When I came in, we had a lot of major problems with the keeper staff. To cite examples, they would go out on breaks and they would go to the tavern and they would get liquored up, come back to work, and I found one gentlemen teetering on the edge of a hippo pool as an example, and then male hippo was known to be a pretty nasty animal, or could be. Payday would come and the keepers would gamble their money away, and I had their wives calling me the following day and saying they had nothing to eat for the children. I would have to send food from our commissary over to their homes. So those were the kinds of situations, so I had to be a pretty tough guy at the beginning. Unfortunately, even later on, that kind of stuck with me. They always kind of thought I was a hard head, but I had mellowed as the years gone on, because things started go my way, but initially I had to be a pretty strict individual to get things moving in the right direction. And the zoo was one of the lowest paid zoos in the eastern United States as well at that time.
