Well, one thing of course that Peter brought was interest in the, shall we say, technical scientific sides of the business. And so we, for instance, hired a man with a master’s in nutrition Bruce Brewer to head our commissary, our animal supply division, animal food supply division. And it… Read More
And this… (George chuckles) This relates back to one of the first things that I’d gotten a geneticist out at Argonne to look at, got shortly after I arrived at Brookfield back in the 50s, this man who had been studying twining in humans wondered if there were any records… Read More
What were some of the strengths or weaknesses you learned from people, especially your predecessor, Peter Crowcroft?… Read More
So he had established a little foundation and he became associated with the, he was on the board of trustees of Chicago Zoological Society. So Peter Crowcroft approached Bill Rutherford in terms of perhaps acquiring a bit of territory in Australia for the hairy-nosed wombat. And so that led to… Read More
But in terms of the previous circumstances, as they say, we went from an almost undocumented collection to one that had science as the basic in terms of the records, in terms of the maintenance of the collection and reasonable terms for the future that, and certainly the development of… Read More
Peter Crowcroft, Australian, tap dancing champion of Tasmania, but he done his degree work in England under Elton. And he also was associated for a brief time, British Museum. He went back to Australia, was director of the South Australian Museum in Adelaide, but he continued his studies. He’d done… Read More
Well, with Robert Bean, we had, after I came, the society officially formed a science committee of the board of trustees. And it was usually headed by someone down at the University of Chicago. Emerson first and then some of the chairs of zoology, but also in the biomedical arena. Read More
Even while I was there, Robert was frequently on the road to Europe and visiting the institutions there. So it was a curious, curious circumstance, a sort of paradox in terms of his non-interest in keeping adequate records, et cetera, that one could then analyze. I mean, when the animals… Read More
What was your relationship with Robert Bean?… Read More
And so we got some things started there that, I mean, they were small inclusions, but we did experiment in terms of furnishings, et cetera, that brought out different behaviors in the creatures. You talked about when you first came there, Robert Bean was director. Right. And you’ve worked for… Read More
What was your relationship with these various individuals?… Read More
And then there were traditional setups in terms of the barred cages for the primates, glass cages for the great apes. But for the most part, it was rather primitive in my view and animals like the small mammals were simply not accommodated in any substantial fashion in respect to… Read More
State of the art, needed help. You were the new guy, so you looked at it with fresh eyes. Well, (George chuckling) with fresh eyes, you saw a pretty traditional setup, except for a couple of instances. For instance, the Australia House, which was novel in the American zoo scene… Read More
And that’s what got Hy and I on that track to begin with. So the creatures that came into the zoo and unfortunately perished not too long after, and we didn’t have the protocols in terms of screening for infections and diseases, et cetera that’s commonplace now, although we had… Read More
When you first came to the zoo, what kind of physical plant did you find?… Read More
So we published a paper essentially bringing those, what were considered two separate families under an even larger umbrella of the viperine. But that was a singularly interesting piece of work. And by the way, I checked all of the dissecting work that Carl did on Saturdays and I was… Read More
Well, clearly the investigations on the reproductive behavior of the amphibians, the Hymenochirus and other Pipid frogs, I mean, that was revelatory at the time and extended far beyond what was in G.K. Noble, and so on, beforehand. So that stimulated a lot of people. And in terms of investigations… Read More
An it didn’t conform to any normal habits of the creatures, either burrowing, or climbing, or whatever. I mean, it did all sorts of things in its enclosure, which wasn’t overly furnished in terms of apparatus like tree branches and so on. But at any rate, this colorful creature died,… Read More
And people often, unless it’s 2009 or 2010, they don’t pay attention, but there are seminal works of that sort. And in my article in Zoological Garden about the talk I gave on the 80th anniversary, I did illustrate the people that he’d affected outside of the zoo field. Read More
Now when you talk about, we’re talking about Hediger a bit, but what would you say were some of, in research, some of your major accomplishments at the zoo?… Read More