I found an old time city zoo that had grown up just like Topsy, and if you look at the old records of the Lincoln Park Zoo, you will see that somebody gave a bear to the zoo, or to the park. Actually, the first animals in the zoo, according the old history book which I left here, and I’m sure you’ve read, and you can get all the information straight out of that, but, a pair of swans or two pairs came in from Central Park Zoo, which would’ve been New York, and they were put on the pond in front and back of it, and that was the beginning, then somebody gave a bear and somebody gave some deer, and then a circus came through town and they bought an old tiger, and each time they had to build something to put it in, that’s the way the zoo started. And it never had a master plan, all the time that I was here, until Les came along, well, I did a master plan when I first came here, and I took an architect from the Chicago Park District downtown, we visited a number of places around the country, other zoos, and we talked, and then we worked for about a year or more on a master plan for the Lincoln Park Zoo. Well, it was so grandiose, I thought they really were serious when they talked about they wanted to make this one of the world’s finest zoos, but it turned out that they did not really mean it, and the master plan was never implemented at all, never got any place, and it probably is a good idea it didn’t because the concepts of zoos have changed in the meantime, and it’s better that Les has the opportunity to expand it because the newer concepts of zoo meaning and why a zoo is a zoo, and why we have the rights to take these animals out of nature and bring them here for public exhibition is quite a different concept than it was in the early days, animals were just something that you could do anything you wanted with, and you got them and you had them and you exhibited them, and if they did all right, that was fine, if they didn’t all right, well, that was too bad. But now here we are with a brand new hospital here with all kinds of fine technical equipment and people with expertise who have not only veterinarian school background, but the internship at other zoo and working with wild animals, there was very few vets in the early days knew anything about wild animals and they didn’t care much either. I was gonna say, it brings up a point, when you started at Lincoln Park Zoo, you didn’t have a very big professional staff surrounding you. Very little, very little. We had, under the director was a superintendent and he was really a foreman of the zoo and he had charge of the keepers.
