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
This was in the early ’80s. And we designed the building that we still use to this day. It needs work, but anyway, it was a good building for a long time. And the significance of that is that I had never been involved. When the zoo was constructed, I… 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
And the gorilla exhibit in particular, it was showing that you didn’t need. You could have moats, but then you could have landscaping. And I was just and I saw it, I saw it. I went and saw it, and I was just, this is the greatest thing I’ve ever… Read More
Well, he just, he became obsessed with that concept. So when he designed the bird house, and he had a team of two local architects, and he would say, “This is what I want you to do.” There was never any, “Hey, have you thought?” No, that didn’t happen. He… Read More
It was just a mess. The building was rotting. It was awful. And that’s just one example of flaws that were throughout. Because he didn’t know. He didn’t know any better. And he wouldn’t listen to anybody. Now I don’t think another zoo person set foot on that site till… Read More
He wouldn’t, he didn’t want them to come. He didn’t want any zoo directors to come. So I spent 10 years basically fixing that. But within that 10 years, my first project was an education building. And I hired the same architects. They were good guys. I hired them, but… Read More
He did not have a single consultant. I learned over the years that he had virtually no experience in mammals and birds, but yet he built these exhibits. And all of them, almost every one of them had major design flaws in them. So, from that time in becoming director… Read More
But the bird house was the centerpiece. It was an icon. It was huge. It was 30,000 square feet. And to this day, again, everything in that original zoo was built in an oriental motif and was painted red and black, from the administration building to the snack bars to… Read More