One of the things that happened happily in the Old Monkey House, where I mentioned Bushman years ago, living at the corner, that would be the Southeast cage of the Old Monkey House. In that part of the building we had some larger cages where we housed our few big apes, the orang, chimp, and gorilla. And happily, we started getting a few babies and it reached the stage where it was just totally in that time, thinking wrong and immoral to house these wonderful animals in these little old cells, the barred, cement cages with a single shelf in them. And so I went to the Zoo Society Board and then down to the Park District commissioners and said that we were reaching an instinct difficult time, we either had to provide a decent home for these great apes or I had to take the ones that we had and ship them out to places that had better, good facilities. And the Zoo Society came along and again, talked with the district commission and said, “We’ll raise money.” And they proceeded to raise the funds that allowed us to build what we called our first Great Ape House. One of the incidental players in that fundraising was Ray Kroc, the McDonald’s man. Ray and his wife, Joan are Chicagoans, and by sheer coincidence, Ray happened to be of my same heritage, we both were Bohemians or Czechs and we got along great. And Ray decided that by golly, a restaurant needed a good kitchen, and a zoo needed a commissary building.
