They had a lot of money. They threw the money around. They had hospitality suites. They took their zoo director clients to expensive, fancy restaurants, and they were a major force within the profession. There were three who dominated the zoo business in terms of providing animals. One in New… Read More
And by the time I became, I won’t say by the time I became director, but certainly two to three years after that, we were not using animal dealers anymore. Maybe occasionally, maybe occasionally for birds, but we weren’t using dealers. Okay, so we’ve talked about there was a director… Read More
Did the zoo and did you continue as the zoo was building and even when you later became the head of the zoo to deal with animal dealers?… Read More
Can you relate how?… Read More
And what place at that time do you think animal dealers held within the profession?… Read More
Did your personality help you in running the zoo and these people that you were tasked with managing?… Read More
That’s a great question. I think so. I mean, I… After being with Mehrtens for about a year, I guess organically (laughs) I began to act and manage completely differently than he did. He said A, I thought B. So the staff, the keepers that I was managing I think… Read More
So I know… I don’t know, that’s a great question. I think… I think the staff was anxious to have somebody who was a cheerleader for them and who had their back, and that that was me, mainly due to the position that he had put me in. You talked… Read More
There was just one other curator. There was a curator of birds. Actually, Dennis Decoursey who worked here at Brookfield after he left Riverbanks. And there again is an interesting look into Mehrtens’ personality. He had a strange habit of meeting people at AAZPA meetings, either regionals or national meetings,… Read More
I became Dennis’ boss. We still did not have a full-time veterinarian. We didn’t have a full-time veterinarian until two or three years after I became director. We had a local small animal practitioner who was the veterinarian of record. Read More
How was the staff, the zoo staff originally then?… Read More
You were the general, you were the curator of mammals. Read More
Was there a curator of birds and reptiles and other support things?… Read More
Terrible. He never. (laughs) He had a reputation. Let me, so here I am. I’m the mammal curator with no experience. So he would, say, contact or be in touch with the Lincoln Park Zoo, and he would agree to purchase, again, this was 1973, some saki monkeys from the… Read More
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