You don’t have to park on our parking lot, there’s street parking, come in for free. You don’t have to buy refreshments at the zoo. All of that you can do and not have to spend a penny. But you can also, and so back then, about half of our… Read More
And two, can you tell me about the governance in general of the St. Louis Zoo?… Read More
Yeah, when I speak of the governance, I think of our commission, which is the ruling body that really makes the decisions. The biggest decision, of course was, “Okay, well who is gonna be director or president there?” But they do oversee major things. I mean you know, they go… Read More
If we needed to hire somebody, we were the HR department. Read More
I guess I wanna ask two questions. In your opinion, obviously it worked out. Read More
In your opinion, why do you think they wanted this change in governance from everything else that had happened?… Read More
And then Steve came with me, came to me and he says, you know, and we had lunch together and he said, “We wanna make you director of the zoo, but we wanna bring somebody else in as president and CEO over you. Well what do you think about that?”… Read More
And so that’s what came about, and they hired Jeff Bonner as the president and CEO, and I was the director and COO, director of operations. So when Jeff and I first got together, and Jeff and I worked it out. And it’s like Jeff said, “Okay, I want you… Read More
If this is a guy I can work with, yeah I’ll probably, that’ll be fine,” you know?… Read More
Certainly with him. Oh, well Charlie stayed on. You know Charlie thought, well, he’d retire at 65, and he didn’t, and then he, well a little bit more. He’s got this project to do, and so forth. And so then when Charlie did retire, I was a candidate to take… Read More
But had you and Charlie talked about that, did he know your thought process?… Read More
By the time he was ready to retire, yes. Yeah, we talked about that. Was he in favor of it, or- He wrote all kinds of letters of recommendation for me to follow him. So they did a big search. When Charlie was about to retire, they did a national… Read More
Yeah, I guess that was always, you know thinking, “Well you know, Charlie’s, you know, 10 to 15 years older than me. Read More
Now while you’re assistant director doing these kinda things and involved in these various projects, in the back of your mind, did you think about the position of director?… Read More
When Charlie retires, would I wanna be director?” You know and, “Yeah, I think so,” and- Did you have those conversations with him?… Read More
But was the original intent to have aurochs, or other animals from the zoo having an ancillary breeding area?… Read More
Yes. But that never came to fruition. We never did put animals out there, just because before you do that, you know, you have to have somebody staying there all the time. You have to have security there all the time. It just, the cost of it kinda, it was… Read More
And it wasn’t until a week later when they were gonna go, the architect that they’d chosen was from, I’ve forgotten where, someplace in Minnesota or whatever. And we were gonna fly, and so here we took Ralston Purina’s private jet on air, and Charlie says, “Well, I want you… Read More
Now during the time you were assistant director, wasn’t there another proposal made to people about a breeding farm?… Read More
Charlie and I and a couple of others on the staff, we had always, were interested in acquiring some other property because we were limited as to what we could do within our own, you know, part of Forest Park. And we went and looked at quite a number of… Read More