So he took the family and move back to San Francisco. And his wife was very happy about it because she had grown up in fairly primitive conditions in northern Sweden. He was a Swede too. And she said, I didn’t come to this country to live in a cabin… Read More
My mother was born in a logging camp in Washington state. She was delivered by a Indian midwife belonging to the Tolt tribe. The town was called Tolt at the time, it’s about 25 miles, thirty miles east of Seattle. And her father was a logger and he was specifically… Read More
Well, my father was a music teacher. He, he was in his thirties actually, when he enlisted in the Army. He was not the ideal age. So he was in a training unit in Texas. And we moved from San Antonio to Wichita Falls. And I don’t remember too much… Read More
My name is Christen Elmo, Marcher Wemmer. Those were my given names. I grew up thinking that my name was Christen Elmo Wemmer. And when I was in my twenties, I found out that I had a second, second name, which was Marcher spelled with a CH rather than a… Read More
And my next question is, who were your parents and what did they do?… Read More
My father was stationed there towards the end of the war. Read More
I don’t have an interest in it. If you don’t remember me, you don’t remember me. I know what I did and what I accomplished and I have to make myself happy. Read More
You’re gonna think, this is weird. Read More
One thing my wife has always told me, she goes, why don’t you promote yourself?… Read More
Last question. How would you like to be remembered your legacy?… Read More
And that’s the sad thing when I talked about what’s convenient, not convenient for the new generations to do to support conservation, but I’ve always had that commitment. I, I grew up with that. But I’m lucky. I grew up, I trapped, I hunted, I did those type of things. Read More
But I was lucky in that I was taught that, you know, when I had a trap line, whether it be muskrat, raccoon, mink, what?… Read More
And never did beaver. ’cause the beaver were almost gone in Indiana when I grew up. But you did it sustainably and you didn’t go in and, and in one month trap out a whole area. You just don’t do that type of thing. So I grew up with that,… Read More
I asked myself, you know, I’ve always been involved with it because I, I felt an obligation or stewardship to try to support wildlife in the environment. That’s why I’m in it. Obviously we didn’t get in it to make money because most zoo people don’t make a lot. Well,… Read More
So one question is what do you know about the profession that you devoted so many years of your life?… Read More
That’s the kind of person I look for and that’s the kind of person I support. We talked about this profession. Read More
Well, if, if they’re smart, like that individual is who also owns a place in Texas, they set up a foundation or a trust, and that trust is investment money. And you don’t touch the trust, but the income it earns is what goes to cover the operations an endowment,… Read More
And so the, if the commitment’s there, they’re looking at what do I do to set up for long-term when I’m not there?… Read More
When that individual is no longer around, what happens to it?… Read More
So it in a sense, it’s not your money, it’s their money. And you know what, they’re gonna figure out how to make that money come in and they’re gonna know that if they mistreat their animals, if they’re, if they have a lot of dying animals and their exhibits… Read More