Interview 24641 – Caption Index: 285
Did you have an overarching, when you became director, vision for the zoo, that was already in your mind?… Read More
Did you have an overarching, when you became director, vision for the zoo, that was already in your mind?… 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
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
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
I was the chairman of that committee, and brought it to Oklahoma City. Read More
And we tied it in with the national, what do you call them?… 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
Oh, I had worried very… At Fort Worth I’d started an antivenom committee where we had a national inventory of all the antivenoms that were available in zoos, or in laboratories and what have you. We never had, while I was there, a snake bite at Fort Worth. And we… 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
And for the next 15 years that I was there, we had an excellent breeding program with Golden Lion tamarins. Did the same thing with the gorilla. We had a mountain gorilla, the only one in captivity. Marvin told me, wrote me immediately. He says, “I think the one in… Read More
And I think there were one or two others scattered around. I spent the next three months, not the whole time. Trying to find out, checking all… Well, you’ve already told me you found it in your animal control. I think you said you found a lemur once. And people… Read More
And I didn’t see them, well, he sent me pictures. But we then, we flew him, the only way we could borrow it was to fly him and the gorilla to Oklahoma City, which we did. So then I had a female mountain gorilla. And the Makumba, beautiful male, just… Read More
What is the first thing you wanted to do when you saw this?… Read More
What did you want to address or enhance right away?… Read More
I wanted, there were some fantastic animals there. I wanted to get those tamarins in a proper facility, not in a cage in the snake house. I wanted to get them and I wanted to get some more. And they were… You couldn’t bring them in. And San Diego had… Read More
They had first choice on any animal, any angulate animal born, maybe even others, over the next five years. And I knew VanDerBrink. I’d bought a gorilla from him at Fort Worth, first gorilla we ever had. And he was a reasonable person. And I sat down with him at… Read More
Okay. What else about the Oklahoma City Zoo?… Read More
The staff was pretty, I started to say immoral. Pretty demoralized by all the changes that had happened. A good thing was we had some bond money that some of it was being spent. And a lot of it we could do with other things with. So in a nutshell,… Read More
Ogilvy had signed a contract such that VanDerBrink, remember them?… Read More