ANIMALS: Dick & Buddy

A wrinkled little face stared up from a shapeless bag of black hair. Acid burns had disfigured the baby gorilla's face—its look was malevolent. But the baby, named Buddy, was sick.

Richard Kroener, the man, scowled at the baby. This was the beginning of a strange attachment—an attachment that began more than nine years ago, lasted until one day last week.

Kroener had been a butcher in Germany before he came to the U.S. and got a job as a kennel man with Mrs. Gertrude Lintz, who collected pets. Buddy belonged to Mrs. Lintz; she had bought the little creature from the captain of an African freighter. But Buddy belonged spiritually to Kroener. He helped nurse the little gorilla back to health. Buddy grew, learned to walk erect, romped with innocent menace around Mrs. Lintz's Brooklyn home with the taciturn, dour-faced ex-butcher. The baby grew up into 200 pounds of gorilla. Mrs. Lintz, who had a cage waiting, decided that the time had come to lock Buddy up. The job fell to Kroener. Wooden-faced, he slammed and locked the cage door.

Buddy, Kroener was convinced, blamed him for the imprisonment. The gorilla's rage became smoldering and volcanic. Several times he lunged through the bars at Kroener, who saved himself only by his agility. Nevertheless, the care of the gorilla had become an obsession with the one-time butcher. He refused to let anyone else take Buddy in charge.

When Mrs. Lintz finally sold the gorilla to the circus, Kroener insisted on going along. Buddy became "Gargantua the Great." Together, the pair of them toured the country in the big show, Gargantua glitteringly housed in a huge, air-conditioned cage of steel bars and plate glass. Kroener lived like any circus keeper. Gargantua, the vengeful, watched with an animal's unforgetful sleepless obsession for the misstep that would bring Kroener within reach of his huge hands. Once the gorilla caught his keeper's arm, yanked it through the bars, bit it so savagely that Kroener was crippled for life. On one occasion Gargantua broke Kroener's nose; once he shattered his jaw. Kroener's strange devotion never faltered.

One day doctors told Kroener that he had cancer, advised him to go to a hospital for an operation. He refused. He would not leave his terrible charge that long. A month ago, while the circus was playing in New York, the taciturn ex-butcher had to go to the hospital, whether he liked it or not. He was suffering from hemorrhages.

Fortnight ago, with Gargantua still glowering in his glittering cage, the circus moved on. Two days later, Kroener died. Said Mrs. Lintz: "If Dick had lived I believe the gorilla would have eventually killed him."