Judy and I were supposed to be heading home to Chicago the day after my first Indianapolis 500. Instead, we had two urgent tasks to take care of in Indy.

First, we needed to find a place to live that would be available in two weeks. Amazingly, we were able to tick that box almost immediately, finding a two-bedroom townhouse on the near north side of Indianapolis for $160 a month, including utilities.

It was part of a U-shaped 26-unit complex called Pennwood Homes and our new apartment was at the base of the U, furthest from the street. It was an easy drive to work, not far from shopping and in a neighborhood that was changing but still safe.

The next thing we had to do was visit the Indianapolis Zoo.

Judy had been volunteering in the animal nursery and the children's zoo at the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago. Just weeks before coming to Indy, she found out that Lincoln Park was going to hire some women as paid zoo attendants.

The problem was that the jobs, like many in Mayor Richard J. Daley's Chicago, were patronage positions. She was told to contact our alderman to get a recommendation. Unfortunately, the neighborhood we lived in had the only Republican alderman on the entire north side of Chicago.

"Young lady, you don't want my recommendation,'' he explained. "That would probably insure that you didn't get the job."

But she did wind up getting a recommendation from a local businessman, a contact of Judy's Aunt Irene. She was offered the job but, before she could begin the new position, we were on our way to Indy.

Tears were shed.

So, here we were, the day after that first Indy 500, on our way to what was then a small zoo on the west side of Indianapolis. It was Memorial Day, so none of the zoo officials were working. But a keeper told Judy the only way she could work at the zoo was as a volunteer. She was sad but ready to start all over again.

The day after we moved into our new apartment, I drove Judy to the zoo where she was accepted as a volunteer in the kitchen, cutting up meat for the big cats and setting up meals for all the other animals.

It was disappointing, but it got her into the zoo milieu.

Eventually, she was asked to start helping out the keepers when needed. It turned into a 40-hour-a-week job, half in the kitchen and half in the rest of the zoo. But Judy persisted.

She came home one day with a bemused look on her face and told me one of the zoo bigwigs had told her women couldn't be keepers because they weren't strong enough.

My diminutive Judy, who had been throwing around 75-pound bales of hay earlier in the day, asked him for an example.

He said, "What if the barn caught fire and the elephant was inside. How would you get it out?'

Knowing that no man, except maybe Atlas, was strong enough to carry an elephant out of a burning barn, she replied, "I'd make two trips, if necessary." Apparently, that shut him up.

When the zoo hired a new curator a few months later, he called in each person who worked there for an interview. When it was Judy's turn, he said, "I don't like part-timers. Do you want to work here or not?"

She was hired for the magnanimous sum of $1.25 an hour. But the money didn't matter. Judy was finally a zoo keeper - one of the first female keepers in the country.

Her area was one of the few indoor caging areas. It included the vet clinic, the new animal quarantine, the nursery, the snakes and the big cats.

Every winter, animals from around the zoo were brought in to winter caging, which was part of Judy's area. That included birds, tortoises, monkeys and other animals.

It was a small zoo, so the animal collection had to be carefully controlled. If the animals got too big for their cages areas, they had to be traded to other zoos.

But Indy did have a pair of beautiful Tigers that Judy loved. She also became the chimp mama, adopting a young female chimp named DOC (donated to the zoo by the Downtown Optimists Club) and wound up caring for and training a baby elephant, which eventually became part of her area.

There were also times when she brought home animals that were in need of constant care, like babies that needed around-the-clock feeding or injured animals that had to be watched.

I never knew what I was going to find in our bathtub or in a cage in the living room when I got home from work.

One time, we had a three-foot iguana living in our bathtub for a few days. I asked Judy to remove the iguana and clean the tub before I showered. She then cleaned the tub before putting the iguana back in.

"Why should it live with your dirt," she said.

We were sharing one car in those days and, on one memorable morning, she asked me to stick around after dropping her off because she needed a ride to the veterinarian to get three baby leopards their shots.

Several people nearly drove off the road staring into our windows as those cute little leopards played on top of the front seat as I drove.

Most of the time, though, the zoo was just very hard work. There were frigid winter mornings when she had to carry a pail of hot water, a hatchet to break up ice in the troughs and a blowtorch to unfreeze the locks on the cages. Shoveling up behind the animals was a daily major task. And there were times when the animals didn't want to cooperate, when she had to capture monkeys that had escaped from their cages or find snakes that had somehow wriggled out of their aquariums.

It was full of challenges that Judy truly loved, and I got to hear some great stories over the dinner table.

When she got pregnant with Tory at the beginning of 1973, Judy decided not to tell the people at the zoo. Since she wore a baggy, gray jumpsuit and rubber boots at work, most of the people there had no idea she was expecting until she walked into the director's office several months before Tory was born.

"I'm giving you my two weeks notice,'' she told him. He said, "Why are you leaving?"

At that point, she unzipped the jumpsuit and showed off her very pregnant belly.

We talked about her finding a way to continue working at the zoo after the baby was born, but Judy decided being a full-time mom was going to suit her just fine. And, when Lanni came along just 16 months after Tory, that turned out to be a very wise decision.

I know she missed the zoo and the animals, but Judy was and is an amazing mom and, once Tory came along, she never looked back.