Mehrtens did not go quietly into the good night, and he just kept writing letters to the editor. He would give speeches at civic clubs and other places where the media would cover. And he was making all these incredible… He turned on me and said I’d stabbed him in… Read More
And we sat on this, I sat down on the tree and he just paced back and forth, told me the history of his life and all this kind of personal things. And then finally he said, “You know, I’m gonna keep my job.” He said, “I’m outta here I… Read More
And he said, “I figure you got three choices.” He said, “If you want to-” He said, “I want-” He had had a meeting in his apartment with me and about 10 others on Wednesday night, the day they told him he was fired. And he told us all, we… Read More
There were reporters out there. There were TV crews. It was awful. And he sought me out and he said, “I want you, the maintenance supervisor, maintenance and construction supervisor, and the business manager to be co-directors of the zoo until we hire somebody.” I said okay, knowing that the… Read More
On Wednesday, they fired him and said, as a lot of boards have done and people have done, which is, we know is dead wrong, “All right, this is Wednesday, but five o’clock Friday, you’re out of here.” So he had basically two days of wreaking havoc on the zoo… Read More
We’d all been avoiding him. And he was in his office with personal friends trying to broker deals to keep this job, which he had no, he for the last year or months he had had zero interest in doing. Now all of a sudden, “I want my job.” We… Read More
It was just, you know, tiger didn’t have, he had a roar but he didn’t have any teeth. And it was just a bizarre several months. And during that time, myself, the gentleman whose title was business manager, and the maintenance supervisor who really was the construction manager, ’cause the… Read More
It was a terrible, terrible time. And so, like I said, February, March, the rumors were just flying rampant that he was not gonna make it, and sure enough, I got a call one day. Actually I got a call at home at night from the gentleman who was the… Read More
That they would give him a very nice exit package, financial. They would have a dinner in his honor. There would be gifts, key to the city, all this stuff. Just please go away. He left that meeting and drove to a friend of his whose wife was a reporter… Read More
How did you ascend to becoming director at Riverbanks?… Read More
So… I guess around February or March of 1973, Mehrtens was almost totally alienated from the commission that he worked for. The year before, they had… He and his wife had an incredibly complex relationship. They really fed off of each other’s egos and whatever. They said she can’t work… Read More
He just, this thing that he had been consumed with, and he was consumed with building his zoo, as he called it, almost overnight, he lost interest. It was like a dog with a ball that would chase the ball all over, then one day didn’t want to chase the… Read More
So let’s talk about how did you go that final step and become zoo director?… Read More
Did they do a national search to replace this first director?… Read More
Well, when I attended my first AAZPA national meeting, which I think was in 1974. It was either ’73 or ’74. I do know it was in Baltimore. The entire… The entire conference… Let me be sure. So you had a conference, you had a schedule, you had papers and… Read More
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