They looked at states that had no marine mammal exhibits, aquariums, whatever and that had weak, dare I say easily influenced state legislatures, and they picked South Carolina. So they got a bill introduced into the state legislature that to ban the exhibition of marine mammals in South Carolina. When… Read More
HSUS brought in their experts, and lo and behold, it passed. So to this day, (laughs) you can’t exhibit marine mammals in South Carolina, which was kind of interesting when the last thing I built was a $17 million sea lion exhibit. And I had to go back and work… Read More
So let’s say the mayor said, “I want to paint the elephants purple.” He only had two votes on the Zoo Commission, so that would never happen. So when they, it took them a while to realize. It took, when I say they, when somebody got elected to one of… Read More
Now during your time, your extended time of 43 years at the zoo at the helm, what was your relationship to animal rights groups and humane society groups over the years, and develop a philosophy about dealing with them and… I can summarize that in two words. The South. (laughs)… Read More
You know, I don’t think there was ever. Never say never. I’m not aware of a PETA chapter in South Carolina. We had a very weak HSUS. I thought we had a very weak HSUS presence, but I learned the hard way that we didn’t. I don’t know what year… Read More
We had a huge anti-property tax movement. I think it swept the whole country, started in California. And those people who were elected, they had a group called We the People. They ran a lot of people for local office, and a lot of them got elected on the platform… Read More
There were other, you know, nonprofits and other agencies within the Midlands, we call the middle of South Carolina the Midlands, who were having to teach these people that, you know, when you call 911 and you need an ambulance, it’s gotta show up, you know. And so they were… Read More
They were more in line of the true public servant than some of these yahoos that didn’t want to raise taxes, and I dealt with that until the day I retired. Thankfully, I had no involvement. I say no, virtually no involvement in state government. State legislature had nothing to… Read More
From?… Read More
Oh boy, I learned a lot. Mainly not to trust a politician. I think I learned what everybody’s learned who’s lobbied any elected official, either from the president of the United States down to a local city council. They’re a different breed of people. When I became director and even… Read More
And I was, I just loved it. I loved the construction. I loved the meetings with the architects. I loved the design process. And they were all huge hits. So in 1986, we had 460,000 visitors. In calendar year 1990, we had 1,012,000 visitors. So we almost tripled attendance. Read More
All right, you indicated, you said, I learned things from lobbying. Read More
What did you learn?… Read More
We had horrible guest amenities. We had two little tiny snack bars and an 800-square-foot gift shop. And the food that we served out of that was horrible. And that was my single biggest complaint. I hated Monday mornings because I’d have a stack of pink slips from the weekend… Read More
And I hired the firm of CLR that was an offshoot of Jones and Jones. At the time, they were called Coe Lee, Jon Coe and Gary Lee. And with the staff, we sat down at a table for several sessions over a period of a few months and came… Read More
Oh, we built a new entrance. I actually relocated the entrance. Our ticket, we had two little ticket windows, and lines would form, you know, half a block long trying to get in the zoo ’cause we only had two ticket windows. Plus the entrance that was in the original… Read More
So I needed six votes here, and I needed five votes here. I needed 11 people to raise their hand, and I could get untold millions of dollars. And I did all of the lobbying for that. Let me go back. The Zoo Commission had been through holy hell with… Read More
And I said, “I want to do a bond issue. I want to expand the zoo.” And I told them what I thought would work, and I developed that with the staff. We needed reptiles. Every day, people came, “Where are the snakes, where are the snakes, where are the… Read More
Where are the snakes, where are the snakes?… Read More
So I immersed myself in the construction. And I loved it. I just loved it. And that had a profound impact on me. It was, hey, you could dream of something, and then it gets built. There it is, you did it, you know. I had a lot of help,… Read More