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
No, I didn’t have to take a test for that. Read More
But did you say Bill you wanna do it?… Read More
Did you have more responsibilities?… Read More
I had more responsibilities. It wasn’t really a supervisory position per se. It was more of a someone that could talk to the keepers and report back to the head keeper or the assistant head keeper position and that they would come to the leader to issue directives. So I… Read More
And was this a job that was offered to you or did you have to take another test to do it?… Read More
It was a bad day. A week later, Jack DePrato says, “Go in and get get the leaves out,” I said, “I’m not going in that tank anymore, Jack.” He says like, “I never tell you to do something I wouldn’t do.” I said, “Well, guess what, I’m not gonna… Read More
And then he just slowly slid back in. And those are things where you really have to stop and think about what’s going on with the safety issues that you have to deal with. They’d never do that today. I mean, you’d never go in with two crocodiles even in… Read More