So I can’t say… I can’t honestly say that at that still early point in my life and career, I had formed a lot of opinions about zoos. I knew I didn’t want to deal with animal dealers. I had been burned too many times. So I started pulling back… Read More
He was the president or director of the Pittsburgh Zoo Society. And he taught a class on, his class was on revenue. And we had a class where we learned that you had to pop popcorn all day so that people smelled it and would buy more, and you had… Read More
I think he was actually an attorney talking about human resources, and I soaked that in like a sponge. That guy was, he was fabulous. But now I knew some directors and people that I would call on the phone and just shoot the breeze with, which was kind of… Read More
My best friend in high school had died of a cocaine overdose, and I wanted, decided I was gonna be a DEA agent. So I’d gone to the post office and was in the process of filling out an application to work for the DEA when they fired Mehrtens. You… Read More
Well, let me back up. So I became director in the fall of ’76, which was the first year that the AAZPA had a management school in Wheeling, West Virginia. And the management school, the philosophy behind the establishment of the AAZPA Management School was to teach business skills to… Read More
Some of them I didn’t know at all. But then I got to meet some zoo directors. And, you know, you’re locked up in Wheeling, West Virginia, and there ain’t a whole lot to do, you know, after five o’clock, after you get out of class than sit around and… Read More
I mean, the zoo was my life. My wife and I got married on a Saturday, and I was at work Monday morning. I was a workaholic because I felt responsible. I felt totally responsible for the zoo. And I just knew I couldn’t keep doing that. So in a… Read More
I hired, what else?… Read More
Education curator. So that all took place over about an 18-month to 2-year period of time that I went from being chief cook and bottle washer to now I had people who knew more about what they were doing than I did. And that… That sort of helped me. That… Read More
I would like to think so. Read More
Were you forming your own philosophy about zoo management now?… Read More
No, I was forming a staff. Even though… All right, not even though. Because I had no managerial, no managerial experience, I was a bad manager. I was, you know, my role model, if you want to call it that, was John Mehrtens. So I was pretty dictatorial. I was,… Read More
The election, the wording on the ballot was, “Do you wish to be taxed to support Riverbanks Zoo?” And it passed by the narrowest of margins. So these four guys took it upon themselves to have a meeting with their counterparts in Richland County. And with the mayor, we were… Read More
And they agreed, this is how we’re gonna fund the zoo, and we’re gonna make it a millage agency. We’re gonna assess local property taxes to fund the zoo’s operating budget. And as I tell people, this was now three years after I’d been director. So for three years I… Read More
We’ve been giving you this money voluntarily, but we’re not gonna keep doing this. And this was the two counties and the city. One of the two counties, Lexington County, had historically been- Remember this is the South. This county had historically been, it was literally the oth- It wasn’t… Read More
And they were the ones putting the most pressure on the zoo, saying, “This isn’t what we do. We don’t fund zoos. You gotta fix this.” Fortunately for us, there was a major shift in state government, where power transferred from the state legislature to local governments. Prior to the… Read More
We’re gonna have county councils and city councils, and we’re gonna have mayors, and they’re gonna do the work of the people. That rural county, Lexington County, held its first election right about the time Mehrtens was fired. And they elected, by single member districts, four young guys who all… Read More
You’re not making enough money to pay salaries, feed the animals, do all that you, keep the lights on. You’re not making enough money. Read More
Where’s that money, where’s the balance gonna come from?… Read More
But I got on the phone with other people and said, “Look, let me tell you what we’re feeding saki monkeys.” And they’d laugh, you know, you gotta be kidding me, you know. So I slashed the food budget probably three-fourths with no impact on animal health or on animal… Read More