David Abraham Raboy, who ran a zoo in Provincetown in the 1970s and lived most recently in Newport, R.I., died at Charlton Memorial Hospital in Fall River on April 6, 2024. The cause was a heart attack. He was 82.
He was born on May 9, 1941 in New York City to Lulu Morris, a former dancer with the Martha Graham Company, and Emmanuel “Mac” Raboy, creator of the cartoon characters Captain Marvel and Flash Gordon.
David grew up three blocks from the Bronx Zoo, which he visited every weekend. He was often asked to leave for getting too close to the animals. The family moved to the hamlet of Goldens Bridge in Westchester County.
“David was an activist from the get-go,” said his friend Ann Phelps, “as were his parents, who were Jewish, atheist, and socially progressive.” They took David to Pete Seeger concerts, which he remembered vividly.
According to his wife, Ellen Leys, when David was 10, he was given a horse, on which he explored the woods, bringing home lizards, snakes, frogs, and other wildlife that he kept in his room. “He was a loner who loved animals,” she said.
David graduated from John Jay High School in Cross River, N.Y. in 1959 and earned a B.A. in behavioral science at the University of Toledo and an M.A. in animal behavior from Clark University.
In college, he was active in the civil rights movement, participating in sit-ins and community organizing and going to the 1963 March on Washington.
David accepted a tenure-track faculty position in behavioral science at Rhode Island College in 1965. Because of his anti-Vietnam War activism and his organizing a faculty strike in his final pre-tenure year, he was let go in 1971. During those years, he had worked as a docent at the Roger Williams Park Zoo, and in the summers he and his first wife operated a small hotel on Shank Painter Road in Provincetown. After they relocated to Provincetown, David found his true calling.
In 1972, with Ann Dutra, he opened the Shank Painter Children’s Zoo, which, in addition to an anteater, sloths, and squirrel monkeys, featured David’s pet mountain lion, Kitty. Combining his love of animals with his design and building talents, David introduced children to animals that could be “friendly,” Ellen said, “and he taught them about animal behavior.”
The Central Texas Zoo in Waco recruited David in 1975, and he left for Texas, taking Kitty with him. Despite his success there, it turned out to be an unfortunate move for a Jewish progressive from New York who hired the zoo’s first two African American employees in a town that was not enthusiastic about having a zoo in the first place. He also insisted on better veterinary care for the animals. David was fired.
He returned to Provincetown in 1976 to administer a two-year housing rehabilitation program dedicated to keeping under-resourced elderly in their own homes. During that time, David served on the Provincetown Zoning Board of Appeals and Coastal Zone Management Committee and chaired the town’s bylaw committee.
He acquired a captain’s license and piloted several sightseeing vessels, including the Cee-Jay for Bobby Cabral. He was a close friend of Al Avellar, founder of the Dolphin Fleet Whale Watch, for whom he built a scale-model boat.
In 1978, David became director of the Burnet Park Zoo in Syracuse, N.Y. and oversaw a $13-million renovation. The local press described him as “a committed and at times combative spokesman for the needs of the animals.” One of his innovations was to start an Asian elephant breeding program.
Based on his Syracuse success, he was hired in 1994 to create a new zoo for Buttonwood Park in New Bedford. Six years of labor transformed the zoo into a “biopark,” based on the principle, as David told a local paper, that “nature does not draw a line between habitats and ecosystems.”
In addition to the whale watch boat replica, David built many other model boats, each in exquisite detail, including one of Pete Seeger’s S/V Clearwater. Two of his models are on exhibit at the Mystic Seaport maritime gallery.
David retired in 2004. Having met Ellen Leys that same year, he joined her in Newport, where they married in 2009. They enjoyed traveling from the top of Nova Scotia to the Florida Keys. One memorable trip was to North Dakota, where David’s grandfather, Isaac Raboy, a novelist who wrote Yiddish Cowboy (in Yiddish, translated into English in 1989), lived for a time.
In addition to his wife, Ellen Leys of Newport, R.I., David is survived by two sons, Joshua and Aaron Raboy of Milford, Conn., stepdaughter Misty Phelps of Plymouth, and stepson Max Kaplan of New Bedford.
A celebration of David’s life is being planned. In lieu of flowers, donations may be made in his memory to the Southern Poverty Law Center, splcenter.org/support-us.
Editor’s note: An earlier version of this obituary, published in print on April 18, misspelled the name of Al Avellar, founder of the Dolphin Fleet in Provincetown.
