I recently got a paper from James B. Murphy, the renowned prominent herpetologists at the National Zoological Park in Washington. And he gave a list of all these dealers that used to deal in reptiles. And on that list was Quivira Specialties Company, Topeka, Kansas, he was at 21st in… Read More
Yes, we had monkeys get off our island. The valve, it’s an old monkey island built by WPA and the valve broke overnight and the water moats run in the island, and these were spider monkeys and they all got off, and out through the park. Come in the next… Read More
But that’s the way the public is. It’s wonderful. And Paul Linger, he was on our staff at the time. He said, “I tell you what, I know how to get those monkeys. Let’s just slip ’em a Mickey Finn. So we took some oranges and injected them with kind… Read More
Then their reflex grip kind of comes in. And so they all conked out and hung on. (chuckles) We stood down there with this net feeling like fools. (Gary chuckles) but one by one, they started coming back to the zoo. So we baited the island. And when they would… Read More
Went out, pulled the door shut, but didn’t latch it or lock it. Pulled the door shut, was, I dunno, working with the hose. We don’t know, got distracted, but the door was in the shut position and looked okay, opened the transfer door, let the tiger out into the… Read More
I called San Diego and said, a few days after Ka Bluey goes back, we’ve got all of these voluntary education zoo, 47 zoos across our country are gonna be in Kansas City. We wanna bring ’em to Topeka for a post-conference tour. And we’d love to show ’em Ka… Read More
And they all knew we had Ka Bluey there and I could hear ’em whispering, “Oh, they’re gonna get to keep Ka Bluey. We’ll get to see the koala.” And I have a great surprise, so they came to the zoo and we wanted to show ’em the rainforest and… Read More
I thought they were gonna throw me into the waterbird lagoon. (chuckles) But, no, they were very good about it. They enjoyed it. Read More
Well, from having famous animals, were you ever involved with the zoo in any animal escapes?… Read More
She’d go around town and the little kids say, “There’s Ka Bluey’s mommy.” (Gary chuckling) That’s the way this town is though. I mean, it was just fabulous. And a big success. Every day was like a Sunday. Read More
You’ve heard that expression, a month of Sundays?… Read More
I never knew what that meant until every day was like Sunday. I mean, the restrooms are out of toilet paper. The ice machines run out of ice. The parking lot is filled and has to be cleaned, I mean, and we got no extra money for any of that. Read More
And I put it away and I kept thinking about it. And I think, heck, we’re the world famous Topeka Zoo, we could bring a koala in from San Diego. So I contacted ’em and said, “What’s involved?” And they sent me this, I mean, it was jillions of pages… Read More
We had to do climate control, temperature control, crowd control. We had to arrange to have eucalyptus flown in to Kansas City Airport and have a refrigerated beer truck, Coors Beer truck from Topeka drive over to Kansas City and pick it up, get volunteer drivers to do that. We’ll… Read More
And anybody and everybody who did something was on the K Team. So burger king gave six free meals to the keeper, and Land Rover, Ford will provide a car for the keeper. I mean, just all this stuff, it was just tremendous. McDonald’s had place mats with the koala… Read More
It was terrific. And Elaine Tu was the koala keeper. And she came in ahead of time, examined everything, and approved it. She went back and then she brought Ka Bluey. That was the koala assigned to us. And I was so nervous the 30 days he was here, ’cause… Read More
This is the biggest event we’ve ever had at the zoo. And the gorilla won’t go out. We had another gorilla on loan from Omaha. His name was Oscar. I said, “Okay, Let Oscar out.” (chuckles) So they open Oscar door. (Gary mimics swooshing) Oscar went out, what a great… Read More
The biggest crowd I’ve ever had was 14,000 and some. For a little old zoo, the city limit, the population of Topeka is 120,000 or something. That day we had 21,995 people go through the zoo. Somebody said, “Why don’t you round it off to 22,000?” Well, cut in all… Read More
How did you, and when did you think about bringing koalas to the zoo?… Read More
Everything was going so well, I mean, the first building and then, not only did we have the elephants, giraffes, hippos, the giraffes were having babies, and even the second generation, that was great. The rainforest was a huge success. Everybody loved that. The Discovering Apes and the orangutans and… Read More