We did the sea lion pool. We built Lion’s Trace where we got the big cats. Out of the barred exhibits. We had over the years limited it down instead of having so many species. We only had five “cages,” of barred cages so you could – and four species… Read More
How difficult was it to move those exhibits forward in a parks department situation?… Read More
It took a lot longer than we wanted. The Friends of Glen Oak Zoo were raising money. It took some doing to get some of the park district people on board to help with it. So we were able to get the superintendent of parks at the time involved enough… Read More
Did you want to build new exhibits and get rid of the bars?… Read More
We did. It was… At the time Chuck had started a friends group. And so there were, and they had a board. And they had started raising money. You know, they contributed a few thousand dollars. Got some money to do some graphics. We built the eagle cage which worked… Read More
But. They weren’t huge fundraisers. It wasn’t the movers and shakers that you really need if you’re gonna expand. So we had Zoo Days and Zoo Run runs. All the normal things like that. But the expense of trying to do new displays, you had to at the time do… Read More
Did you start that as a volunteer program?… Read More
That one was under Chuck’s. We had some volunteers at the time. We expanded it a lot. Again, we developed more of the docents that would help do educational programming. And then there were some that would be working with the animal keepers. But yeah, it helped a lot to… Read More
So yeah, it’s more communications again. Read More
Did you also have volunteers?… Read More
We did. Read More
Who started that?… Read More
So sometimes you felt like a mom. Read More
And sometimes you felt like a friend and sometimes you were the boss and just said hey, this is what we gotta do, you know?… Read More
Whether it was my decision or it was passed down. You could grumble about it, but this is the way it is and you just do the best you can with what you got and you keep moving forward. You mentioned that you had part-time keepers. Read More
Come back in an hour. Read More
(laughs) You know?… Read More
And now I’ve gotta call the director of parks and let him know this is coming up and he thought I was kidding and I’m like we’re not kidding. You know, and we had to do some research and come up with a plan of how we were gonna attack… Read More
So you’re the director. Read More
How would you describe your management style?… Read More