"D.H. Penner"
In the month before his death, Al Oeming banded great grey owls, fawned over his horses and Rhode Island Red chickens, cleared snowy trails with his beloved 1968 John Deere tractor, pumped iron in the basement and climbed a board a stair stepper three nights a week.
Even with a pacemaker and another cardiac procedure looming, one of Alberta’s greatest adventurers and entrepreneurs refused to slow down.
“He was not the type of person to take it easy,” says his son, Thelon, a playwright in Toronto. “He always lived life on his own terms, and I think he went out that way.”
A zoologist, naturalist and filmmaker, Al Oeming died after undergoing an angioplasty in Edmonton on March 17. A barrel-chested pro wrestler who bench-pressed 505 pounds in his 20’s, Oeming could still lift 140 pounds at the time of his death three weeks shy of his 89th birthday.
“He was just driven,” his son, Todd, 55, says during a tour of the family’s sprawling property in Strathcona County. “He never took a back seat to anybody.”
Known best as the proprietor of the Alberta Game Farm, Oeming traveled from the Arctic to Africa on expeditions to capture animals displayed at his 560-hectare zoo 25 kilometers east of Edmonton. Opened Aug. 1, 1959, the park boasted the world’s largest private wildlife collection at the time and welcomed hundreds of thousands of visitors before it shut down, then operating as Polar Park, in 1998.
An occasional guest on his friend Marlin Perkins’ popular television program Wild Kingdom, at one time Oeming had 166 species on exhibit at the game farm, including a bottle-fed grizzly bear named Big Dan, a Siberian tiger named Hector that walked on a leash, a cheetah that rode in the back of his station wagon and gorillas that routinely used treetops as a ladder to escape their compound and roam the countryside in Strathcona County.
“I told dad that he should a write a book about his life, but he was always too busy writing the next chapter,” says Todd Oeming, who worked on the farm before embarking on a career selling commercial real estate.
Born April 9, 1925, in Edmonton to parents who immigrated from Germany, Oeming enlisted in the Canadian navy in 1943 and served as a gunner in the South Pacific during the Second World War. Discharged in 1946, he became a professional wrestler in the U.S. with his boyhood pal Stu Hart, with whom he later owned the Northwestern Wrestling Alliance, the predecessor to Stampede Wrestling.
Returning to Edmonton in 1949, Oeming wrestled under the pseudonym Nature Boy and studied ornithology at the University of Alberta. Climbing into the ring against the likes of Gorgeous George, Killer Kowalski, Haystacks Calhoun and Al and Tiny Mills, he staged sold-out shows at the old Edmonton fairgrounds that often ended in donnybrooks with the spectators involved.
After completing his master’s degree at the U of A under renowned zoologist William Rowan, Oeming sold half of his share in the wrestling circuit and used the proceeds to fund the game farm on Highway 14.
In 1964, chairman Mao Zedong invited him to China to study breeding programs for rare and exotic species; later, Oeming bred the first muskoxen born in captivity, a pair of calves the City of Edmonton presented as a gift to the Moscow Zoo.
Over the years, a handful of feature films were made by or about him, and a miniseries about him called Man of the North aired in 1980 on CBC.
“He was … not of this era,” Thelon Oeming, 34, says of his father, who was married twice and divorced once. “He was in love with another world.”
A master promoter, Oeming traveled the country in winter with his cheetah, Tawana, in the back of a station wagon. Pulling into small towns, he would call police to report a maniac with a cheetah on the loose — and then call the local radio station and grant an interview. “He was doing guerrilla marketing at a time guerrilla marketing wasn’t common,” Thelon says. “He was a great salesman.”
Over the years, thousands of schoolchildren in Edmonton got to meet Tawana during classroom visits, and his animals regularly appeared on local TV. Once, Oeming sent Todd to a television studio with Hector riding in the back of a van. Eventually, the 135-kilogram tiger pushed its way to the front and squeezed its head out the driver’s side window.
“I’ll never forget the look on people’s faces as we drove past,” Todd says.
In recent years, Oeming had become an auctioneer and accumulated a collection of hundreds of carriages and thousands of sleigh bells.
Oeming’s wrestling mat still sits in the basement of his house off Range Road 223 a short drive from his former game farm. His books on draft horses and horse-drawn vehicles are scattered in an office that overlooks the feeder where Oeming watched grosbeaks, blue jays and pileated and hoary woodpeckers. At night, he fell asleep, dreaming of the howls from packs of coyotes and timber-wolves and the roaring of lions.
On the night he died, Todd Oeming held his father’s hand and kissed him on the forehead in his room at the Mazankowski Alberta Heart Institute. Sometime this summer, Oeming’s family will gather at the former game park and spread his ashes in a spruce bog.
“The phone has been ringing every five minutes since the night he died,” Todd Oeming says. “Some people are sobbing and others want to tell me stories.
“I listen for them, and for dad, too. It is almost like he has never left this house.”
