And as a result, I benefited by that because over the years, if I needed support at the zoo, even though there were times there were bureaucracy bottlenecks that came up, usually the various support forces would respond whether it’s an electrician, the plumber, the painter, somebody would be there because we needed them, and that paid off for me. so that was all a learning experience. Well, when I first came to the zoo, I had kinda crazy thoughts, after all the zoo was Park District, and Lincoln Park was Park District. And I thought to myself, “You know, this little 29 acre nugget here, “guys, we can expand north, we can go south, “we can go a little bit east or west.” I had thoughts that may be with time and help and money, we could make the zoo a bigger, better place than it was. And that to me was kind of an initial challenge, and then I quickly realized that, that was totally foolish, there’s no practical way that a Lincoln Park Zoo could expand in Lincoln Park because Chicago has been blessed with its park system, and every spring, summer, and fall, the city of Chicago would move down to the lakefront. And I assume that it was equally too on the south side, I was just involved at the north side. But I realized that every sort of square inch of space in Lincoln Park was needed by other facilities, people’s operation, functions. And so I came to a tough conclusion that I better learn to live with my 29 acres and not have dreams of 1,000 acre big zoo living in a park.
