As a child, I had a great many very patient pets. They ranged from a baby alligator that somebody gave me to box turtles my mother would pick up on the highway when she was in the process of keeping them from being killed and became a collection in my backyard. And in fact, the first article I ever wrote was about breeding box turtles. That is an article for a to be published. I was very interested in butterflies and had the good luck to be a boy scout with a wonderful scout master and go to scout camps where I could hike and find snakes and butterflies, turtles and watch a tremendous variety of birds. Missouri was a good for that sort of thing. Later on, I became interested in photography as a hobby, photography of wild animals and to photograph terns nesting on mud bars in the Mississippi river, unable to afford a boat, I got a wash tub instead, and I would put my movie cameras and tripods in the washtub, stripped down to my skivvies and push out in the river and float out middle of the Mississippi river to the mud bars, where the birds were nesting and build a blind there and follow their life histories and began to develop movies. And I use this material later on when I began working at the St. Louis Zoo for lectures and for kids and clubs and so on.
