Please stay out of this, just give us your blessing and just stay out of the way and let the people decide. I do believe that they were all very surprised when it passed because I don’t think they really understood how popular the institution was with the tax payers. Read More
Did it come from the city fathers?… Read More
Was the sales tax idea your idea, was it a group thing?… Read More
Did it come from the commission?… Read More
They dropped it off 100,000 for each year. So, by the end of three years, we didn’t get any more money from the city. So, we had to generate our own. So, obviously we started looking at revenue centers. We started balancing that with the capital expenses in terms of… Read More
Just that overnight. So, when we and this was a tax against a sales tax for Oklahoma County and the county would collect the money, give it to the city and then the city would dole it out to the trust but nobody else could touch it. It was the… Read More
We had recognized if we had the money, what we would do. So, when we got the money, the next morning I was on the phone to a contractor about let’s get our to the City Planning Committee, let’s get this out, let’s get it in bid form. Let’s start… Read More
The economy kept plummeting. People didn’t have the spendable dollars they used to have. And as a result, we were having a hard time attracting people to the zoo. They just weren’t gonna spend the money to do that. So, we started looking at other ways of funding the institution. Read More
And so, that was not going to happen. Bond issues were mainly for capital expenses. They weren’t supporting operational issues. So, that left only one possibility and that was the sales tax. So, I guess in the fall of 1989, an effort was made to put together a referendum for… Read More
We put together plans, we worked the plans. We made the effort to change the institution in appearance first because that way people could see what was being done and not just saying, “Well, we’re doing this program or we’re doing that program.” They aren’t interested in programs. We wanna… Read More
The responsibilities as they were lined out to me were that we needed to get the zoo back online. Actually the zoo in Oklahoma City was like the Bird Department in St. Louis at the time. It was broken and it needed to be fixed. There were a lot of… Read More
You tell us what we need to do. And they were pretty good about that at in the beginning. And so, we started working ’cause we didn’t have a lot of money. We started doing just cosmetic changes. New coat of paint can do a lot for an old building. Read More
Your responsibilities of executive director, were they given to you in a piece of paper or was it okay, you’re in charge, make it happen?… Read More
By the time I left, it took me almost an hour to get to work. So, it was totally different. And so, it was a bigger zoo. And then when you go to Oklahoma City, now here’s a zoo that had had some struggles and it was struggling at the… Read More
That seemed like a good place to leave a mark and to really take on a challenge. And that was attractive. And so, we went. Read More
How different were each of these compared to now what you’ve landed in?… Read More
Well, when you start comparing the institutions, Philadelphia was a very formal culture. It was a very scientifically oriented program and the culture was that we wore ties. We were expected to act and look the part that the zoo wanted us to portray. All of us. St. Louis was… Read More
You had been working at a couple of other zoos before you came to Oklahoma. Read More
Passy was very much used to a rural scene because she was born and raised in rural Nebraska. So, she started, she got some students and so she molded into the music community there, she’s still very active in the state and local Music Teachers Association and Teachers Association. So,… Read More
In 1985, the oil boom was over and oil had gone down to $14 a barrel or something like that and they were plugging wells. The biggest employer in the state was the company that handles all the bank, runs the core things for banks and stuff. And FDIC, they… Read More