Yeah, I think it was a American egret. it could have been a snow. It might even be a cattle egret. Anyway, so he wanted more property. And then finally, I just said, we didn’t buy that land. We didn’t acquire it for a racetrack. This is great, if we… Read More
And we got that, we got our site was approved. There was a guy named DeBartolo, who was mafia, very mafia. I mean he, and it was well known. He later I think died, but his son went to jail. So says, “Here’s 25 acres for you,” you know. And… Read More
And it was, there was private property available. Well, they didn’t wanna do that. And so the next thing gave them 25 more acres, 50 acres. That’s a lot of land. And then some of my trustees I found out were speculating. They were buying property up. And they were… Read More
You have those very often?… Read More
32 Acres. Oh god. 32 acres. Well, I think that zoos, to be successful, really over the long run need to be just huge. Chester Zoo is huge, and they’ve done a lot with it. Well, you know, Bronx Zoo is huge, but they don’t have access to a lot… Read More
It’s 650 square miles. So you have to have, people have, are gonna move around by a car, and you have to give them a place to park. All the evidence was that Oklahoma, the state, was gonna approve paramutual betting, which I don’t understand. But I knew that it… Read More
And although some of my trustees at the end said, “Well, you’ll never use that. Let’s use it for this racetrack.” I had a terrible, the worst idea I ever had at Oklahoma City was to build a race, to join… We needed a parking lot. Business was just, we… Read More
Now you have, I think ingeniously, you, in the Lincoln Park Zoo, I think how you have handled, I mean they’re like a locked in sea. Uh-oh, she’s asleep. Oh no. Handled a very small land mass. Read More
How big is it?… Read More
Have you ever added to it?… Read More
By the time I got to Oklahoma City, he was in line to be speaker of the house, which he did become. I mean, Jim was very helpful. We got several million, I think we got about eight or $10 million from these two grants. But they had to be… Read More
No, but in about six months I did have. And we had, the zoo was about 70 acres. And one thing that Phil Ogilvy had done, well, the city had done it, but he was very close to them. There were two granting agencies. One, was the Bureau of Outdoor… Read More
Did you have an overarching, when you became director, vision for the zoo, that was already in your mind?… Read More
Every accident has a cause. When somebody says, “There’s no cause here, and we can’t tell you the cause.” Now, this is bread and butter, you know, safety program. But if you have people get killed, then you better address it. And so I was extremely concerned with good safety,… Read More
And they had to tell us, they had to find out why, what was the cause of the accident?… Read More
We had a very good safety record. And every accident, I don’t care how small it was, how insignificant it was investigated by three people, who were different areas. Read More
And we tied it in with the national, what do you call them?… Read More
I was the chairman of that committee, and brought it to Oklahoma City. Read More
Poison Control Centers, and the zoo became a poison control center. And we didn’t get any money out of it, but we got a lot of contacts, and we were part of the system. That was a, I think a big thing. I was very pleased with that. The zoo,… Read More
We built about 20, one to an acre, 20 modular enclosures where we could put a bird, or a mammal, or what have you. And that was good and bad. Some of the animals we got, we had to modify. It’d been better if we just build them as we… Read More