When Brenda Russell was only 6, her great-grandparents piled her and her brother into their shiny 1974 Lincoln Continental and headed for Scarborough.

As their car sped through the Rouge Valley and onto Meadowvale Rd., Melville and Myrtle Budd were taking Russell and her 7-year-old brother Brian to spend the day in the company of elephants, hippopotamuses and kangaroos.

It was Aug. 1, 1974. The family was travelling to the Metropolitan Toronto Zoo, where more than 10,000 people turned up for a glimpse of the animal kingdom on the site’s preview day — 14 days before the park was set to open. The Budds and their great-grandchildren would be among the first to pass through the zoo’s wooden gates.

Now, on the zoo’s 40th anniversary, which will be marked Friday with a party featuring special animal meet and greets, Russell recalls her visit as a perk of being the great-granddaughter of the city’s fire chief.

Though she was too young to have lasting memories of the visit, she remembers “it was a sunny, beautiful day and I was quite happy.”

During subsequent visits she rode the zoo’s train — since closed after a 1994 accident where the locomotive lost power and rolled backwards down the track into another, injuring about 30 people.

On other occasions, she stood before enclosures, eyes agog as her favourite animals, the fuzzy orangutans, swung from vines.

“Now, I buy the all-day pass for the bus and my favourite is the penguins,” she says. “I love watching them swim.”

She will return Friday with her 5-year-old daughter Brooke.

Executive director Dr. William Rapley, who has worked for the zoo since 1973, will be wandering the park reminiscing about early years.

Rapley missed opening day, but was there for some of the zoo’s quirky and colourful milestones.

In November 1974, he remembers his dinner was interrupted with a phone call alerting him that Amanda the gorilla had escaped her enclosure.

“They gave her branches to feed on and she stacked them against the wall and climbed up, ran out of the pavilion and was found running around in the field,” he says. “I was really worried that if I just darted (at) her I could lose her in the forest.”

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

Fortunately, he says Amanda was trained to drink from a cup so he fed her a cup of cherry-flavoured Valium, which calmed her enough to be transported back to her exhibit.

“I have hundreds of stories like that,” Rapley says. “It’s all part of the zoo’s rich history.”