Walked all the way through it. With $40,000 worth of stuff in it. And Diana was saying, “I hope to God, he doesn’t get in that gift shop.” And guess what, he opened that door, and got right in there. He never touched anything. Read More
It was successful. For many years. For a long time. But it got to the point where the docents were wanting to run the zoo. For example, here’s a good example, all they thought the gorillas needed something to play with, so they put an oil drum without me knowing… Read More
Did that prove to be a successful project with the docents?… Read More
They were the ambassadors. What they were able to do was to meet the public and they walked around with a rabbit or a turtle or something like that. They had a meeting and I taught classes to them for a long time. Read More
What did you want the docents to do Pat?… Read More
He started a zoo docent program from the very beginning, he started a docent program before we even opened. We had docents and he had meetings with them at least once a week, training program for the docents. Read More
There was no experienced zoo staff there, they had to be trained there by me. So did you- I get a little bit distorted when I see an intelligent person put four pounds of feed in for a one pound bird, so I notice things like that. Or putting the… Read More
Now, you had to recruit staff to take care of the animals, how did you go about doing that?… Read More
He took care for nothing for years, Bud did that for years. Read More
The Citizens and People’s National Bank bought the elephant and then donated it to us. They paid $20,000 or something like that for the elephant. Goodness, we had all kinds of businesses. Even though we were for profit, it was interesting, we were for profit, but Pat got lots of… Read More
That’s before we even had any- Beisa oryx. Beisa oryx Before we even had pens. No, it was scimitar horned oryx. The scimitar, excuse me. And that was our symbol, scimitar horned oryx was our logo type thing in the very beginning. And these animals were running on the whole… Read More
Our first animals were the beisa oryx, remember?… Read More
Some of them were donated, Earl Tatum loaned me some animals to put in there. He was always bringing stuff in and taking stuff out. Read More
Where did you acquire the animals for the zoo?… Read More
Well, there was a problem, I wanted to get into the wetlands area and there were some problems. I was supposed to go to the Army Corps of Engineers or some damn thing, and I decided against that. So I built pond and paid the guys $12,000 to build it. Read More
In building the zoo, were there problems that you encountered in putting together a brand new zoo?… Read More
Well, I had been to other zoos, yes. But I didn’t really go to other zoos to get a plan. What I wanted to do there, I pretty well knew what I wanted to do. But like the giraffe feeding tower that we built, you got that idea from safari,… Read More
Did you visit other zoos for ideas?… Read More
Yes. He showed me some things that I needed to do to have a back run to the back where the animals could go into stay in the zoo but they can go inside the barns. So that was a good move, and Earl talked to me about that. You… Read More
You ever heard of rotatum?… Read More