Okay. Speaking of famous people here. Anyhow, the reason I went back to St. Louis was because I had had a nostalgic feeling for the St. Louis Zoo, the zoo that where I had my start, and a zoo that was a very beautiful zoo, wonderful topography there, the grounds of rolling hills and natural trees, the old oak trees there, lots of white oaks there, and other kinds of oaks, and the design for that zoo was a very good one, it was a carefully planned and worked out thing, there had been a master plan for it, early, early in the teens, and John Wallace was the architect, and I knew a lot of, he was a very, he did was full time, employed full time as a zoo architect to build that zoo, and he didn’t have any other, other outside business, except maybe with friends houses and things of this sort, well, that was one reason I left, another reason I left was because, I had regularly asked for increases in salaries, not only for myself, but for the zoo personnel, all of them, they had the animal keepers classified as laborers in the civil service classification, they were under a labor ceiling, they couldn’t make more money than X number of dollars, it would be for that group, the gardeners in the greenhouse were skilled technicians, so they got more money than the animal keepers did, and I kept pushing and fighting for this and finally got them reclassified, and they did then make more money, the guy that made the most money in that general classification was our truck driver Art, and he of course belonged to the right union, and so did some, one of the board members was the president of the union, I think, and so they got quite a lot more money than any of that level people working in the zoo, and I had, I was getting $10,500 a year in 1962, and most of the other zoo directors were way above that, around the country, way above it, I mean up to maybe 20,000 or something like that in those days, maybe some even more. and I was offered $25,000 to go down to the St. Louis Zoo, and so that, and the fact that I went to the park district and to Mr. Galey the president and to George Doughney the general superintendent and asked them to go to the board through, and here is an offer a legitimate offer that I have to go to St. Louis, now, if you’re interested in keeping me here, you must come up with that or better, and they didn’t, and so I went to St. Louis. Well, it was I think a very wonderful time though. Yes, it was, and I have fond memories of Chicago and the Lincoln Park Zoo, and I don’t hold any grudges against them for that, actually I earned the Chicago park district many times my salary, by having Zoo Parade, because the Chicago Park District got paid by NBC for the rights to televise on Chicago Park District property right here in the Lincoln Park Zoo, they made about $150,000 out of the old zoo parade show, a lot more than I made out of it. And actually that was a show that received a lot of awards in the early days of television, and education.
