Claude wasn’t much of a talker, he barely moved, and never wore a costume to entice his audience – but on Sunday, hundreds gathered in San Francisco to celebrate the life and legacy of the city’s beloved albino alligator.
A New Orleans-style brass band, a gator-shaped eight-foot-long white sourdough bread, drag queen story time and even a street officially bearing his name, Claude the Alligator Way, the memorial was one of its kind.
The reptile sure won millions of hearts when he was alive, but he was also remembered for stealing from a 12-year-old girl.
The 10-foot-long, 300-pound white alligator with pink eyes and poor eyesight once stole – and then gobbled- the girl’s ballet shoe, recalled Bart Shepherd of the California Academy of Sciences, Claude’s home for 17 years before his death in December.
“It’s no small feat to get a shoe out of an alligator,” Shepherd told a crowd of Claude’s fans in Golden Gate Park.
It took a lot of anaesthesia, specialised tools, and multiple vets and staff members to extract the shoe from inside Claude – a task that was completed successfully, despite a fire alarm going off throughout the building at the time, Shepherd said.