There are probably very few people who remember Susie Q the elephant at Beech Bend Park in the 1960s.

But many people around Charleston, South Carolina, still remember Susie Q as the popular mascot of a local TV station.

I learned about Susie Q from a reporter from the Charleston newspaper, Jason Ryan. He wrote about Susie Q last November and about the fact that no one seemed to know Susie Q’s ultimate fate.

The Asian elephant was owned by a man named J. Drayton Hastie who also owned a TV station in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina.

Susie Q was trained to do simple tricks, and was featured on the station regularly. She was quite a hit, appearing in parades and at birthday parties and making headlines on the few occasions when she got loose and wandered through town.

But then a mystery — what happened to the beloved elephant after the early 1960s?

Ryan did some research and found a Daily News article from 1962 detailing how Susie Q was a new feature at Beech Bend Park, which among other attractions at the time, featured a small zoo.

The Daily News article said Susie Q was then about 8 years old and weighed in at 3,500 pounds. She was brought to Bowling Green from South Carolina in a truck, with police escorts at various points, by a Beech Bend employee named Bobby Harrod.

Susie Q, however, was overshadowed in her debut at Charles Garvin’s Beech Bend by the simultaneous arrival of Dutch the giraffe. Dutch, a female measuring in at about 16-feet-tall, was reportedly the tallest giraffe in the country.

Dutch’s journey from a zoo in Oklahoma was quite an undertaking, as the special “giraffe trailer” she was transported in often had to make detours around overpasses.

Beech Bend immediately began promoting Dutch and Susie Q, among other attractions — an ad for a 4th of July celebration at the park noted there would be greased pig, husband calling and largest family contests, along with a chance to see car races, the world’s largest picnic table, and, along with Susie Q and Dutch, a pen of alligators and a bengal tiger.

It’s not clear exactly when, but Susie Q wound up in one of the many Florida roadside zoos in the 1970s — it’s not recorded, but it seems likely that Dutch also left for a new home about that time.

After that, it appears Susie Q wound up in a traveling circus in the midwest and then one in Mexico, where the trail ends, according to Ryan.

Do you remember the Beech Bend zoo? What are your memories of it? Let me know.

— Wes Swietek is the Daily News managing editor and can be reached at wes.swietek@bgdailynews.com.