Fix You

I’m not a veterinarian, and I‘d never operated on a chimpanzee. Still, as with everything in life, there’s always a first time. The patient was born at the Mattel toy factory in Hawthorne, California, in 1964. He appeared in the 1965 JCPenney Christmas Catalog and ended up in my hands on Christmas morning of that year. I was three years old. Chester O’ Chimp retailed for $8.19, $83 today. By pulling a string on his side and letting go, he spoke eleven different phrases, all with a bad Irish brogue. Two of the phrases were a bit passive-aggressive if you ask me: “Let’s go to the zoo and look at the children!” and “It’s so wonderful that we look so much alike!”

I never called him by his name; to me, he was always “Mumonkey.” I slept with him every night, and he accompanied me everywhere. When my mother was mangled in a car accident that nearly took her life, and I didn’t see her for almost six months, I clung to Mumonkey the entire time, like Linus and his security blanket. During a series of violent storms that Los Angeles experienced in the early 1970s, which came with winds that caused the walls of our tiny clapboard house to sway, I held Mumonkey until the skies cleared, ignoring the mocking comments by my older siblings that I was much too old to be clinging to a stuffed animal.

Mumonkey sat in my room in different locations as I grew older. He ended up in a closet when I became a teenager. I think I tossed him in there when a girlfriend came over and forgot to bring him back out. By that time, his pull-string had broken, and he no longer talked. A piece of his ear was missing, chewed off by my Aunt’s puppy. The wires that caused his fingers to grip onto mine were poking through his clothed hands, and stuffing was sifting through a small hole in the seam that ran down his back.

Still, when I moved out of the house, he came with me. When I got married in the mid-1980s, he lived in a cabinet in our first apartment.

When my kids came along and their stuffed toys began to fill the place, I decided to let Mumonkey go. I don’t remember throwing him away, but sometime in the early 1990s, he disappeared.

I didn’t think I’d miss him, but I thought about Mumonkey often. When eBay became a thing, I casually did a search and found a couple of replicas. I was always tempted to bid, but I could never justify spending the money, and I wasn’t sure what I would do with it if I won one. So, more time passed. Toys that my children once cherished have been discarded, but not all of them. My oldest grandson, now 15, came by one day and found a dinosaur puppet he used to play with. He stared at it fondly, then gently put it back in the box he found it in.

A friend told me about a British television show called The Repair Shop that he watches. It sounded interesting, so I took a look. In it, several tradespeople (a woodworker, a clockmaker, a leathersmith, etc.) work out of an old barn as people bring in cherished family heirlooms, worn-out furniture that’s been in the family for generations, and old toys. They talk about the emotional connection they have with the objects, how they came into their lives, and how they came to such disrepair. They leave the item there, and for the rest of the show, we watch the craftspeople bring the items back to life, sometimes looking brand new. Sometimes, repaired to work and stand up to another fifty years, but still showing the scratches and dents left there by the people before. The payoff is when the owners are reunited with the objects, and they are overcome with emotion.

I was transfixed, and it wasn’t the payoffs that got me. Maybe because of some tough things my family is going through, I found something very therapeutic about watching things get fixed. I watched episode after episode, which isn’t difficult. The show has its own channel and plays continuously.

Inspired, I got onto eBay and searched for Chester O’ Chimp. There were several, all in different stages of deterioration and ranging from $30 - $150. I didn’t want to get one that looked like it came right out of the box. My justification for this purchase was to adopt one with problems that I could fix, and I felt confident I could. After all, I watched hours and hours of The Repair Shop. The craftpeople made it look so simple.

The one I chose was in pretty good shape, except the string for his voice box was missing. I got him for a reasonable price, too, $20. While waiting for his arrival, I asked Google how to fix a voice box on a Chester O’ Chimp. Surprisingly, there was no answer. But it did refer me to a YouTube video of a guy who fixed Chatty Cathy dolls. Chatty Cathy was also a Mattel toy, but she was introduced in the 1950s. She was made infamous by an episode of The Twilight Zone, where a little girl receives one as a gift. When the girl pulls the string, the doll says, “I love you!” But when the evil stepfather pulls the string, the doll says, “I’m gonna kill you!” In the episode, the doll was called Talking Tina, but we all knew it was Chatty Cathy.

Assuming that the voice box in Cathy would be the same kind as in Chester, I watched the video closely. I began gathering the tools I would need to give the soon-to-arrive patient his voice back. I would need dental tools, an assortment of tweezers, a sewing kit, Q-tips, Vaseline, Goof-Off, a rubber O-ring, braided fishing line, and another O-ring, this one white and thicker than the first.

When the box arrived, I was actually nervous about opening it. I knew it wasn’t the same Chester O’ Chimp, but in a way, it kinda was. It was the same toy that became more than a toy that I owned and loved as a child. I wouldn’t allow myself to get choked up when I finally took him out of the box and held him in my hands after all these years. It’s not a good idea for doctors to get too attached to their patients. My purpose in buying him was strictly to fix him, and because I had no idea what I was doing, there was a chance he’d be destroyed in the process.

I waited a few days before operating. I studied the video repeatedly. I found other videos of people fixing similar toys and studied them. In the meantime, I couldn’t take my eyes off the monkey. I found myself wanting to pick him up and just look at him. He brought with him memories of my grandmother and mother holding me in their laps as I held him in mine. He reminded me of how much I clung to him during the violent chaos of my childhood. But I’ve been careful not to allow nostalgia to take over; there are always too many people around.

Finally, I opened him up, unstitching the bottom of his feet and rolling back his fur. I was amazed at how well he was made. His insides weren’t just stuffing, but molded foam rubber. The voice box was a record player with a spring that wound the turntable when the string was pulled and turned a small record under a needle and speaker when the string was released. The guy in the Chatty Cathy video said it should take about fifteen minutes to do the repairs. It took about 8 hours for me, but by the end of the day, Chester O’ Chimp was talking and saying all eleven phrases. The next day, the string broke, and I had to do it again. It took about five hours that time. Even the fourth operation took hours, not minutes.

My family, including my younger grandchildren, is not impressed by him, and some find him creepy. I think they look at him as another one of my projects. My wife, who knows me better than anyone, may wonder if he’s becoming an obsession.

Not knowing what to do with him, I look at toy collectors to see what they do. Many appear to be more interested in the boxes the toys come in than the actual toy. There are places where you can get reproductions of old toy boxes made. I consider this. But, while I’ve seen pictures of the box he came in, I don’t remember the box mine came in. To be honest, I don’t remember mine talking, which leads me to believe his string broke pretty early on.

I purchased an acrylic box, about the size of the original box. I got a picture of the front of the original box and turned it into a decal, then attached it to the see-through front panel. So there he sits. He can easily be taken out, and he’ll talk if you pull the string. When new, the chimp wore a vest, which I’m not crazy about, but he wore one. I think of ways to reproduce that vest.

Throughout all of this, my eldest daughter has moved back home after a devastating break-up that’s left her grief-stricken. She’s lost more than a companion, but also his daughter, who over the years has become her daughter. She’s lost her community and her home. I’m grateful she and my grandson are in a safe place now, but I wish I could do something that could fix her broken heart. But I can’t. She sobs in my arms, and there’s nothing I can say that will remove her pain, so I’m speechless. I’ll just let her cling to me until this storm passes.

Later, while alone, I glance over at the toy in the acrylic box. He’s over 60 years old. Mumonkey.

(Here's an old clip of when Mattel introduced Chester O' Chimp to world. Along with a few other playthings.)

https://youtu.be/6XZn3ZJ3t84?si=S4b99xWaThe87tcO