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
And it turns around, looks you in the eye, and horns are crossed over ’cause they’re not fused to the skull yet and oh my God, that was just so fabulous. But then she grew up and had babies of her own, so you get into second generation Topeka Zoo-born… Read More
I said, “Let Max out.” And the crowd is there anticipating and waiting. And I said, “Let me let Max out.” And crowd was there and, “Let Max out,” and this is to be continued. Read More
(Gary chuckling) No, they keeper radioed back and said, “Max won’t go out.” (chuckles) What do you do?… Read More
Can you give us a few things in your tenure that were memorable?… Read More
Either that stood out like, oh my gosh or, oh my gosh?… Read More
There’s always something going on at the zoo, yeah. That’s the Simon & Garfunkel song, I guess. ♪ And it’s all happening at the zoo ♪ And it is. I think one of the most exciting things for us was the birth of our first giraffe, which was in 1970. Read More
So we observed breeding dates and we calculated gestation and on the 468th day, 15 and a half months, and any ladies watching this, aren’t you glad you’re not a giraffe?… Read More
We were having a lecture, we used to have different zoo people come in, like Ron Blakely from Sedgwick County or whoever from so many zoos, and give lectures to the staff on their own time in the evening, and no obligation, but most of ’em showed up. And we… Read More
Can you tell me how involved you were in day-to-day activities and were you a hands-on zoo director?… Read More
(chuckles) My vision of being a zoo director was, I guess I kinda liked the European school of zoo directing, or we used the old European school, and maybe they don’t do it these days, but where they make the rounds every day. And I made the rounds every day. Read More
But I didn’t like being chained to the desk. You have said that there’s always something going on at the zoo. Read More
The entire building where you walk in and it’s, it was almost taking a tropical greenhouse or a botanical garden, tropical exhibit, but developing it so you could incorporate animals as well, which means you gotta know which birds you’re gonna eat, which plants, which plants may be poisonous, certain… Read More
They came in and built their own webs on the stainless steel spider web. But everything else, cooties, and iguanas, giant fruit bats, everything else was in free flight or free ranging, two-toed sloths, whatever. So we wanted people to get the feel of the humidity and just take a… Read More
How did you fund it?… Read More
Oh, we, we built the Large Mammal building. When we had to fund that, we had to institute the admission fee because the bridge fell over the Kansas River and they stopped all capital improvements. And attendance was going well and admission fee was going well, and we’d raised the… Read More
Can you tell me about the development of the rainforest exhibit?… Read More
The rainforest, a lot of zoos had birdhouses, tropical birdhouses where at one end there would be, say, the end of the building would be a square, the square end of the building would be filled with tropical plants and there’d be a guardrail and lots of live trees and… Read More