They had maybe 40 zoos. There weren’t many zoos in the United States at that time. There were very few aquariums. And he put this roster out. And when Pierre Fontaine, my boss Pierre, called me at home, said, “Come, I have something to show you.” And it was this… Read More
The Dallas Aquarium, Pierre Fontinee, director, (laughs) Lawrence Curtis, assistant curator. So I was, I had gotten a title. And I did everything there, signs, setting up exhibits, did all that. And when I got graduated, when I got my master’s degree at SMU, the park director, the park director,… Read More
I was, oh! I have to tell you, AAZPA. I had been in correspondence with, well, Karl P. Schmidt, whom we were talking about last night night at the Field Museum. Roger Conant, he was at the Philadelphia Zoo, curator of reptiles, and I had sent him a number of… Read More
Now, did you go from that position to another position at the aquarium?… Read More
Also Chris Coates, another big name in aquariums. But Roger, and we had an awful lot of correspondence. And he was really studying water snakes at the time. And we had, I guess six different species within 100 miles of Dallas. So we had these relationships. I think it was… Read More
Absolutely. My first job. I was almost 15, and I went to the aquarium. And the director there said, “If you want to, you can bring your snakes out here.” See, they had been banished from the little townlet, University Park. So I was gonna bring my snakes out there. Read More
If you can get a mentor at that age, it’s a wonderful way of getting into any field, I think particularly zoo. And I’ve got wonderful experience there. Read More
And so Pierre Fontaine offered me the job. Man, I was delighted. Pay was pretty good, 45 cents an hour. But got all the weekend hours, and I took that job. From then through high school and through college, I worked there. And I would, Fontiane was a big mentor… Read More
So the witness, it was a Boy Scout camp. And the head scout master, he thought, this is wonderful. I mean, this is a great demonstration, because these kids need to know how to you know, what to look for. He couldn’t see the snake. And I had, you know… Read More
Was that your first zoo slash aquarium into the profession job?… Read More
Now I was about 13. Things like that happened. And oh, my mother had to drive from Galveston to, she must have hit 80 miles an hour, she said. And oh, and they gave me antivenom, and the bite was not bad, the bites. And that’s the only time I’ve… Read More
This was at Galveston, Texas, during the great war. And we were living back there again. My father was in the air force in England. I would go out in the field. We caught king snakes, we caught ribbon snakes. I even got into, I shouldn’t have, but caught a… Read More
They had in one bag, they said a copperhead. And so that was one of my, that was my payment, these snakes. And so I was getting ready to give my lecture, and I decided, well, I’ll use this copperhead. ‘Cause they’ve caught it, the kids had caught it. And… Read More
I didn’t catch it, but I had to buy it from a man in Brownsville. They called him the Snake King. And I used to get snakes from him. And that just built and built. After three or four years of that, I mean, I even had a coral snake. Read More
But he had his own collection of snakes. Read More
Ditmars was a prolific writer, and he was a good writer. And he made all this, he wrote about the “Snakes of the World.” That was my first book by him. I poured over that book. I could tell you… In fact, if you haven’t read it, it’s got the… Read More
And when the Bronx Zoo was started, and built their reptile house, who would they hire as curator of reptiles but Raymond Lee Ditmars?… Read More
I know you were collecting other things, but how did that real interest in collecting snakes start?… Read More
You obviously, at a young age knew a lot about them. I mean, more than the average kid. Well, I got started in snakes the way many kids at that time got started. And it started in a zoo. It started at the Bronx Zoo where their curator of reptiles,… Read More
And I would say that my schooling, especially at SMU, I had not been a very good academic student in high school. I was too busy with my snakes, I guess. And of course the, you know, females of the opposite sex, not snakes, but people, girls. But when I… Read More