Marlin Perkins was a man of vision, and one of his early positive, nice things in addition to the fact that he was able to build the Children’s Zoo at Lincoln Park, he started something called the Traveling Zoo. And Marlin was able to get, and I don’t remember if the Park District bought it, if it may have been donated by some trucking company, but he got a big trailer and a tractor to pull it, and created this first wonderful Traveling Zoo. And it was a unit filled with little cages, and Marlin decided to send it out into the community and various staff people, usually the then newer, younger curatorial staff would go out with the Traveling Zoo, and tell the story of animals to the community. So that was something that Marlin pioneered, and you can imagine physically it was an expensive clumsy kind of thing they have lumbering around Chicago streets. Even today a big truck trailer unit is a problem that drive around. So we retired that unit, I can’t remember where it may have ended up, for some reason, I think it may have ended up at Hawthorn Mellody, a zoo up in the north suburbs. But be that as it may, I got a smaller truck unit, a self-contained unit that a person could drive more comfortably and easily, and conceptually it made nothing but sense to have that outreach. I didn’t have the television outreach at the start that Marlin did, and I think that he probably pioneered the use of that sort of vehicle in the country.
