And understand he had us believing that he was one of the most famous zoo directors in the country, if not in the world. Or that his reputation was less than sterling in the zoos that he had worked in prior to Riverbanks as a reptile curator. And he had… Read More
So, can you, can you…… Read More
And we had stainless steel. I have this mental picture right now. We had these stainless steel feeding pans, and the mangoes were in one little pile and the blueberries were in a pile and the celery was in a pile. So he was, I guess the first, and we’re… Read More
And it was over 10 years later when the animal collection was two or three times bigger and more sophisticated than it was when I became director before we ever spent that much money on animal food budget in a year. That’s how crazy it had become in terms, and… Read More
How did he treat the staff?… Read More
Well, let’s talk about the diets and one other thing that he had in common. For some reason that only he would have known or knew, he had a really interesting habit when he obtained animals, mammals, mammals, of getting one male and two females. Didn’t matter the biology of… Read More
And the saki monkey’s daily diet had 19 different fruits and vegetables in it. And he would not allow, and by then we had a actual, we had a commissary supervisor, retired army sergeant. And he could not buy… You know, restaurants, for example, will buy blemished vegetables and fruits… Read More
Absolutely not. Mehrtens ran- At that time, from the spring-summer of ’73 until ’76, April of ’76 when he was actually fired, he had 100% control of the animal collection. He purchased the animals. He developed the diets for the animals, which is a whole another story. He wrote out… Read More
You talked about the diets. Read More
What were you, what was the story of the diets?… Read More
They could have easily been flown. That was the way they were being moved at the time. But again, I think it showed he didn’t know. He thought that’s what he was supposed to do so. And I’m sure the dealers took a nice cut of whatever the fee was… Read More
Now at the same time, were you able, were you tasked with getting other animals or traveling?… Read More
Or were other people in your staff- Were other people in the staff that were working for him and the zoo tasked with getting additional animals overseas?… Read More
I should go back to college and go back to my professor, Sid Gauthreaux. He had parlayed… There was a little- Clemson campus was a big campus, but he had managed to parlay an old building, a little brick building right smack dab in the middle of the campus. And… Read More
And I learned to be a cynic in that room, (laughs) and I’ve been a cynic all my life. And that trip sort of cemented the fact that, you know, this man who had held himself out, John Mehrtens, as a world’s expert and authority on everything having to do… Read More
And Mehrtens by that time had burned a lot of bridges with the community, with local political leaders, and with his own, with the Zoo Commission. And… Well, let me go back to your trip with getting the tigers. Read More
What lessons did you take away from that?… Read More
Well, (laughs) first of all, I learned there was a big world out there. I think the only place I’d ever been prior to that was the state of Florida. My father didn’t like to travel, and so as a kid growing up, the only place he would go, take… Read More
No, I was general curator. That would have been sometime in, like I said, that would have been right around the time the zoo opened in April of ’74. Things, the zoo went south very quickly. Going all the way back, all the way back to that group of gentlemen… Read More
There was no zoo, there was no revenue. So they would sort of… Mehrtens would on a piece of paper kind of figure out what he thought he needed to pay these people working in horticulture, in the maintenance department, and pay the electric bill. Then divide it by three,… Read More