Micky, taking a break form dish-washing duties. (Image by Michelle Reback.)

Queens Village was the place to be in 1949 if you needed your household chores done by a monkey. At least that was the case according to an article I found in Life magazine’s August 29, 1949 issue. The piece, “Micky the Dishwashing Monkey,” recalls a simpler time in America, when capuchins were called upon to rinse silverware. It also recalls a time when everyone in the offices of Life magazine was apparently drunk.

In addition to his domestic talents, Micky liked waving to pretty girls from the apartment window and rubbing extinguished cigar butts on himself. He also once punched his owner in the foot so hard that she was unable to wiggle he toes for six months. The owners weren’t quadriplegics who needed assistance but apparently just lazy and bored middle-class people. A brief excerpt from the article, which was subtitled “A talented Long Island capuchin loves to work at the kitchen sink”:

“For the past few years Mrs. John Taral of Queens Village, N.Y. has been letting her pet monkey, Micky, wash the dishes for her without ever thinking there was anything special about having a monkey who washed the dishes. Then the newspapers found out about it and suddenly Micky and his mistress landed on the front pages. For days, Micky washed dishes for the press, and Mrs. Taral suddenly realized what a household gem she had.

‘You could put a million dollars on the table for my monkey and I wouldn’t take it,’ she told the Herald Tribune‘s animal story expert, John O’Reilly.”