In Port Richmond, a tire man’s unlikely menagerie

On East Somerset Street, in a clean and roomy paddock next to a tire shop, in the shade of a giant weeping willow, lives a fat and contented pony - the Pony of Port Richmond. His name is Albert, but everyone calls him Coco.

Coco does not bite or kick. He is patient and gentle with the neighborhood children and the many passersby who stop to gawk, who abide by the sign on the tire shop's gate: "Please, do not feed the animal (Horse). Thank You."

He does not flinch even when the cargo trains rumble past, or when the red rooster whose coop abuts his paddock crows. He enjoys these quiet days on Somerset after hard years of abuse in a carnival.

He is owned by a sweet and gracious tire salesman named Kazem Nabavi. "Kaz," as his many loyal customers call him, lavishes Coco and all his animals - chickens and roosters and pheasants and even peacocks - with care and affection, because they remind him of his treasured childhood in the ancient fortress city of Shushtar in Iran. There, as a boy, Kaz and his friends galloped Arabian horses through the fields and along the streams and rivers, playing out favorite scenes from the movies of John Wayne.

To sit and talk with Kaz in his wood-paneled office is a thing of delight. Your cheeks will hurt from smiling.

A little over five feet tall, he is a warm and welcoming man who speaks in a rich accent and punctuates his sentences with peals of laughter. At 70, he is vigorous and lively. He has run the tire store for 35 years and figures he'll run it for another 35 - until he is 105, he says with a laugh. Then he wants to open an ice cream shop.

"Still I am working. I am not off one day. Even I never had a vacation," he said, laughing. "Work is my pleasure."

He left his homeland in the early 1960s, fleeing the brutality of the shah. He worked on ships in Hong Kong and at a nightclub in Greenwich Village, and then came to Philadelphia to study manufacturing and engineering at the now-closed Spring Garden College.

After jobs in a textile factory in Kensington and at Campbell Soup Co. in Camden, he bought the tire shop and found a stable behind it. He and his wife, Sedighah, raised their son, now a doctor, and their daughter, now a lawyer, in a rowhouse across the street.

"Beautiful," he said of the life he has made in America. "The life is beautiful."

Not long after taking over the shop in 1979, he quickly went about fixing and filling the stables.

There have been many ponies. He named one Brave. Another, Smart. And there was his beloved Ziba, which means "beautiful" in Persian. Kaz keeps a photo of her on a shelf in the shop. When she fell sick about eight years ago, Kaz ignored recommendations to put her to sleep, and instead put her to pasture at a large farm outside the city. Two years later, when Ziba died, peacefully, Kaz drove out to bury his friend himself.

His animals are not for killing. He refuses to sell any of his birds out of fear they could be bought for slaughter. He has built a special coop to care for sick birds - the hospital, he calls it. His peacocks just had babies. Some of his chickens, a special breed from Chile, lay green eggs.

"They love me and I love them," Kaz said of his animals, his face glowing with pride.

Behind the tire store, the coops and stables are out of sight, if not sound, from neighbors. But they say they enjoy Kaz's animals - and the eggs he hands out like candy - for the touch of rural living they bring to Somerset.

Anna Marie Collins and Rose Pellegrini from down the street said they enjoy awakening to the crows of the roosters. And they like seeing Coco.

Four years ago, a friend called Kaz to tell him about a frail pony no one wanted. The carnival folk called the horse Albert, as in Einstein, Kaz believes. It was a joke. The horse, they said, wasn't very smart. The creature only knew to run in a circle. Kaz went to see it.

"I saw a beautiful pony and I bring him here," Kaz said. Now, Coco is plump and healthy. And every night after he closes up the tire shop, cleans out the chicken coops, and hefts out a new bale of hay for Coco, Kaz will pull up a chair and sit among his cherry and peach trees, reading one of his history books. Out loud, so the animals can hear.

Out there, he said, he feels like he is 7, not 70, back home, sitting in the green fields of Shushtar.