And I think that has hurt a number of programs that I thought were good programs. The other change is when you look at staffing nowadays, and I’ve had this conversation with a lot of my peers in the past, is I think we didn’t do our job in mentoring… Read More
What do you think is the biggest change in the zoo profession over the past decade?… Read More
And I said, well, yeah, I’ll do that, but I’ll do it under a contractual basis, not as an employee. You wanna contract me, I’ll, I’ll do that. But I work directly with you and I don’t work with certain other departments that had, I thought were kind of hindering… Read More
And so I did that for a year and the contract was over and I left, moved down to Georgia happy. Read More
And he, I said, like, what?… Read More
And he said, would you design some things for us?… Read More
And he said, well, would you consider doing special projects?… Read More
I’ll make it easy on you. I’ve been thinking about retiring, I’ll retire. And he sat on that for a while. Nick back says, no, I don’t know that you need to do that. I said, no, Mike, I am, I’m retiring, I’m tired, you know, I wanna, I wanna… Read More
And I finally said, you know what, Mike?… Read More
You know, I said, I, I don’t have a problem with the relationship, but he, he kind of hesitated a little bit, which I understand that’s kind of a tough position to be in. And he was getting a lot of pressure from the board about changes that they wanted… Read More
And so they brought Mike in and I kind of went in one day and I said, well, you know, congratulations, this is really great. Read More
What are you gonna do with me now?… Read More
You don’t have a reptile building because Ray Polly and his reptile building had been closed and became an education center, which was great. They needed that. So I revamped that and, but I could tell that it, as far as that master plan that was there, it wasn’t gonna… Read More
It’s like, why do I have two bird buildings?… Read More
One, I was tired. I was, I was 71 years old at the time. And it’s like, you know, I think I’ve been at this long enough and we were having a lot of maintenance issues because these big old buildings been historical and trying to keep ’em up. I… Read More
Because I knew the challenges involved at the time changing culture at the zoo, substantial changing culture things we’d talked about then. No one believed in an ambassador program. No one put hands on animals, you know, and they, and unfortunately they’d not been mentored, and a lot of ’em… Read More
And I came in and to his office one day and said, well, here’s what I would do, and it, it’s gonna create a lot of changes if I do this. Oh, okay, okay. We’re still searching, but that’s good to know. And about six months later, he calls me… Read More
And I, I told him, I said, well, can I think about it?… Read More
And of course during that time, Stewart was going, what’s your assessment?… Read More
And I said, well, yeah, I’m not traveling. Okay. So I went in and worked with Kim for about a month before she left and then was acting GC of the zoo. Read More