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
Did your personality help you in running the zoo and these people that you were tasked with managing?… Read More
That’s a great question. I think so. I mean, I… After being with Mehrtens for about a year, I guess organically (laughs) I began to act and manage completely differently than he did. He said A, I thought B. So the staff, the keepers that I was managing I think… Read More
So I know… I don’t know, that’s a great question. I think… I think the staff was anxious to have somebody who was a cheerleader for them and who had their back, and that that was me, mainly due to the position that he had put me in. You talked… Read More
There was just one other curator. There was a curator of birds. Actually, Dennis Decoursey who worked here at Brookfield after he left Riverbanks. And there again is an interesting look into Mehrtens’ personality. He had a strange habit of meeting people at AAZPA meetings, either regionals or national meetings,… Read More
I became Dennis’ boss. We still did not have a full-time veterinarian. We didn’t have a full-time veterinarian until two or three years after I became director. We had a local small animal practitioner who was the veterinarian of record. Read More
How was the staff, the zoo staff originally then?… Read More