I was assigned horticulture, which I did for about four or five months. Had a ball. My salary was $6,750 a year. That was my first salary. And I had an apartment. Life was good. And one day I was out in the zoo working with the horticulture department. And… Read More
And I had had very little contact with him because I was working in horticulture. The contact I had had with him was not always pleasant. He was not a good manager of people. But I reported to his office and he said, first words out of his mouth, he… Read More
That trip, which I think about all the time, was a very life-changing experience. And when I say life-changing, not because of the experience of taking care of two tigers, but by what had transpired with Mehrtens and animal dealers before, during, and after the trip. He actually had been… Read More
I’m not sure what, but anyway, he had been involved, John Mehrtens was a… He was a reptile guy. His entire career had been reptiles. And so he had been involved in the very first sea turtle sort of conservation project in South Carolina on a little island called Fripp… Read More
And then we turned them over to DNR, who put them on a ship, a boat, and took them out to the Gulf Stream and released them. That was called headstarting, and that was abandoned soon after as being ridiculously labor-intensive for saving only a few turtles. But anyway, it… Read More
So I worked in the horticulture department, planting trees and shrubs and clearing brush and doing this stuff out in the zoo site. There were only two departments at the time. There was the horticulture department and the art department, and those were the only two groups of employees. And… Read More
And she says, “This kid over here wants to talk to you about this letter.” And he said, “Well, come on in here.” So we go in and sit down in his office, and he again reiterates the fact that he needs this technician, and he says, “When can you… Read More
I need you to start.” I said, “Well, I have another year of school.” And he said, “Well, I need you to start before then.” And I’m thinking, “There’s no zoo out there, you know. You don’t have any animals.” And he says, “Well, I’m gonna go ahead and tell… Read More
And I go back into the office, which is now a building and now the office that I ultimately worked in for 43 years. And again he tells me that the animals are gonna be arriving anytime now, and you need to be ready, you know, for that phone call… Read More
And then I remembered that several months before, you know, I had gone. I thought, “Well, this is just very strange.” I didn’t answer the letter, but a few weeks later, I went home, got in my car, drove back down, and now there was construction going up. A lot… Read More
You don’t have an appointment, and you’re just gonna have to come back.” And I said, “Well, I can’t do that. I’m going back to school, you know.” So she said, “Well, sit over there, just wait.” Well, about 30 minutes later, the door opens and here he comes out,… Read More
And he told me basically I was trespassing and turn myself around and go, and for some unknown reason, we just, he started telling me about the zoo, his dream for the zoo. Well, as the conversation went on, you know, I told him that I was majoring in zoology… Read More
He didn’t think zoos needed full-time veterinarians, but he needed a veterinary technician, and would I be interested in the job?… Read More
I said, “Sure,” but I could’ve cared less, you know. So I left. Forgot all about it. So about four or five months later, I go to the campus mailbox and open it up, and there was this green envelope, and in the up, addressed to me, and in the… Read More
And honestly, I had to think a minute about why was I getting this letter?… Read More
But anyway I woke up the next morning in my parents’ home, and the newspaper was there. And I picked up the paper, and on like the third or fourth page of the paper was a little article about two inches long about how the zoo in Columbia was coming… Read More
there’s a railroad track and a pine and- A railroad track, a transmission, a set of high power transmission lines, and a pine forest. That’s the zoo. That’s what I see. So I drove over the railroad track over a dirt road and under the power lines, cars going back… Read More
Columbia got the second century, and then Greenville got the third century. Columbia could not decide what to do, what to build. And they had a number of projects they explored. None of them seemed to resonate. And these men, these gentlemen tried to take advantage of that and say,… Read More
And in 1969, when I would have been a freshman in college, the state of South Carolina created something called the Rich-Lex Riverbanks Parks Special Purpose District. The Rich-Lex are abbreviations for Richland County and Lexington County. Now the two counties are divided by a river, and those two counties,… Read More
90-plus percent of them serve two purposes, either fire protection in rural areas or water and sewer districts in rural areas, with a smattering of other kind of unique things like airports, a couple of hospitals. So the legislature, the delegation from Richland and Lexington County took advantage of that… Read More