His name was Pierre A Fontaine. His background was dressing windows, setting up window displays in department stores. But at home he had tropical fish. And when they built the aquarium, he knew somebody, and he got the job. And I worked in that aquarium through high school, then through… Read More
You know, my schooling was just typical. It was small town stuff. But with reference to, you know, this interview about zoo careers, and I’m thinking about other kids out there right now. I had a civics class. I guess it was in junior high, I think. And we were… Read More
And my biology teacher in high school, just a wonderful man. He was a mentor. And he had had some touch at the University of Michigan with Dr. Blanchard, who was an outstanding herpetologist. And he kind of passed this stuff, this material along to us, great inspiration. And then,… Read More
I knew the word. And so that was very early. Elementary school was just standard. Now, when I got to junior high school, I was knee deep in my herpetological investigations. And I had my own snake collection. And when the biology teacher learned about this, “Oh, you’ve got to… Read More
And University Park is kind of uptown from the rest of Dallas. And the neighbor there didn’t like my snakes. He knew I had them, never came over to look at them. And so he was a lawyer. The mayor was a friend of his. This is just a little… Read More
I guess I was about eight. Read More
What kind of schooling did you have?… Read More
So I got what, you know what Spanish moss is?… Read More
And he said, “Well we really appreciate this, but you know, come back.” So the next trip to Galveston I was determined to do something. I didn’t tell any, I didn’t tell my parents about this, but I managed to get two more crabs. They were pretty good-sized. These, I… Read More
I got Spanish moss and I got these brown paper bags, and I filled them full of very, very wet salt water. Put the crabs in between, so they’re surrounded by that. When we got to Dallas, probably about seven hours later, long trip, those crabs were alive. And we… Read More
I love to fish. My grandfather was a great fisherman. And so we would go out, at Galveston, out fishing all the time. We made about three trips every summer from Dallas, I mean Sherman, to Dallas and to Galveston. It was an all day trip. And we would visit… Read More
And in Fair Park, in Dallas, they built all these wonderful, they built a natural history museum. They built an aquarium, and they built other museums, plus all the usual stuff you have at a fair. My parents took me to that aquarium on the way to Galveston. And I… Read More
Just blue crabs, the kind you eat, crab gumbo. And when we got to Dallas, very sad that the crabs had died. Oh, they were not in a sack, I’m sorry. They were in a metal bucket thing. But they’d died. I had it full of salt water and all… Read More
And I had things like that. Read More
What are your recollections of the first zoos that you were seeing?… Read More
Oh. Well, Sherman didn’t have a zoo. And my recollection of zoos was quite limited. And I’m not sure I understand why, but there was a zoo in Dallas, there was a zoo in Fort Worth. There was one in Houston, but I never went to it, they never took… Read More
And I’d put them in jars, and I’d keep them there for a while. And anytime we were driving on the highway, we have a lot of box turtles in Texas, we did then. They’re disappearing along with the rest of the fauna. And we would stop and get that… Read More
Well, I have to tell you, where I grew up. I was born in Galveston. But in two years we moved to a little, kind of a hick town in North Texas, north of Dallas called Sherman, Texas. And we grew up there. I did. For some reason, it can’t… Read More
And we had a miniature turtle-arium And I just made that word up, but it sounds okay. So I grew up and then, oh! We had a fish pond. I didn’t want goldfish. We would go fishing at one of the lakes and we’d bring perch back. We’d bring a… Read More
What kind of zoos did you see when you were growing up?… Read More