Oh, well it was Floyd Young who was the director who was retiring, and George Donahue came to Buffalo, he was the General Superintendent of the Chicago Park District, and he came to Buffalo and interviewed me and asked me then to come to Chicago for further conference here, about the job here, and Floyd was retiring within nine months of the time I came here. So George Donahue thought it would be a good idea, and I guess his board did too, that I come ahead of time to get with Floyd and be with Floyd to get some of the knowledge of the working of the Lincoln Park Zoo, within the Chicago Park District, and it was a good thing, it was a good thing for me to be here early and to talk with Floyd, before that, Floyd had come to the Lincoln Park Zoo under Alfred Parker, and Parker had brought him in to run the aquarium, freshwater aquarium, and then when the Shedd Aquarium was built, Floyd came down to St. Louis and went through our reptile house there in order to get ideas of how he could convert the freshwater aquarium to a reptile house, and that was the first time I met him, and that was, I can’t remember the year exactly, but it was in the ’30s, I’d say ’35 or somewhere along there, and then he did convert the building, and they operated then as a reptile house, but while it was an aquarium, all that space in the basement was a fish hatchery, and they hatched millions of fry there, which were liberated in Lake Michigan as a service for the fisher’s department of the State of Illinois. So Floyd was more a fish expert. Yes, he knew fishes, and he knew fish hatchery operations, but he started life as a jeweler, and how he got involved in fish I think was accidentally, I think he got started as an aquarist in his home, and that developed into a paying job for him, and then that developed into director of the zoo itself.
