Fundraising is probably more important to zoo directors and zoo professionals today than are more critical maybe. It was still important in my day. When I started as zoo director in 1963, there’s nothing in the job description about fundraising. And of course, big zoos have a whole staff, a whole department to do fundraising, and rightly so. But fundraising started out for me, what we tried to do, we needed to generate funds above and beyond the city budget in order to make the zoo progress. So the first project, when we formed the Friends of the Zoo in 1964 was to, first project, was to raise the money for a pair of tigers. Our zoo had never had tigers. We had facilities for tigers, for big cats, which would work for tigers, we’d never had ’em.
