‘Cos it was the biggest thing they’d ever done. Well, that went open to a huge success. And that’s what led to the Downing Gorilla Forest. I just got a note from my other patron saint at the zoo, Mary Lynn Oliver, who’s from the Beechcraft family, the Beech family, and they wanted to do a major exhibit. So I wrote ’em a nice long thing ‘cos my next major project, I wanted to get these elephants out of the exhibit they were in. And I went over to visit with them and I sat down and I realized in 30 seconds that it was gorillas or nothing because they had just come back from sitting down next to the mountain gorillas 10, 15 feet away. And they had that mystical experience and they wanted the children, and they said that first, the children and the families to have that experience.
