Photo by Milton Morris
Jack Bonturi
Age: 94
Hometown: Native New Yorker; moved to Columbia after WWII
Career: Retired in 1982 from the screen-printing business
Star Status: Oldest and longest-serving volunteer at Riverbanks Zoo, volunteering at least 500 hours a year
When he's not at the zoo: He bakes excellent New York-style cheesecakes for friends and family and watches baseball on TV, especially the Yankees.
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Jack Bonturi’s first job, at age 13, earned him $5 a week for 48 hours of work. Eighty-one years later, Bonturi is still working, as hard as he can. But now it’s 10 to 12 hours a week, and he does it for free.
“They offered me a golf cart, but I turned it down,” Bonturi says of the folks at Riverbanks Zoo and Garden in Columbia, where he has volunteered for 32 years. He’d rather stretch his legs with a good walk.
Three days a week, rain or shine, Bonturi arrives at the zoo at 7:30 a.m. and strolls to a hay-filled equipment shed he calls his “office.” He pulls on rubber work boots and is ready promptly at 8 to start scrubbing out the barns behind the kangaroos, howler monkeys and lemurs.
He came looking for volunteer work at the zoo right after he retired. “Physical labor, that’s what I wanted to do,” the Mid-Carolina Electric Cooperative member says.
“They said, ‘We’ll give you a tryout, and we’ll let you know’—I’m still waiting to hear!” he says with a wink and a sly smile.
Proudly, Bonturi recalls that in his younger days—in his 60s—he handled bigger chores, like cleaning up after the elephants. The big animals—rhinos, giraffes, hippos—are still his favorites.
With a work ethic born in the Depression, Bonturi has rarely missed a day; he doesn’t want someone else to have to do his work. “If I can do it, I’m going to do it. They do depend a little on me.”
Plus, all the young people at the zoo keep him thinking young.
“If I was around all those old fogies, they’d be telling me their ailments,” he says.