He was a man’s man. And he’s standing there with this sheepish look on his face and a sledgehammer. And there’s a big chunk missing out of the top of this wall, and Dr. Schroeder’s standing there. And I walked up, I’m taking all this in, and I looked down… Read More
He was just an amazing man. So for six weeks, he set about… Well, the second day he was there, there was a small article in the paper, and it was about Mehrtens, and he had spoken to the Humane Society in Columbia the day before and said horrible things… Read More
So our tour of the zoo had lasted maybe 40 seconds, and he says, “Why is that wall there?” I said, “I don’t know. I didn’t have anything to do with putting the wall. That was Mehrtens.” “Tear it down.” “Oh, okay, (laughs) sure.” So we start going around the… Read More
Not because of an ego or feeling like I deserve, but we needed space. And I said to people, “Look, I’ll move into that office, but they’re gonna hire a director, and, you know, don’t read anything into this.” But I hadn’t moved anything personally. It still had some of… Read More
And for six weeks, that was his office. We shared a desk. I later found out that when he was director at San Diego, he had the door taken off his office. He couldn’t shut it. He didn’t believe in closed doors. And so the next morning I come in. Read More
Dr. Charles Schroeder, who had been the longtime director of the San Diego Zoo and who had dreamed of and built the San Diego Wild Animal Park and before that had worked as veterinarian at the Bronx Zoo. I mean, he was just, he was a very, if you want… Read More
Zoo something out of the Midwest. Anyway, he wasn’t really employed by them, but when he was hired by the Zoo Commission, he was in discussions with them about becoming a consultant. Anyway, so I get a call that they’ve hired this man. I knew who he was, and I… Read More
And, oh, by the way, he’s now the acting director, and you’re the general curator again. So now I’m demoted. After about, I don’t know, two weeks, I’m no longer the acting director. So once Don Barton walked away, Dr. Schroeder asked me the most profound question that I think… Read More
All I was trying to do was keep the animals alive and fed. And this is the oddest thing to say. I don’t even know how we were opening the zoo in the morning. It just sort of happened. You know, there was no… There was no customer service department,… Read More
I was 101% focused on the animal collection. So now I’m the acting director, and still I’m focused on the animal collection. And Mehrtens unfortunately decided that he was not gonna go quietly, and he began attacking the Zoo Commission mostly and then me for his undoing. And remember, he… Read More
They called Bob Wagner, who at the time was the executive director of the AAZPA and said, “What do we do?… Read More
We got this guy that’s running amuck, and, you know, we’re trying to put the zoo back on financial footing, and we don’t know what to do.” And he said, “I got an idea for you.” He said, “You need to call this guy out in San Diego named Charlie… Read More
Everybody worked, we had a great day, it was a nice day. They had a lot of people in the zoo. Sunday, we had a nice day. Monday, you know, my head’s spinning like a top. And Tuesday afternoon, I got a call from the chairman of the commission and… Read More
And it basically said, “We the undersigned do not think that having three people run the zoo is a good idea. And therefore, you know, we like Satch, and we think he can handle this, and we all signed it.” And they did it. And I found out later that… Read More
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