Well, I had to apply for the job. So, yeah, I did apply for the job, but I started interviewing around in case, you know, I didn’t get the job. So I interviewed at Central Park Zoo, Jim Murtaugh, who I had worked with at the, who was a keeper… Read More
Let’s see, I started in February and Ken was asked to resign soon after I started. And so, but he signed a letter of resignation, thinking that he was going to get a job just by making some phone calls. And he didn’t. Read More
And ’cause I wanted to be assistant general curator. I didn’t know how to be a curator over, you know, my experience with reptiles and birds was minimal. And maybe he left early. Anyway, so they left the acting, the assistant general curator job open. I became acting general curator. Read More
And he left in December of that year and I became acting general curator, was it?… Read More
And at what point did you change titles and responsibilities?… Read More
Not really, I mean, I just, well, my experience from the National Zoo worked well for most of it, yeah. And as the, well, you were then the assistant general curator. Correct. Read More
Did you have any mentors there?… Read More
So were you, when you were there, getting used to things, were you learning from anybody specifically, leaning on anybody?… Read More
At at that point, there were, yes. There was a female registrar. When Bruce became assistant director, he thought he could be both assistant director and vet, and when he ended up in the hospital, he realized they needed to hire somebody else and so the head vet was a… Read More
Were there other women in senior staff positions?… Read More
You’d say, well, which animal is that?… Read More
They couldn’t tell their animals apart. I wasn’t used to that. That was difficult to get used to. But no, Ken Kawata was not a popular general curator, so I think the fact that I wasn’t Ken and I was coming around, helped, helped me. Everybody thought Ken, that Dr. Read More
And I’d worked with Bruce as a vet when he was a vet. Read More
Were there issues you had to overcome?… Read More
And if so, how did you do that?… Read More
Not really. The keepers, it was a very different group of keepers because when I started, in order to be hired as a keeper at the Milwaukee County Zoo, you had to live within Milwaukee County. So most of them had no animal experience at all. I mean, they just,… Read More
Yeah, there was a, that’s a, yes, the county sup, they were all unionized. So. But the federal keepers were unionized too. There was a federal union. Read More
All union?… Read More
So did the older staff accept you as their boss?… Read More
And so that was a big learning curve (chuckles) on how to schedule and make sure that every area was covered. They had keepers who worked different units and then keepers who were known as rovers who went in between all the units. Read More