I was the oldest of six children and probably had the best my parents could offer, seeing as I was the first one and they could spend more time with me when I was the only one, or, almost the only one, there weren’t many of us. But most nuumber were six, there was a lot going on. During the winter, one of two favorite places my father would take us, he wouldn’t take all six of us, he’d take the three oldest or the four oldest, to the zoo nearby us, outside Boston, the Stoneham Zoo, now the Walter Stoneham Zoo because it was free. It was run by the MDC, the Metropolitan District Commission, which was a state-run zoo. We loved to go to the zoo. Of course, I loved it more than anybody. I remember seeing moose there and saw warthogs there and lions, everything else you want in a very small zoo, that was my introduction to zoo’s.
