Some of them are two weeks or a month. Some of them stay with us six months or a year, or we’ve had students that stayed with us for as much as two years, about half of them are undergraduate. About half of them are graduate students. About half of… Read More
And so we came back and talked to one of my board members who was Henry Doorly’s granddaughter and said, how do you, you know, how do you go about rounding up a bunch of ladies?… Read More
Cause in those days, docents were all women, you know, to, to come in and be volunteers, you know, cause we didn’t have very much staff. And she said, well, it’s real easy to talk to the junior league. They start things. They don’t run things or finish things, but… Read More
Turns out that she was a professor of English at UNO. So that’s kind of when we hatched the plan that I was going to quit that. She was, had all kinds of free time. And so I, you know, after the break I went back up and said, all… Read More
You had to do a test every week. You had to do take-home tests. You had to, you had to absolutely be there on time when you were scheduled to take a class around. And you know, and it is evolved from that. Now to the point that we’ve got… Read More
But, but that won’t, that won’t pay the, that won’t pay all the bills. And then of course, we’ve got a lot of other things that are going. So, you know, we’ve got the other 240 acres that are off display, breeding, holding and conservation. When you became director, you’d… Read More
What was your vision for the education element of the zoo and how did you start to develop it?… Read More
Well, I think fairly, fairly early on, I, you know, right after I became director, I went to zoo conference out in California and, and got introduced to a very odd species of critter called a docent. Up until then, I’d never even heard the word docent, you know, but… Read More
Part of it because we, you know, we’d had a push to, to display north American hoofstock because, you know, we were all, it was all foreign, you know, hoofstock and you know, the realities of life are, is that native north American hoofstock, particularly the cervids, don’t display well… Read More
So we did that kind of as a part of the justification for all the other things that we wanted to do out there. Read More
Has that been a successful endeavor?… Read More
Well, only from the standpoint that yes, it’s been successful, but only because of the fact that we endowed it. We endowed it right up front, because you’re not going to attract enough visitors in a drive-through park to pay for the maintenance. I mean, it’s just not going to… Read More
Well, now you’re gonna, you’ll have to go to the, we’ll have to go to see, we’ll have to go to the history which I brought with me. And in the, in the, in the, in the early 90s or in the 90s, you know. So you have a– There’re… Read More
Half of– It was given to you?… Read More
Yeah. Oh yeah. Half of it is, well, 200 acres is a drive through north American safari park, where elk, bison, you know, white tail deer, mule deer, pronghorn antelope, and, and then a few mammals and small stuff, some wolves and bears. Read More
How’d that concept of that drive through come about?… Read More
I said, it’s easy. If he defaults, you give it to the zoo and we’ll make a breeding farm out of it. And he said, oh, that sounds good. So we made him put that land up as a, as part of the collateral and the guy defaulted. And now… Read More
When did this occur?… Read More
You need numbers to actually say you’re, you’re managing, and you’re making decisions because you can’t make a decision with a pair of animals other than do we breed them or don’t we breed them. And the genetics are the genetics. You can’t, you know, so. So I think our… Read More
One of our board directors lived on a lake west of Omaha. And the guy who owned the lake was a bit of a gambler. I’ll put that gently as I can. And needed to borrow some money. And he put up the lake as collateral, was wanting to put… Read More