Yeah, I was assistant director. Eventually, Heinz Heck came in from Munich, where he had been also assistant director. Heinz’s younger brother was immediately appointed assistant director, as I recall, in Munich when Heinz left to come to Catskill. He had been hired two years before he actually came over. Read More
How did that come about?… Read More
Well, from running the feed wagon, I eventually, became his assistant. And the second year I was there, an imported person came in, Heinz Heck. Heinz was the son of the previous director of the Berlin Zoo. He came in from working in the, the, I’m sorry. Read More
He was there a lot. He knew his animals well, very well. We had a problem with kangaroos having mouth problems, and, gradually, he got them changed in diet and got them eating a much better diet, and solved the mouth infections. Read More
Roland, was he hands on? Was he there a lot?… Read More
Now you went higher in the organization, didn’t you?… Read More
Ah, boy. He was a fabulous man. Elderly. Very, very knowledgeable about wild animals. He had a lot of property. The Catskill Game Farm was hundreds of acres. He originated a horse section, a barn, six or eight chain link fenced corrals, and roughly eight indoor stalls. The Przewalski’s horses… Read More
Then he bought more and started a whole collection of wild horses. It probably was the largest collection of Przewalski’s horses in the world among the horses. Boy, boy, they were tough customers. (chuckles) You never walked into a pen with those animals alone. They would come after you. The… Read More
The farm itself was approximately 1,000 acres in the Catskill Mountains. 200 of those acres were open to the public, but the other animals, like the Przewalski horses, were kept in their own quarters. A large quantity of deer and antelope were in the park and some legitimate zoo animals. Read More
Now they say that Roland Lindemann, your boss who hired you, was quite an unusual gentleman. Read More
And the number that I remember, the first winter, we had to consolidate animals together to keep ’em warm in the Catskill Mountains. We had a barn roughly a 100-feet long and 50-feet wide. That barn held male, only male, red kangaroos. A red kangaroo stands six-feet tall in a… Read More
Do you have any good Roland Lindemann stories?… Read More
Tell me about your boss at the zoo. Who hired you?… Read More
The year after I went to work for him, he went to Australia and bought a huge shipment of animals from Australia. It came in to New York in two large groups. One ship couldn’t carry ’em all. There was a tremendous number of birds, roughly 100 cockatoos, parrots and… Read More
I was hired by the owner of the Catskill Game Farm, Roland Lindemann. Roland had started, I think he was in the financial business in New York City. His father and mother came over from Germany, retired. He was a pensioner from being a zoo director in Europe. And he… Read More
I visited a place called the Catskill Game Farm. It was an interesting place. We had a son by then. We went back and I bought a bear cub from the Catskill Game Farm. Took it home and trained the cub to let me handle it, put it on a… Read More
I traded the bear, the trained bear cub. I traded it for a group of deer. And I got the deer. I think I wound up with five deer, something like that. And these, I (chuckles), I started a small collection of zoo animals. And I opened a zoo, a… Read More
Finally I got rid of that. We spent some time in Sarasota, Florida. This was the home of Connie’s parents. Eventually I went back up to the Catskill Game Farm and asked for a job, and was given a job on the feed wagon. The feed wagon was a pretty… Read More
Yes, these were untrained babies or just partially trained. They would follow the leader and follow the two bigger elephants. They didn’t yet know enough about circus life to perform, but they gave the impression of performing. Read More
No, not really, but I certainly was interested in elephants. Now we see it. We went ahead and finished the season. We went back to Vermont, back to Bennington, my hometown. I was convinced by my father that I should join him in his furniture manufacturing business. Some of this… Read More