By Warner M. Montgomery Warner@TheColumbiaStar.com        

Montgomery, the hippopotamus, was born September 17, 1972, and died July 15, 2008.

After I returned from my Peace Corps tour of duty in Thailand and continued my teaching career at A.C. Flora High School, I developed a strange fixation on hippos. For years I collected hippo memorabilia. Anything resembling a hippo or anything with a hippo on it, I added to my collection which became known far and wide.

I visited zoos across the country checking out hippos. I studied their behavior, their habits, their likes and dislikes, their physical makeup. I was a man possessed.

In graduate school at the University of Michigan I found other hippophiles. As a diversion from our studies and as a reason to gather at the Pretzel Bell pub, we organized the Hippopotamus Interest, Preservation, and Protection Organization - HIPPO for short.

HIPPO created a motto (Hippos for Peace), a handshake (hands clasped together with thumbs down), and a goal. We pledged to do everything in our power to have the hippo replace the dove as the symbol of peace, after all, doves eat their young, but hippos are known to protect other animals from raging crocodiles.

We discovered that hippos in captivity love heads of cabbage, so at our weekly meetings we would annoint a carefully selected head of lettuce, ceremoniously pull off the succulent leaves, and wash them down with swills of beer followed by whole, unshelled peanuts (another hippo delicacy). In the era of peace, love, and radical demonstrations, we were following our bliss.

I carried HIPPO to Ohio University, where as international president, I continued the weekly ceremonies and organized an annual convention. Soon after the 1970 convention, I got fired. The academic dean thought I should be spending my time grading papers not praising hippos.

Gov. John West rescued me from academic ostracism and hired me to research criminal justice in South Carolina. The first thing I did was organize a chapter of HIPPO among my bureaucratic buddies. A few years later, 1974, Riverbanks Zoo was created. My cousin, Carter Montgomery, a fellow HIPPO member, was hired as a nutritionist. And lo and behold! The zoo bought a hippo from the Memphis Zoo. By some strange coincidence, Columbia's first hippo was named Montgomery.

For years, HIPPO met at Montgomery's compound and paid tribute to all things good and hippo. Montgomery loved the lettuce and peanuts…and hated doves.

Our last HIPPO meeting was in 1981 just before I left for Africa to gather information on the hippo population and to spread the word. After I returned in 1989, I visited Montgomery to tell him the bad news, the movement had crashed. The dove still represented peace. My hippo collection was rotting in my attic. He was sad.

Now, Montgomery is in heaven. Perhaps, he is taking the cause to the Great Hippo. Perhaps, HIPPO will rise again. Hippos for Peace!