There were only a few women keepers in the children’s area. And a lot of the keepers were old timers, men who’d been there, some of them for years, but really pretty good animal handlers. And it was, in the beginning, you know, I learned a lot from them, and that was my attitude. “I need to learn from them as much as they can learn from me.” And so, you know, when I worked the summers at Monsanto prior to that, at the chemical plant, I was working with a lot of older men at that time. And so I knew how to work fairly well with them, and so it was a good opportunity.
