He married the senator’s daughter, but it turns out that Henry was a really good, apparently very astute and aggressive businessman. So he took a small fortune and built it into quite a nice fortune. But we’re fairly sure, at least we’ve never found anybody in the family that would… Read More
And, and of course the stipulation was, was that it’d be named after, after Henry. So we have, you know, when I, when I retired three years ago, we had actually more species of animals, actually more animals than San Diego, in a zoo named after a guy that we’re… Read More
When you were, as you were progressing as a young director of the Omaha Zoo, and as you continued, what people were in a sense, your mentors from other zoos?… Read More
Well, in the beginning, in the beginning we found a few of them. And then, you know, we don’t add the words, it’s word of mouth and they, you know, they, they find us and, and it is word of mouth. Read More
Is this part of the education department?… Read More
Or who runs this program?… Read More
Part of it is, but mostly it’s part of, part of the, of the, of the research and medical department, yeah. But education manages part of the, as far as the housing and stuff like that. Let me do a little business here. Tell me about the name Henry Doorly… Read More
Does this, how do they find you?… Read More
Do you find them or?… Read More
And then, you know, we branched out into taking students both undergraduate, they simply want to know about to management and husbandry and you know, and a whole spectrum of zoo activities. Most of it focused on the sciences though. Read More
And you provide housing?… Read More
We provide housing and we provide a stipend so that they can eat. Interestingly, the overseas agent, Asian students, particularly. A lot of students, we’ve had a lot of students from Vietnam, from Thailand, from China, quite a number of Russian students. I think we’ve had students from 40, 41… Read More
We give them a stipend, but it’s a fairly small stipend so that they can eat and they get a discount at the zoo and they do their own cooking and we’ve got washers and dryers and then the whole bit. So they get a stipend, but it’s a very… Read More
And we’ve been doing that now for about 18, 19 years. But then three years ago, we went to just about, three years ago, we expanded that. We had another school district come at us and they wanted to do a full-time curriculum. We’ve had on the drawing boards. Actually,… Read More
They do their full junior and senior curriculum at the zoo five days a week for a full day. And they’re doing all of the curriculum at the zoo. And we’re exposing those students to, not just the normal curriculum, but because we expose them to a lot of hands-on… Read More
And so now we, you know, we’ve got, we’ve got 34,000 square feet of research space, but we’ve also got an upper floor, two upper floors, because the two buildings are mirror that are connected, that are dormitories for 20 students. And then we’ve got four student houses. So we… Read More
Some of them are two weeks or a month. Some of them stay with us six months or a year, or we’ve had students that stayed with us for as much as two years, about half of them are undergraduate. About half of them are graduate students. About half of… Read More
And so we came back and talked to one of my board members who was Henry Doorly’s granddaughter and said, how do you, you know, how do you go about rounding up a bunch of ladies?… Read More
Cause in those days, docents were all women, you know, to, to come in and be volunteers, you know, cause we didn’t have very much staff. And she said, well, it’s real easy to talk to the junior league. They start things. They don’t run things or finish things, but… Read More
Turns out that she was a professor of English at UNO. So that’s kind of when we hatched the plan that I was going to quit that. She was, had all kinds of free time. And so I, you know, after the break I went back up and said, all… Read More