Interview 25370 – Caption Index: 7
What was your childhood like?… Read More
What was your childhood like?… Read More
Did they interest you or wasn’t on your scope?… Read More
Well, kind of a many, my parents moved all over California, I was brought up with my mother and stepfather, and he had numerous jobs, and during my early years, I never went to the same school for more than a few months until I got in the sixth grade,… Read More
And what were your parents doing?… Read More
They were farming at the time. We had about 3,000 acres down outside of Maricopa in the area they called the Flats, and it was a mixed farm for mainly cotton, alfalfa for seed. We had some soybeans, we grew castor beans, we grew sugar beets and just, and mixed… Read More
But as I told Loretta, “I was born at a very young age in California, in 1941.” And can you give us your name, and where you were born in California?… Read More
Okay, Mitch Bush, I was born in Santa Ana, California. Read More
What’d your parents do?… Read More
That’s gonna age me. Read More
Well, I’m not, I listed… Conway. I would put him number one. I haven’t arranged these others. Belle Benchley, I would have to put there, ’cause she spent years keeping that place together. And every, you know, it is a major zoo, San Diego Zoo. The architect that we were… Read More
And who would be your third?… Read More
Ed Maruska, you were talking about him. I think the Cincinnati Zoo was an excellent zoo. And in many ways I thought it fulfilled the needs of a zoo, perhaps better than most of them. And I thought Maruska was very well organized. He kept his mind on the goal. Read More
So out of all those possibilities, personal opinion, now, which ones I can’t say was the best, but I would say the ones I’m gonna tell you were most noteworthy. Excellent, excellent. Now, at the top of my list really would be Bill Conway. He and I have had a… Read More
That was something completely different. I would call that noteworthy, but I don’t think it was outstanding. Roger Conant, he was a great herpetologist. I don’t think he was that good a zoo person. His mind was always on herpetology, really. And he was not trained. Roger Conant never took… Read More
He was at the St. Louis zoo. He had a three ring circus surrounded by some zoo cages and all. He had performing chimps, performing cats. It was a big deal, and the public ate it up. Now, was it good? I don’t know. I have some reservations about it… Read More
If you want to know about that, you can ask me. Now, let me just finish the answer though. In looking at 50 years of zoo directors, some have, well, we had George Vierheller. Read More
Did you ever meet him?… Read More
I’m not talking. You’re not in it, okay. A lot of them just moved up the chain of command, moved up the ranks. And I guess I’m that one, ’cause I started out as a kid counting people. And then I got more responsibility. But my origin was zoology. And… Read More
Where’d you come from?… Read More
Oh yeah, he paid, you know, voice mail to the, you know, research and conservation and all that. But he was just having a good time. That was, to me, was delightful. And I’ve seen others that way. They’ve come from circuses. They’ve come from animal dealers. The director of… Read More