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
But this one young man walked into my office. He had just like two weeks before graduated from Clemson University, of which I am also a graduate, in horticulture, and he had done an internship at Disney. And I thought, “Well, this kid, he doesn’t, he’d never been to a… Read More
We had all these long, wide sidewalks with steel handrails, and he convinced me to cut down the steel handrails, cut curves in the sidewalk, put in more natural material like split-rail fences and things, and planted it stem to stern. And within about two years, I was getting more… Read More
Well, we’re not called Riverbanks Zoo for anything. We’re on the banks of a very big river with no bridge, no way to get over there, back then. Plus Mehrtens spent all of the money on the zoo in its location and wouldn’t spend any money across the river. So… Read More
Can you tell me something about botanical garden and the horticulture and how the zoo was involved in that?… Read More
Yes. In addition to being involved in the AZA, I also was a member of the World Zoo and Aquarium Association, WAZA. Ultimately became chair of that board as well, which was not a lot of fun. But I went to a WASA conference. I want to say Antwerp, but… Read More
Was in the middle of this massive city, tall buildings all around. And you walk in, and a small zoo, few acres, and you’re in an oasis. And they did something I had never seen before, which was vertical horticulture. They had planted walls, and it was just the most… Read More