We went back to what Walter Anderson taught me a little bit in his ambulatory work at Ames with ropes. We literally had to drop some lariats around the heads of some of the hoofed animals. In the Lion Hose, the only way we could get to a cat was to have a long pole, and we’d put the lariat on the end of the pole and try to maneuver it so that we could drop it over the head and shoulder of the cat, and bring it to the front of the bars where we could then get to it more safely. But I’m sure I had a lot of strange and a bit dangerous moments trying to learn to work around, and with the animals at Lincoln Park Zoo. I certainly had a total phobia about poisonous reptiles, I wasn’t about to try to reach into a cage and get a rattlesnake. Fortunately for me, there were a great group of people in the herb section. And we had one special man named Eddie Armandarez, who was a keeper there, and then became our curator of reptiles. And he had a group of people that did and could safely handle all of the different venomous creatures that we had in the old Reptile House at Lincoln Park.
