Ernst Lang was the director of the zoo in Basel, absolutely wonderful and a terrific expert on propagating difficult species. Gorillas, orangutans, rhinos. Very, very educated and competent individual. But there are so many. In the United States, there were directors that I thought very highly of. One of them was Clayton Freiheit who when I first knew him was a curator at the Buffalo Zoo, eventually became the director of the Denver Zoo. There were Ed Maruska at the Cincinnati Zoo, a very distinguished director. Robert Bean of the Brookfield Zoo, extraordinarily kind to me, I was a St. Louis kid and I drove to Chicago with a letter from St. Louis’ general curator to Bob Bean and knocked on his door in the office, went, his secretary let me, he read the letter, spent the rest of the day taking me around and arranged for me to go to dinner with his curator of birds.
