I mean, the county, the Milwaukee Public Museum became a private entity separated from the county. And when they did that, the employees could choose either to stay county employees or go work with the Society, but they still worked at the museum. So that whole thing was tough too. Read More
I don’t think the Society has the base, financial base to do it alone. So they just need to keep working on getting the governing bodies, so they’re connected. As a society, the Society still runs the education department and the Society does all the graphics for the zoo and…… Read More
Are they still in charge of conservation?… Read More
It’s usually they’re in city parks and they’re, a lot of kids there only exposure to animals. And they don’t necessarily need to have, you know, lions and tigers and most of the smaller zoos don’t. They have a bobcat or bears or something like that. And they have sensory… Read More
In your opinion, does that kind of relationship work or was there built-in issues that would naturally occur that if they could do it a different way?… Read More
Well, what the result of that whole controversy of the 1990s is that for the first time in almost a hundred years, there was a written agreement between the Society and the zoo as to what was the responsibility of the county, what was the responsibilities of the Society. I… Read More
So yes, everybody has animal escapes. At one time you spoke to the Wildwood Park Zoo Society at their annual meeting. Yep. And. In Marshfield. You spoke about the benefits of a small city zoo. Mm-hmm. Read More
Well, Wisconsin, we used to have a Wisconsin Zoo Association. There’s a lot of small municipal zoos. At one time there were a lot of small, most small communities had a zoo. And I think it’s, that’s Marshfield, yeah. I think Wildwood Park Zoo’s in Marshfield, Wisconsin. And I remember… Read More
What are those benefits?… Read More
We did animal escape drills on a regular basis. And it was always fun ’cause the keeper from the hospital or one of the keepers was designated as the escapee. I remember once I used it, I’d been trying to get something fixed in the Lion House for forever. And… Read More
I did have once, our first, was it our first?… Read More
First or second behind the scenes weekend at the zoo, they started opening up some of the back areas at the Milwaukee Zoo. And we had a cheetah that sort of shinnied up the outdoor exhibit between tree that had grown and was on the roof of the Lion House… Read More
And then all those little kids following Mr. Rogers all the way around the zoo. That was fun. We did the elephant, the Elephant House has to, when the African Wildlife Federation had its had a anniversary, 25th anniversary, the one that Jimmy Stewart’s daughter was involved in, so we… Read More
You never had an escape in Milwaukee that you had to get involved with?… Read More
Oh yeah, no, we had- for your expertise?… Read More
Yeah, no, we had animal escapes, but they were nothing. Probably the most serious, well, most serious one was we had a Dall sheep that got out as we were trying to get ready to ship it and it almost made it to the gate at, the front gate and… Read More
It’s not, it was always a society program. Not a zoo program. I mean, the zoo was involved peripherally. I mean, we had our bird people were involved. We have a master bander who works within the Aviary department and she’d been involved. So the, yeah, so it was always… Read More
As your time as curator, can you recollect any memorable events such as animal escapes that you had to be involved with or potentially VIP visits or things that were obviously a bit out of the ordinary in the day-to-day running of the collection?… Read More
Well, that would happen more at the National Zoo than it did at the Milwaukee County Zoo. I remember when Ken Kawata, who was at the Milwaukee County Zoo at the time, got married and he was a big panda fan. So he went to Ted Reed and he and… Read More
And then they did similar work in Wisconsin to see, talked about how, because all the bird populations are declining. So it was originally supposed to be a five-year project. It ended up being a 15-year project and finalized with, they produced two landowners manuals, one for Wisconsin landowners and… Read More