# The Bellman Who Taught Ducks to Take the Elevator
The funny thing about the lobby ducks at The Peabody Memphis wasn’t that they were in the fountain. It was that, for a while, they were famous hotel guests with absolutely no sense of ceremony.
Edward Pembroke noticed. He was a bellman at The Peabody Memphis, and before that he’d been a circus animal trainer, which is about as useful a background as a person could have when faced with mallards who had become local celebrities. His aim was wonderfully specific: turn a lobby joke into a daily ritual.
The joke had begun a few years earlier, when Peabody general manager Frank Schutt and his friend Chip Barwick returned from a hunting trip with live duck decoys and placed them in the hotel’s ornate lobby fountain as a prank. It was the sort of prank that should have lasted long enough for a few laughs, a few raised eyebrows, and maybe one confused duck shaking water off its tail.
Instead, guests loved it.
So the ducks stayed.
That left the hotel with a charming problem. Ducks are good at many things: floating, quacking, dabbling around in water with great seriousness. But they are not born knowing how to behave like a polished attraction in a grand hotel lobby. They do not naturally understand red carpets. They do not hear Sousa in their heads and think, “Ah yes, showtime.”
Pembroke did.
Drawing on what he knew from training circus animals, he shaped the ducks’ day into a small performance. The mallards would come down from their rooftop home. They would ride the elevator. They would cross the lobby on a red carpet. Then, in front of waiting guests, they would step neatly into the fountain as if this had been their plan all along.
It’s hard not to smile at the picture: a bellman with steady patience, a few mallards with the seriousness of tiny officials, and a hotel lobby suddenly holding its breath for webbed feet.
No one needed fireworks. The magic was in the order of it. What began as a prank became a march, and what had been a funny sight in a fountain became The Peabody Duck March. The ritual became official, set to John Philip Sousa’s “King Cotton March,” giving the ducks a soundtrack grand enough for generals and goofy enough, somehow, for waddling.
And that may be the best part: the ceremony is both small and grand. It has music. It has a red carpet. It has an audience. And at the center are five North American mallards, going about their business with the solemn dignity of creatures who have never once worried about being overdressed.
Every day, at 11 in the morning, the ducks parade to the lobby fountain. At 5 in the afternoon, they march back to their rooftop home. The schedule is tidy, the carpet is ready, and the fountain waits like the stage it accidentally became.
Pembroke served as the first Peabody Duckmaster for about 50 years, retiring in 1991. Under his patient care, The Peabody’s ducks became more than a hotel curiosity; they became one of Memphis’s gentlest traditions, the kind people make a point to see because it asks so little and gives such easy delight.
All because one bellman looked at a few unruly ducks and saw a parade.