Basically, before then, they had just taken donations when they did the, and mostly birds and small things. And they, Washington Park, boy, Washington Park was annexed to the City of Milwaukee. Boy, it’s complicated, but it was just an old farm, so, they were just taking care of the animals in the farm. And they finally accepted a bear cub and then the bear hibernated and then when it ate its way out of the barn the next spring, they decided that they needed to build for substantial caging, so they built the bear line. And at that point, the citizens were involved. 1907, they hired Ed Bean as the director of the Milwaukee, of the, what was called the Washington Park Zoo at the time. And so the first board of directors for the Washington Park Zoological Society included the director, several aldermen and basically interested naturalists. There were two, there were a lot of smaller, smaller groups before the 19th board zoo club donated sea lions and, you know, another group donated pelicans.
