And he says, “We’re looking to hire,” I’m repeating his words, “We’re looking to hire a young man “and train him to run the aquarium. “And the salary will be $3,600 a year.” Well, that sounded like big money ’cause I was making 3,500 at NIH. So my wife and… Read More
Was your impression that he was looking for an heir apparent?… Read More
What pearls of wisdom did he throw at you?… Read More
Well, he taught me how to tie my shoes. I was tying my shoe, maybe his shoe, I don’t know. He had a hard time getting down because he’d had a staph infection in his hip early on. And he walked with a very decided limp. And we were somewhere,… Read More
I could never figure out why my shoelaces always became untied. Well, it was ’cause I wasn’t tying a square knot. After I returned to the aquarium, I came back in 1953 as assistant curator. After I got out of the army, I went to work at National Institutes of… Read More
Well, I didn’t see too much of him, being way down at the bottom of the totem pole. He was a little difficult to get along with. If you kept your nose clean and you did your job, you hardly ever saw him or heard from him at all. I… Read More
Chute came, of course, with aquarium credentials. I don’t believe Mr. Brunskill had any, I don’t know he was hired long before I got there. So I don’t know what his background was. But that was sort of the attitude there that if you’re told to do something, do it. Read More
What professional things from the aquarium field did you learn, or personal things did you learn from Mr. Chute?… Read More
So you were hired by Mr. Chute as a tank man?… Read More
Yes. Read More
What was your relationship with him?… Read More
The shark tank, which was 30 feet long and held maybe 30,000 gallons, I believe, my memory is getting a little dimmer and all that. The majority of the tanks were 1200 gallons. Smaller ones were four to 500 gallons, but they fit in very nicely that the aquarium was… Read More
And so we worked on that for many years to upgrade it. Read More
When you first started, how many people were working there?… Read More
40 people, 40 people. And this was 1950 when I started. Guards, janitors, souvenir sales, ticket sellers, office help, was the director, the assistant director, a secretary, and a bookkeeper, that was there. Engineering department, six tank men, as they call them on those days. And that added up to… Read More
So it’s look at the time was revolutionary, groundbreaking for an aquarium?… Read More
Well, Walter Chute with George Morse and one of the architects from Graham, Anderson by the name of Shavani, took a trip to Europe, and they went to aquariums in Germany, and Italy and other places and collected the best ideas they could from every aquarium. They went to Naples,… Read More
It was not stocked, but they let the public walkthrough and just look and see what the place looked like. And then in 1930, open it up in June, fully stocked with fish. Read More
And then the director, when it was fully stocked?… Read More
Was Walter Chute, who had come to help design the aquarium. And I have to look back and for those days it was one of the most workable aquariums that I ever saw. It was easy for the tank man, as they call them in those days, aquarist now, to… Read More