balto was given all the credit for this success, but in fact his team was one of twenty that handed off the serum at roughly 30-mile intervals all along the route. While it is true that Balto delivered the goods to the end point, in fact the most treacherous parts of the relay were endured by a different team with a different lead dog named Togo. Togo’s cohort of 20 dogs ran an astounding 91 miles in a single day, the punishing distance compounded by their having to cover a stretch across Norton Sound in winds that threatened to break the ice apart and send them out to sea. Togo was a healthy Siberian husky and while his stamina and sense of direction were at their peak, he never fully recovered from the brutal conditions of the trail. He died four years later and was mostly forgotten in evolving stories of the “serum run.” Yet without Togo’s steady and heroic completion of that section of the trail, none of the serum would have made it and no sled dog’s statue would have been erected in Central Park. Most importantly, diphtheria would have raged through Nome unchecked.

          Like so many subsequent life-or-death stories, the dogsled relay was followed by people all over the mainland via newspaper accounts, and once the serum was delivered, Balto was seen as the de facto conquering hero. His musher re-assembled the team a few days later when the weather had cleared so that it could be filmed “coming down the street,”—now in broad daylight—“delivering the precious antitoxin.” The team, as well as Togo’s team, albeit under separate auspices, toured the country and Togo even appeared at Madison Square Garden, wildly embraced with cheers and applause. And Balto was present and lauded at the unveiling of my beloved statue in December of 1925, although he was reported to have shown little interest in that event. But celebrity in America can be fickle and brief.

         Within a few years both Togo and Balto had receded into obscurity and the serum run was old news. Togo and his team lived out their lives well-tended in Maine, and in fact most Siberian huskies of today are descended from one of that team. For a while, Balto’s team was less fortunate. In 1927 a Cleveland, Ohio businessman named George Kimble discovered the dogs in Los Angeles at a cheap dime circus, abused and unkempt, and promptly organized a campaign to raise money for them to be brought to his home town. They received another hero’s welcome upon their arrival and were housed and well cared for at the Cleveland Zoo for the rest of their lives.

         Today Balto’s preserved body can be seen on permanent display at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, while Togo’s is proudly shown at the Iditarod Headquarters in Wasilla, Alaska. Still in love with the whole saga of serum run and the heroics of these singular animals, I have had the privilege of visiting each of them in turn. In death they look nothing like the faithful and impossibly determined animals they proved to be in their lives…they look more like shelter dogs than the Siberian huskies we recognize now. But I still have the statue in Central Park to love, although now I can only WISH I could climb up on Balto’s back and give him a hug. And I just learned there is a statue of Togo at Seward Park. Can I make room in my heart for another bronze demi-god?