Happy World Penguin Day! To celebrate, here’s a spoon from the Portland Zoo with a tiny penguin on it.
Back before Portlandia “put a bird on it” the city of Portland famously “put a penguin on it” in a campaign to help raise awareness about our friends in the south. This spoon was one of those penguin-adorned souveniers, probably made sometime in the mid 1960s but definitely before 1976.
Located in Washington Park in Portland, Oregon, the zoo first opened in 1888 under the name “The Portland Zoo” and changed its name to the “Portland Zoological Gardens” in 1959. In 1976, the city held a naming contest and ended up changing the name to “Washington Park Zoo” and then in 1998, renamed it to “The Oregon Zoo” (for which we featured a spoon in February!)
Not sterling and not haunted, this spoon is just happy to have a penguin on it!
