You indicated trying to reach everybody. Marketing strategy was Karen on the grip and grin run every day. For years it seemed like I was in every rotary club and lion’s club and then, because we didn’t have much staff. For the first two years it was just me. And… Read More
Those people didn’t have anybody under them. I mean, we had a staff of four or five people and we were already six years old because we just worked long hours. So, things like marketing, I did all the accounting. I’ll do all the bookkeeping. I finally had a secretary,… Read More
There was a lot of arguments about destroying the desert ’cause most people didn’t see anything out there that they were gonna destroy when they cleared it ’cause there was nothing on it, right?… Read More
No, no, of course not. But the university helped a little bit because they had a university researcher that was getting his PhD in big horn ecology. So, the university helped with some fence. Basically we just fenced off a big piece of the hillside. So, all we had to… Read More
You talked about trying to reach various audiences. Read More
What was your marketing?… Read More
And again, initially it was like, hm. And then it was like, well fine. Yeah, okay. So, there was never any pushback until I started to get to the bigger stuff. Read More
To the antelopes?… Read More
To the antelopes. I mean, that was gonna be a pretty groundbreaking decision. I mean, even because by then we had done some midsize North American things like coyotes and kit fox and big horn sheep as part of a research project that was fish and game came to us… Read More
Just to follow up with that, the big horn, were they, since the government approached you, were they helping the funding?… Read More
And so, you can do that job if you choose to just as well as plants as animals, but we’re trying to do the whole ecosystem, so we need both. And we’ve talked about various animals for comparative. Read More
What was the first exotic non North American animal that you brought in and how did you sell that first one?… Read More
Well, the first one, the first non exotics were in the very first building we built, which was the little rodents. So, we had kangaroo rats and so I brought in jerboa and at that time they were pet shop animals, jerboas (laughs). So, it wasn’t even hard to get… Read More
So, it was easier for them to wrap their heads around different plants from different areas and comparisons as opposed to animals, or they got it equally?… Read More
Their concern with the animals is they thought that if we did an animal collection, if we became a zoo that, that they didn’t want to become a zoo because they all had the same vision of growing up with zoos that people had at that point in time, which… Read More
Would you say that it’s value so to speak, rivals or is comparable to the animal collection in the type of specimens you had to acquire?… Read More
Absolutely. The botanical collection, because the board again, felt most comfortable doing gardens first, we made a pretty serious effort in really doing a good job with specimen plants, well labeled, well-documented, and the second professional staff person I ever hired at Living Desert was a botanist horticulturalist position. I… Read More
And part of that vision also was this comparative between the plants of the desert and the plants of deserts around the world?… Read More
Correct, we started with that from day one and that was pretty accepted from day one by the board. They quickly understood that it did help people understand more about desert plants if they could see that plants might physically look alike from other deserts of the world, we didn’t… Read More
Well, we did a certain, yeah, right away. I mean, we did a lot of classes and we did a lot of local field trips. We did out to death valley and down to Baja whale-watching and we started doing trips right away because I really felt that that was… Read More