He used to like to drink a type of cherry liqueur, and I would keep him supplied with that. And for that I would get all kinds of books and things in return, bartering. There was Frank McInnis at the Detroit Zoo. He was a landscape man. And he knew… Read More
We lived in New York, brief, in New Jersey, briefly when I was 10 or 11, eight, nine, 10, 11, yeah. And my mother took me to New York to the Battery Park Aquarium. I was, that was my first, the second aquarium after the Dallas Aquarium. But that was… Read More
And he wanted, he was far seeing, and he wanted to develop the Coney Island. It was just a carnival area. The anchor, like in a shopping mall, He wanted to put a zoo anchor out there, a zoological anchor. And so he told the New York Zoological Society, in… Read More
Were there any directors who influenced you particularly, at that time?… Read More
Well, at that time there was another phenomenon that was going on. It had been going on for about at least a couple of years. And that was Zoo Parade. The public ate that up. And it was one of the best PR factors for zoos in the United States,… Read More
We bought all kinds of weird things and just figured, we’ll put all of this together and maybe it’ll work. And that’s how we did a lot of it. Now, we also looked at nutrition, you know, the carbohydrates and proteins and all that, we did that. The health of… Read More
Hell, you wouldn’t know, is this high or low?… Read More
There wasn’t any data. So a lot of it was discovery. And the main thing I wanted to work on with that zoo, in addition to the husbandry, I just thought it was a great opportunity to teach for educate the public. And we did a lot of that. You… Read More
But then you learn from, if you’re smart, you learn from your mistakes. And so I had your… You asked about nutrition. We just tried to, it was a lot of it was experimental. Try this on this animal. I got a giant armadillo, a little one, and I couldn’t… Read More
And this armadillo just wouldn’t eat. And finally, somehow, I guess there was some excrement on his shell, his carapace. I gave him, got some warm, tepid water, gave him a warm bath and put him back in. About 10 minutes later I was in the living room, heard a… Read More
And in fact, I must tell you this. That getting a degree, whatever, even zoology, which my degree was, I didn’t know anything about finance. I knew nothing about budgeting, obviously, from the aquarium thing we did. And personnel management, we never learned anything like that. And time, you know,… Read More
You need to read “Life Magazine.” So when were you working with these unusual animals, what was your general approach, not only to them, but to the animals now that you were in charge of at the zoo about the care of these animals?… Read More
The care of the animals at the Fort Worth Zoo were, I’d have to say it was a learning experience. Very little was known. We didn’t have Lee Crandall’s book on mammal care in captivity. We had a lot of material from the Philadelphia Zoo where they made up completely,… Read More
Ivan Sanderson, I found out, was in Africa collecting animals. He had a giant pangolin. He had a male giant pangolin. And I wrote him and said, “I’m really interested in this.” He said, “Oh, they’re very hard to keep. I doubt if you’ve got one now, if, you know,… Read More
I was told that when Ivan Sanderson got off the boat, he had scheduled a press conference. And he talked about this pangolin he had. And somebody said, “Oh, here. Read More
One of them is a giant pangolin. Hell, this long. And I’ve really worked learned about, you’re in my Eden, tapeman, you know how it is. We worked with a different, I mean, I fed him the same thing that the doctor had been feeding them. But then he would… Read More
You know, like Julius Squeezer for a snake, you know, a boa constrictor. And the best one I remember was Olivia de Javelina, all at the Arizona Sonora Desert Museum. And then of course, the mate to Olivia de Javelina was Gregory Peccary, wonderful names. And the public remembers those… Read More
Do you remember Ivan Sanderson?… Read More
When I first got to Fort Worth, I really started, I had a chance there to do something. At Dallas, it was just, I’d designed all kinds of things and they, “Yeah, that’s nice. When we get a bond issue, we’ll think about that,” and all. Fort Worth, I could… Read More
They’ll come see it and all that. In my herpetological work, there was a guy in California who sold papers, books and things, on herpetology. And when I wrote him and said, “Send my catalogs to the Fort Worth Zoo,” he said, “Oh, you’re in the zoos,” yeah. He said,… Read More