DATE: Sunday, March 9, 1997                 TAG: 9702270627

SECTION: COMMENTARY              PAGE: J3   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Book Review

SOURCE: BILL RUEHLMANN

                                            LENGTH:   69 lines

HEARWARMING[SIC] TALE OF LIVING LIKE ANIMALS

If warm, wry Erma Bombeck had been one part animal trainer, she might have come across like Jeanne Anne Vanderhoef.

Gibbons in the Family Tree (Brunswick, 186 pp., $22.50) is Charlottesville writer Vanderhoef's comic memoir about acquiring, embracing and enduring two diminutive but dynamic wild things.

``These are not monkeys,'' she explains patiently of the titular simians. ``They are apes.''

But Vanderhoef, wife of an army intelligence officer, administered quite a menagerie to begin with.

One of the dogs, Pruno, was a Great Dane, brindled, reasonably confused in some quarters with a full-grown tiger. The other, Yorick, was a black mutt who looked small only when standing next to Pruno. The cat, Tucky, was large, white and, in the manner of all felines, beset by social inferiors.

Then there were the three kids - Craig, Lee and Christy.

The idea, back in 1956, was for Col. and Mrs. Vanderhoef to get this crew across country from Vienna, Va., to San Francisco in a station wagon, thence by ship to Bangkok, Thailand, where he had been assigned as American adviser to the Thai Intelligence School.

Her father being a career cavalry officer, Vanderhoef was fairly accustomed to such long-distance troop movements.

But the papers weren't exactly in order, of course. Pruno had diarrhea, an oppressive ailment in a crowded motorcar. The dogs got loose in Wazata, Minn.

Bears attacked the family bags at Yellowstone Park, which was OK, because those bags would sail for the Far East on the wrong ship anyway.

And tigerlike Pruno was called upon to save their lives with his intimidating presence from a howling mob in stopover Hong Kong.

All of which explains why the gibbons, Penny and Pogo, purchased in a Dickensian pet shop near a Buddhist temple, didn't seem like such a big deal at the time.

They joined Pruno, Yorick and Tucky, along with a pair of mongeese, two guinea pigs, an assortment of snakes and a barfing crane named (what else?) Ichabod.

``Wildlife additions to the household,'' writes Vanderhoef blithely, ``if you happened to be a family of animal lovers, seemed a natural sort of thing in Bangkok.''

Back in Vienna, at the end of the colonel's tour, they drew crowds and the national attention of Parade magazine, in the company of an additional horse, a pony, two goats and a Sicilian burro.

But the pert, pansy-faced gibbons remained the uncontested headliners.

Like the time nice Mr. Waters, the mail carrier, drove up to the house:

``The car windows were open and the apes went in. In a heartbeat they were back out the windows and up into the trees, each clutching an armload of letters.

``Mr. Waters leapt from the car in pursuit of the mail entrusted to him, but no one noticed that he still had not closed the windows. While everyone, the (visiting) ladies included, ran in undisciplined frenzy to gather the envelopes drifting from the trees, Penny and Pogo quietly swung down, gathered more letters from the seat of Mr. Waters' car, and the `mail drop' continued almost without interruption.''

General delivery!

Gibbons is an irresistible account of fauna and family. Vanderhoef's husband has retired, her children have married, and she is now 77. Her mother, Janet Lambert, was a best-selling author of books for teen-age girls, so she has turned to yet another hereditary talent.

To order a copy of Gibbons, send $22.50 plus $5 shipping and $1.10 Virginia sales tax to Brunswick Publishing, P.O. Box 555, Lawrenceville, Va. 23868, or call 1-800-336-7154. MEMO: Bill Ruehlmann is a mass communication professor at Virginia

Wesleyan College.

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