We built about 20, one to an acre, 20 modular enclosures where we could put a bird, or a mammal, or what have you. And that was good and bad. Some of the animals we got, we had to modify. It’d been better if we just build them as we… Read More
Oh, I had worried very… At Fort Worth I’d started an antivenom committee where we had a national inventory of all the antivenoms that were available in zoos, or in laboratories and what have you. We never had, while I was there, a snake bite at Fort Worth. And we… Read More
And I think there were one or two others scattered around. I spent the next three months, not the whole time. Trying to find out, checking all… Well, you’ve already told me you found it in your animal control. I think you said you found a lemur once. And people… Read More
And I didn’t see them, well, he sent me pictures. But we then, we flew him, the only way we could borrow it was to fly him and the gorilla to Oklahoma City, which we did. So then I had a female mountain gorilla. And the Makumba, beautiful male, just… Read More
And for the next 15 years that I was there, we had an excellent breeding program with Golden Lion tamarins. Did the same thing with the gorilla. We had a mountain gorilla, the only one in captivity. Marvin told me, wrote me immediately. He says, “I think the one in… Read More
What is the first thing you wanted to do when you saw this?… Read More
I wanted, there were some fantastic animals there. I wanted to get those tamarins in a proper facility, not in a cage in the snake house. I wanted to get them and I wanted to get some more. And they were… You couldn’t bring them in. And San Diego had… Read More
What did you want to address or enhance right away?… Read More
Okay. What else about the Oklahoma City Zoo?… Read More
They had first choice on any animal, any angulate animal born, maybe even others, over the next five years. And I knew VanDerBrink. I’d bought a gorilla from him at Fort Worth, first gorilla we ever had. And he was a reasonable person. And I sat down with him at… Read More
The staff was pretty, I started to say immoral. Pretty demoralized by all the changes that had happened. A good thing was we had some bond money that some of it was being spent. And a lot of it we could do with other things with. So in a nutshell,… Read More
Oh, a big problem was it had been sort of pawned to an animal dealer. Read More
Ogilvy had signed a contract such that VanDerBrink, remember them?… Read More
And as you know, tamarins, the father raises the babies, and passes them back and forth to the female. But he in effect carries them, but they had two. And it had had a baby, and the baby had been lost. So there was a problem. The herpetarium, was, I… Read More
The ungulate collection was fantastic. Warren Thomas had done that. There were then holes in it though. I mean, there a male had… He was very proud of the, a gazelle that he had gotten from I think Sudan. Excuse me, it was a white-eared cub. And the male had… Read More
They didn’t have any. It was probably, I don’t know whether it was extinct, but couldn’t get any. Well, that whole herd, I mean that, there was about eight animals, nothing sustainable. The golden, they had a pair of golden tamarins in their herpetarium. By the way, they named it… Read More
But after a while, too many things were happening at Fort Worth, good things. We made a master plan for three years with some long range stuff, you know, listed, but an operating plan for three years. Then every year we would sit down, the staff, and we would review… Read More
What did I find?… Read More
Well, the condition of the zoo when I came, it was 1969. The total lack of continuity was a big problem. And I had not been used to that sort of thing. There was no master plan. And I’m a firm, I’m a firm believer in having a realistic master… Read More
When you became director, when you came to Oklahoma City, what was the condition of the zoo?… Read More