Who did they hire?” “Michael Robinson,” who was then acting, I mean was then assistant director at STRI, which was the Smithsonian Tropical Research Center in Panama. And this guy came right out of the woodwork. I mean, he had never been mentioned. Nobody ever mentioned his name and he… Read More
And then Jaren Horsley was general curator at the time. And he got ill, in fact, he got really ill with hepatitis from eating oysters at the Baltimore AZA convention and was out for a little over a year. And appointed me as acting general curator. And during that time,… Read More
Meaning the castle on the mall, which was basically the Smithsonian, the big management area where the secretaries all were. And we wanna talk to Ripley about getting Reed out. And I said, look I’m not here to talk about that. We’re up here to talk about hiring. And that… Read More
I mean a new assistant director at the time. And Eisenberg wasn’t really involved in the running of the animal collection. He was still senior scientist, but he evidently was able to convince the assistant director for animal programs at the time to take me up and put me in… Read More
When they hired the directors at the National Zoo, I worked under, I think seven directors or acting directors in the time I was there, Ted Reed was never appointed. He was appointed, he was never selected by a group of people that would go through a group of applications… Read More
So we decided, hey, wouldn’t it be really neat if we could put up a bunch of of logs with branches on them, fill the pool up and put sloths that the trees ’cause the water, they’re not gonna cross through water. Good idea. We never told Deetline about it,… Read More
The first night, guess what happened?… Read More
Sloths could swim. And they swam over, they got out and two of them got killed because they got on top of the Jaguar exhibits and get pulled, I don’t know if I was gonna lose my job then, but I tell you, Deetline was really, really, really not only… Read More
That was a working keeper, yes. Read More
Okay, and were you able to make changes or do things while you were doing that particular position?… Read More
As a matter of fact, I was in, and in fact, I’ll tell you one really interesting story. I was working with Jack a lot and I was in this Small Mammal Building at the time. And at the time the building was, it was full of animals, but they… Read More
And so all the dirt was muddy and it took us probably a year to get a lot of the exhibits that we thought we needed to get done done. And this one’s Deetline was still there. I’ll tell you this other story ’cause it was an embarrassment, really embarrassing. Read More
I went up there for a year to straighten those issues out. I came back, he put me into the supervisory, administrative officer position there to get me another raise. And I mean, I really shot up in my job in that period. you started out after an animal keepers,… Read More
You were still a working keeper>?… Read More
I’d apply, yeah. I mean, the jobs were offered and I applied and I got it. Read More
So you were thinking even beyond that, or you were just thinking, okay, this is another job, it’ll be more money or?… Read More
Well, I certainly wanted to continue to move up. And when I’m trying to think of this timeline here, I was offered, Don Deetline was general curator at the time. And Billie Hamlet, I don’t know if you know who Billie Hamlet was, Billie Hamlet worked with Ernest Walker on… Read More
And I had a really difficult decision to make because it was a position with reptiles, which I really liked, but I hadn’t been working in reptiles for years. And I really saw the position I was in as a better position to move up in the administrative aspect of… Read More
Did you see this as a moving up in the organization?… Read More
It was definitely moving up, but no, I didn’t have to at that, did I have to take?… Read More