FORGOTTEN BOOK: PENELOPE

 Penelope by William C. Anderson (1963)

First sentence:  "Mrs. Agatha Finkmeister was probably the only woman in the whole state of Texas who waxed her mustache."

With that opening you know you are in for a strange ride, and Penelope doesn't disappoint.

Agatha Finkmeister is landlady to Captain Gregory Williams, USAF.  We meet them both as a hurried Williams bumps into Mrs. Finkmeister, knocking her (derriere over pince-nez) into an umbrella stand and spilling the contents -- eighteen pounds of sliky wet mackerel -- out of the damp paper bag he had been carrying.  This, combined with dolphin he had been keeping in the bathtub, is just too much.  Mrs. Finkmeister orders him gone -- mackerel, dolphin, and all (including Williams' roommate and oft-times enabler, Major Cornelius Callaghan) -- by midnight.  

The creature in the bathtub is Penelope, probably the smartest dolphin in captivity and the subject of Williams' research into communication with animals.  Williams hopes to be able to teach Penelope how to nderstand human speech, and perhaps eventually learn to talk in a primitive way.  Six months earlier, Williams had been able to convince the chief of San Antonio's Aerospace Medical Center that he was doing basic research in the communications field.  The chief, Colonel Osgood, arranged for a briefing with the top brass, but sadly Penelope refused to perform at the briefing and went so far as to spit a stream of water on a visiting general.  Williams' project was cancelled and Penelope was moved to his bathtub, at least until midnight.

By why did Penelope act so uncharacteristically strange?  It turned out that the young female dolphin had just that day "become a woman"  -- cramps and all -- and was completely confused by the change which had happened to her. 

Williams, Carrighan, and Penelope moved to a nearby motel -- the men to a room and the dolphin to the motel pool.  (Carrighan, in additon to being an Air Force major, was the also the heir to the Carrighan Casket Company, which made transporting Penelope a lot easier.)

What follows is a broad comedy that would make Thorne Smith proud, complete with romantic misunderstandings, mild sexual innuendoes, a stock cast of comic actors, and heavy alcohol consumption.  It turns out that Penelope can speak fluent English, but in a deep Florida accent (she spent her adolescence in Marineland).  Hijinks continue up though the marriage of Penelope to a Greek dolphin named Demetrius in the grand ballroom of the Lusitania.  To say much more would be to spoil the fun.

Of you are in the mood for something light-hearted and amusing, you can't go wrong with Penelope.

William C. Anderson (1920-2003) was a retired Air Force colonel who served from 1943-1963, and the author of more than twenty novels, historicals, and true-life stories.  The one constant characte in Anderson's novels is Cornelius Callighan, whose wheeler-dealer skills aid enable the lead characters, "often despite regulations or higher authority."  Anderson's best-known book is Bat*21 (1980), based on the true-life story of an American navigator shot down behind enemy lines in Vietnam; it was made into the well-reviewed 1988 film starring Gene Hackman and Danny Glover.  

Penelope was one of a spate of books influenced by the pioneering research of John C. Lilly, who studied dolphin communication from the mid-1950s to the late 1960s, and wrote such influential tests as Man and Dolphin (1961) and The Mind of the Dolphin (1967)..Other novels covering the same subject were Arthur C. Clarke's Dolphin Island (1963), Robert Merle's The Day of the Dolphin (1967), and James Gunn's The Listeners (1972), as well as the title story from Leo Szilard's 1961 collection The Voice of the Dolphins, and Other Stories.

Penelope returned for a sequel, Penelope, the Damp Detective (1974)