So Mr. Johnson gives me a list of 10 names to call to go visit to get the money, raise the $5,000. He writes out a check. Now, he was a conman. You might say I was influenced. You might say I was, you know, unduly influenced by this sort… Read More
He said, “Here, I’m gonna give you this check now, but it’s gonna be not good, ’cause I’m gonna call the bank, and tell them not to run it through. Now you take this check though to these 10 people, and you’ll get, you’ll raise the other $4,000. And if… Read More
Well, I was called a conman, inveterate conman, I think, by George Dolan. Dolan and I were close, personal friends. He was a wonderful reporter. He really was a good writer. The one thing about Fort Worth that I don’t think I communicated, in Dallas, if you got money, I… Read More
I didn’t start it, Hittson did in Fort Worth. And so we had a citizens group formed like a society. And the head of that was an oil man named Kirk Johnson. Kirk was, he loved animals, but he also was really a big hunter in Africa. Guess who his… Read More
To what do you owe this description?… Read More
When you were in Fort Worth, the Star Telegram columnist, George Dolan, described you as, “An inveterate practical joker, and in zoo matters, an unsurpassed conman.” Why would he say such a thing?… Read More
Fletcher Reynolds was at the Cleveland Zoo. I think he had been an animal dealer, and he was a character. And we got along fine. He treated me like an adult. But there were cases where, “Who is this snotty-nosed kid, that thinks he knows something about?” But I put… Read More
Belle Benchley, she was a great lady. She was a great lady. Read More
And so you had to, I became familiar with things like that. Davis from Columbus, he was big, and he was kind to me. Read More
And was that the first gorilla born in captivity?… Read More
Mm-hm. No. We were doing our aquarium design at Fort Worth at that time. And we went up there to look at aquariums, and we saw that baby gorilla. It was maybe a week old. Fantastic. Now Davis was, I don’t remember what his training was, but he was a… Read More
Coates stayed with it. And what happened was, he was it. He didn’t have an aquarium, the war was on, came on. And they didn’t have an aquarium in New York for 10 years or more. And finally, Coates got one going, and then he had at Coney Island. So… Read More
He really didn’t, wasn’t too interested in the zoo. And now Walker. Walker was an excellent mammalogist, as we all know. Now, he and Dr. Mann, this was an interesting thing I observed very quickly. Directors and assistant directors often didn’t get along well. Frequently, they hated each other’s guts. Read More
He used to like to drink a type of cherry liqueur, and I would keep him supplied with that. And for that I would get all kinds of books and things in return, bartering. There was Frank McInnis at the Detroit Zoo. He was a landscape man. And he knew… Read More
We lived in New York, brief, in New Jersey, briefly when I was 10 or 11, eight, nine, 10, 11, yeah. And my mother took me to New York to the Battery Park Aquarium. I was, that was my first, the second aquarium after the Dallas Aquarium. But that was… Read More
And he wanted, he was far seeing, and he wanted to develop the Coney Island. It was just a carnival area. The anchor, like in a shopping mall, He wanted to put a zoo anchor out there, a zoological anchor. And so he told the New York Zoological Society, in… Read More
Were there any directors who influenced you particularly, at that time?… Read More
Well, at that time there was another phenomenon that was going on. It had been going on for about at least a couple of years. And that was Zoo Parade. The public ate that up. And it was one of the best PR factors for zoos in the United States,… Read More
Hell, you wouldn’t know, is this high or low?… Read More
We bought all kinds of weird things and just figured, we’ll put all of this together and maybe it’ll work. And that’s how we did a lot of it. Now, we also looked at nutrition, you know, the carbohydrates and proteins and all that, we did that. The health of… Read More