Interview 5420 – Caption Index: 112
Lincoln Park and the National Zoo being the other two. Now Marlin loves snakes. He hired you. Moody loves snakes. You’re workin’ for him. Read More
Lincoln Park and the National Zoo being the other two. Now Marlin loves snakes. He hired you. Moody loves snakes. You’re workin’ for him. Read More
Did Marlon show up at the reptile house on a regular basis and was he able to impart any life lessons to you?… Read More
Well Marlin was a frequent visitor to the reptile house. By now Marlin, not only was he director of the zoo, but he was very heavily involved in Wild Kingdom. So he traveled a lot. But when he was in town, he spent a lotta nighttime hours in his office. Read More
Well when I started the zoo in 1963, Marlin Perkins had just been at the zoo about six months and he followed George Vierheller who had been at the zoo for about 40 years. The St. Louis Zoo was in Forest Park. The Forest Park was established about 1875. And… Read More
St. Louis was founded by fur trappers, early fur trappers and hunters. And so there were a lotta baby animals who were brought in from the trappers and kept. Baby bears. There were bears. There were wolves, there were coyotes, foxes, skunks in many of the city parks including Forest… Read More
For the fair, there were 1,000 birds that belonged to the National Zoo that were in that cage. After the fair closed, they did ship those birds to National Zoo and St. Louis had to catch a whole new collection of birds. But at that time, the flight cage was… Read More
And then can you gimme just a little capsule history of the zoo?… Read More
Because Marlin was director, but you had met the director before Marlin Perkins. Read More
So what was the zoo like when you started?… Read More
And you were working for Moody Lentz who was the curator of reptiles?… Read More
Moody Lentz was the curator of reptiles and general curator. And he reported to Marlin Perkins who was the director. And then our assistant director was Henry Sanders who also was curator of birds. So then as a result of all our exercises, Mike, Jerry Lentz and Bob Fru had… Read More
When you first started out at the zoo, can you tell me what was the zoo like when you first started out?… Read More
From the success of that program, our Zoo Friends Association outfitted a classroom. We had folding chairs with sidearm desks. We had 100 chairs, so we limited the teachers workshop to 100 students. And the first year, we had a 150 signups. So we had 100 students and 50 on… Read More
So you were then still the education coordinator?… Read More
Coordinator. Read More
And then one day, the science supervisor said, “You know, these students are getting training that our science teachers in grade schools haven’t had that training. I think we should do a teachers workshop.” And he was a graduate of Harris Teachers College as Marilyn and I had both associate… Read More
Few of ’em had vertebrate biology. If they did, they dissected a cat. They knew nothin’ about the ungulates and the carnivores. And so our animal courses were very popular. Our teachers workshop the very first year, we had 100. We only had 100. We got by then a classroom. Read More
But if you don’t mind working with the students, we’d like you to keep doin’ that. And someday I’d like you to meet with someone from the St. Louis Board of Education and help develop a more formal program.” So that was my step. To me, a big step in… Read More
That these students needed something more than the average student. So we developed a program for the gifted students. We sat down and we wanted 10-week classes, four hours every Saturday. The only place we had was a basement of the antelope house. It was a dark dingy place. So… Read More
At that time, couple of ’em were promoted to assistant curator. Jerry Lentz was assistant curator and Bob Fru was assistant curator and Mike Fleig was a bird keeper. I was a reptile keeper. Jerry and I divided the reptiles. Jerry took snakes. I took amphibians. Bob Fru took mammals. Read More