I remember, when I first came to Topeka in 1963, people would come out to Gage Park into the zoo to see the animals, to be in a semi-natural setting. By that, I mean, we have a lot of shade trees and it’s very pleasant in landscape grounds. Over time, we’ve developed landscape grounds. And they enjoyed that. And even on a hot summer afternoon, it was a pleasant thing to be. Then shopping malls came into vogue and people went to shopping malls to cool off and shopping malls had food courts. And I’ve really felt shopping malls were a big competitor, at least in this community for our zoo. And then of course, we got all these wonderful things on TV and people say, I can see all this natural stuff on TV, it’s not the same.
