And this is before, I mean, there was nobody out there at night. And I thought to myself, every IMAX I knew at that point was a money losing operation for somebody. So, I had those kinds of things, but ’cause I moved very slowly, and I tried not to… Read More
What kind of budget did you start with?… Read More
My first budget was 10 grand, and please don’t spend it less than, in 12 months, ’cause you were gonna run out of money in 12 months and that included my salary. And when I think by the time when I first sat down and had my first lunch with… Read More
And I’m going, “No.” And my board’s going, “Well, why not?… Read More
We have all this anchorage.” And so, I had a few incursions like that, that wanted to use the land for something else. Read More
IMAX came and thought they might wanna put an IMAX and did we want an IMAX on our property?… Read More
Did you have any, as you’re developing your master plan, was there any friction with the board or people who wanted to go in a different direction as you started to develop things?… Read More
There was hardly any friction about the plan. There was, because we had a lot of ground physically available to us and the community was just starting to grow around us, we had other organizations coming to us and asking our board can’t you lease us X amount of ground. Read More
I mean, that was my favorite one is I had a group of fairly wealthy people who decided they loved the lawn bowling and there was no place to do lawn bowling in the area and so, and we had all these acres, couldn’t we give them a couple of… Read More
And then I’d go talk to a couple of different board members about, do you think this is a good idea and would you help me fundraise for it?… Read More
And then once I got all the pieces in order, then we’d take it to the board and go, okay, on the master plan, this is the next thing, and Karen says it’s gonna cost us this, and we think we can get the money here and the board would… Read More
To this day you can be an owner/builder in California. You don’t have to have a general contractor. And so, I just learned to be an owner/builder. And so we could build stuff that a lot of people couldn’t have afforded if they’d just done it the traditional way, which… Read More
So, I could draw walls and I could draw landscape features and I could, because there was no structure to that. It had a little house for the coyote so the architect was, the pro bono architect, John, would draw that and we’d get a permit stamp from that. And… Read More
Did you have a master plan that you had to show them or that you wanted to show them?… Read More
I had a master plan, I had two master plans. I had the master plan they saw, and then I had the master plan that underlaid that master plan that they didn’t get to see for about 12 years. In all honesty, they never saw it. The master plan they… Read More
Who was helping you develop the master plan or was this all your vision?… Read More
I guess it was me. I mean, it sounds rather pompous, but it was just me based on visiting zoos, visiting parks, and thinking about how I could teach people about the desert and how I could afford to build certain things, because again, I couldn’t build it unless I… Read More
After you had done the, what I guess I’ll call the basics of what the board wanted with the trails and so forth, did you have any things that you knew you wanted to develop first?… Read More
Well, yeah, absolutely. I mean, I knew I needed to bring animals in because if we were gonna make money, the kids weren’t gonna come to see plants and hike. ‘Cause again, Colorado Desert’s pretty barren even at its best and so I said to the board, when we designed… Read More
I could explain it to the board that it’s why we’re gonna have this, these funny little animals that don’t live in our desert, but they live in another desert. “Well, okay.” Made sense. Read More