About $2500 a year, which was not very much money. And what Ted did was he was able to convince the district government that was to their advantage to give up the zoo because it was draining money from them and put it under totally under Smithsonian. And at the… Read More
So Ernest Walker was running the zoo?… Read More
Yes, he was the– De facto. Well, I mean, he was assistant director, so he was basically in charge of hiring of getting the budget and everything and Mann was at that point almost was a really old man. He was putting informed and I think he left it up… Read More
What kind of management style did Walker have?… Read More
Who’s running the zoo, Mann or Walker?… Read More
Walker, yeah. He’s running it. Yeah, and I tell you, one of the things that was going on back then is that the National Zoo even though it was under the federal government and under Smithsonian, the salaries and operating budget came from the District of Columbia. So what Walker… Read More
I mean, I remember when I started out, I think it was with GS3 and I don’t– What does that translate to?… Read More
Now, you’re in a different level now, you’re a keeper, not a kid coming in with reptiles, did you have contact with the then director Mann?… Read More
I didn’t really have that much contact because he never really came into the zoo. I think the last time I saw Dr. Mann was right after he retired and he retired, I think, I wanna say, four months after I started. And they brought him down about, I don’t… Read More
But you never got in trouble for it?… Read More
I never got in trouble and Jean never reported us or anything like that. I mean, he took it and really good humor. When you started, the director was not William Mann, it became Ted Reed. No, it was William Mann. Read More
When you started?… Read More
When I started, yes, and Walker were still assistant director. Read More
It was definitely different. I mean, some of the stuff that we did, if we’d done it 15 years later, we probably would have been fired for it because, I mean, I don’t wanna start as far as practical jokes are concerned, but I’ll tell a couple of stories in… Read More
And at the time I’m standing there and Jack says, “echidna laid an egg.” And I said, “You’re kidding me,” and I opened the door and Jean’s coming around and I take the egg out. And I say, “This is amazing, Jean, look at this.” And Jack says, “Let me… Read More
You feed it as a kind of a pancake, but it was like dough and it was brown. So we took a big chunk of this stuff and rolled it out on the table this long and put it in aardvark cage. And Jean same thing comes walking down and… Read More
And I said, “Here, it’s really dead, it’s not moving at all.” And then at that point, we just decided enough was enough. Read More
Now, let me read you, you said something I wanna kind of jump ahead, just as a tan, you said about you play practical jokes and people seem to enjoy it and so forth. Read More
You’ve been at the National Zoo in the profession a very long time, from a philosophical or an animal keeper point of view, do you think in your later years at the zoo, the keeper force did those kinds of things, enjoyed their job the same way from when you… Read More
Did the evolution of the keepers as you started and when you kind of finished, did you see a difference in that maybe enjoyment of the job, or was it different?… Read More