Interview 22877 – Caption Index: 204
And at what point did you change titles and responsibilities?… Read More
And at what point did you change titles and responsibilities?… Read More
Were there other women in senior staff positions?… 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
So were you, when you were there, getting used to things, were you learning from anybody specifically, leaning on anybody?… 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
All union?… 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
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
What number of staff did you now manage approximately?… Read More
Hmm, God, I don’t know. A lot of ’em. Let’s see, probably 30, 40 people. Read More
And what were your new responsibilities?… Read More
Different from the National Zoo?… Read More
Yes, because at that point, they had a curator of birds and a curator of reptiles. And then the, so I basically had all the mammals at that point. And I scheduled all the keepers, and this is before computers, so that was, you know, sitting there with pieces of… Read More
I can’t remember who the third one was who interviewed me. It was a very strange process ’cause you went to the interview. All the three, there were three finalists there. We all interviewed the same day. They offered me the job that day and I had to say yes… Read More