Well, conservation is an expensive sport. Many years ago, we used to brag. We being Riverbanks used to brag to ourselves and to our colleagues that, you know, we donated a thousand dollars to painted dog conservation in Botswana. Now they sneeze at a thousand dollars. It’s expensive. You have… Read More
Well, talking about that, what skillset does a zoo director need today as compared to when you started?… Read More
Phew. Well, when I started, and let’s, so I started in ’73. Let’s go back maybe 10 years before I started. So 10 years before I started through about five or six or so years after I started, 90% of the zoo directors only knew how to do, were only… Read More
I hired the best people I could given the restraints that I had, which were salary. But I hired the very best people I could, and I let them do their job. I also kept my board, which we called a commission. I was a good communicator, and by that,… Read More
And while I’m being criticizing myself, I have a very short attention span. And so I have staff meetings and they’re all sitting around the table and they’re giving reports, and then there’s silence. And I look and they’re all looking at me. And somebody will say, “You know, we’re… Read More
If I was a baseball player in the Hall of Fame, I could tell you what my statistics were. I can’t do that. It’s just, it’s a… You’re a work in progress, you know, and you just, every day you come to work, you try to be a little bit… Read More
You can do it first thing in the morning. You can do it after lunch, which is when I normally do it. You can do it at the end of the day. But do it. Make sure the staff sees you. Speak, it gives you an opportunity to interact with… Read More
What do you think made you a good zoo director?… Read More
Hmm, I don’t know. I have a very inquisitive mind. I read a lot. I observe, I traveled all over the world. Every time I went somewhere, especially to another zoo, I tried to find as many things as I could to bring back home and implement at Riverbanks. The… Read More
What zoo director goes on rounds?… Read More
I did it every day till the day I retired. The day I retired, I went on rounds. And for me, unlike our, some of our German colleagues who when they go on rounds, they go on rounds. They go on all the backups. I went on the public side. Read More
I said, “Come with me. Let me show you what I see.” And I would say, “Okay, this, this, this.” “Well, how did you see that?” And I guess it’s this innate thing that I had and others have. But when I left that last day, I went on rounds,… Read More
And the first one is, how important do you think it is for zoo directors to make rounds of their zoo, and did you do that?… Read More
I have a friend named Mike Zulat, who used to make fun of me because he would call for whatever reason to talk, and I would say, “Look, I gotta go on rounds.” He thought it was the funniest thing he had ever heard in his life. Read More
Let’s build a botanical garden. So we hired one of the country’s preeminent botanical garden firms out of Pittsburgh, and they designed a master plan for the garden, the initial phase. And I went back to the county and I said, “Okay, I’m ready. I need six million bucks.” It… Read More
It was kind of a bad decision that he made that ended up being a good decision in that had we built picnic tables or whatever we would have built on that property 40 years or 50 years ago, that probably all that would’ve ever been there. Now we got… Read More
Let me digress a bit from your zoo to a number of questions that are essentially what’s your opinion?… Read More
And I’ve got this bond issue. We built the reptile house. All that was looking good. And now I want to do another bond issue. (laughs) I want to make some more additions to the zoo. And I went over to that county and to lobby and try to garner… Read More
So I got the staff together and the Zoo Commission, and what are we gonna do?… Read More
You know, I don’t, there’s no bridge, there’s no way to get there. And the zoo is located on the south bank of the river, and it’s relatively flat land. The property that- And we had property over there. The local utility that had given those little acreage of land… Read More