So that was an option. But then when Kennedy passed the deferment for having kids, we had a kid and that was the end of it. I didn’t have to worry about terminating studies and joining the army. When did you decide I wanna work in a zoo or was,… Read More
Yeah, that was my friend Dave Rent, who was also in the student section, was close friends with Carrie Baldwin, who was the director of the San Francisco Zoo. And Dave was one of those kids that was always hanging around the zoo. And Baldwin had a television program too,… Read More
All the students who were keen wanted to see. And eventually we, we were invited in, we could see those birds. And I mean when I heard what they were doing in research, I wanted to do the same sort of thing. So I kind of bought into the research… Read More
And she was very happy to terminate her contract to go back east because she had a bunch of bad kids. They were making obscene phone calls to her after hours and stuff like that until I got on the phone with them and I gave them some of their… Read More
I got really severe burns on my face. In fact, it cracked, it looked like polygons in the arctic and seeped fluid for about a week before it started to heal. I don’t know what degree of burns they were, but it was serious burns. But yeah, that’s the stuff… Read More
And if so, how?… Read More
Yeah, all of them. All of those zoology teachers did, I mean, I loved it, But anybody more than others that, Well, Swan was, Swan was a can-do kind of person. So he, he made it possible for us to go down there. And I mean, it was a changing… Read More
You don’t have to kill ’em and make ’em into study skins. And when I found out that I could do that, I quickly switched over and started wanting to study anthology with him. And I did my master’s degree with him on Impaling behavior of Loggerhead strikes. And so… Read More
Did did any teacher have an effect on your life?… Read More
I didn’t tell you about the music part because my father had us all learn instruments, but that’s another chapter in my early life. But at SF State, I loved taking zoology courses and met a number of professors, became good friends, remained friends with them till the end of… Read More
I count me in, if you’re gonna do that, I want to go to Mexico. And he got money, he got money from, well it was easy to get money in those days in the sixties, but he got money from like two sources. And so like four of us,… Read More
And he said they came to the first village after the first month and he said he started speaking Spanish and everybody fell on the ground there laughing their butts off. Turned out that his teacher had a serious speech impediment and he had learned Spanish from this joker who… Read More
He showed us his spring and there was a dead wood brat floating in the waters of his spring. He had a colony of my Otis little brown bats in the attic of his house. He showed us where the shoe moles were collected in the redwood groves. I set… Read More
He said, Chris, he said, he said, we have a few specimens of shrew moles from the Santa Cruz mountains, and I think the man whose property they were collected on is still there. He said, you might wanna look ’em up and see if you can collect some more. Read More
So my grandpa said, let’s all go down to Ben Loman, where he had a cottage in the Santa Cruz mountains above uc, Santa Cruz now. And so we started going down there on weekends and during summers and I started collecting mammals real seriously. And I got the neighborhood… Read More
Oh, I wanna look at kangaroo rats. Okay, just be sure to close the case when you’re finished. And I would go in there and look at specimens and read the labels and everything like that. And I loved it. I just, those labels were like magic to make because… Read More
And then he would say, well Chris, you go ahead in the collection and what do you wanna look at today?… Read More
Ald, who is a, a French lady who, who had survived the war as a child and had immigrated to the US And she was his bio technician, a very nice lady. She was like a second mother to me. After several years I got to like her very much… Read More
She got me this book and it had these line drawings, very old looking line drawings, not the sort of things we’ve seen today, very stylized. And so I started trapping mice in the, the basements of some of my neighbor kids who knew that there were mice in the… Read More
And I was standing there next to him. He says, to expose the beetles, you have to hit the cow pie whack. And of course I had cow shit all over my pants and he had ’em all over his pants. But then he was showing me these beautiful, colorful… Read More