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Port Richmond Tire Salesman Cares For Own Backyard Zoo


If you asked 100 people to picture a pony and its home, it’s unlikely that E. Somerset St. in Port Richmond would serve as the setting. Yet there is one, officially Albert, but known to the neighborhood as Coco. Coco is patient and gentle, he isn’t disturbed by thundering trains or curious pedestrians.

Kazem Nabavi, 70, is known”Kaz” to many of his customers. Nabavi cares for Coco, as well as chickens, roosters, pheasants and peacocks in the stables behind the tire store he has owned for 35 years. He says that they remind him of his childhood in Shushtar, Iran, where he would ride Arabian horses with his friends and pretend he was in a John Wayne movie.

He left Iran in the early 1960s, fleeing the brutal reign of the Shah. He worked in Hong Kong and Greenwich Village before moving to Philadelphia to study manufacturing and engineering at the defunct Spring Garden College. He worked at a factory in Kensington and Campbell’s Soup before buying the tire shop in 1979 and discovering the stable tucked away behind it. He quickly began repairing and filling the stables.

Coco isn’t Nabavi’s first pony. There were Brave, Smart, and Ziba as well. When Ziba fell ill eight years ago, Nabavi ignored advice to put her down and sent her to a large farm outside the city to peacefully live out the rest of her days. She enjoyed two more years of life there.

Nabavi refuses to sell any of his animals for fear that they will be slaughtered for food. He also has built a special coop for sick chickens — he calls it the hospital — where they can receive the care they need to recover.

Nabavi learned about Coco from a friend four years ago. He said there was a frail old circus pony that no one else wanted. The name “Albert” was a sort of cruel joke, hinting at Einstein while poking fun at the horse’s supposedly limited mental capabilities. Nabavi went to see him and brought him straight back to the stables on Somerset.

Each night, after he closes up at the tire shop, Nabavi tends to the animals’ needs at the stables before pulling out a chair and reading aloud from one of his history books to the animals. He says that when he is in the field with his animals he feels like more a 7-year-old boy in Shushtar than the 70-year-old man he is.

Full article at philly.com
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