And you can’t see what’s holding him in there and been successful breeding them and have babies there now. But it was my first design build ‘cos this guy wanted the money quick and he wanted babies. And all I could get was males. And I had a choice of… Read More
Could I do that?… Read More
And I looked at them and I said, “With your help I can.” Because I knew that it was in our master plan. And you can’t ever turn down money when it’s offered. I don’t care if it’s 10,000 or whatever. Oh, we can’t do gorillas now, I gotta do… Read More
And they basically said, what’s the best one in the country?… Read More
They’d already picked out a 75th anniversary gift, but some of them weren’t happy with what they were doing. They wanted to think bigger. And they came to me and I gave them, here’s an elephant exhibit for this much. Here’s a lion exhibit for this much. And they chose… Read More
They just kept adding more. And it’s how I met my great fundraiser through this program ‘cos she was the one doing it in junior league. And this was done with the recommendation on the final vote when we made our presentation of somebody from the national office being there… Read More
They were more nervous about, could they raise that much money?… Read More
‘Cos it was the biggest thing they’d ever done. Well, that went open to a huge success. And that’s what led to the Downing Gorilla Forest. I just got a note from my other patron saint at the zoo, Mary Lynn Oliver, who’s from the Beechcraft family, the Beech family,… Read More
Can you give me some highs and lows about these things?… Read More
Well, some were exciting, neat. The interesting one, the first one right off the bat after North American Prairie, which you talked about a little bit was the Koch Exhibit, which was the outdoor chimp and orangutans. You spell that, right, Koch, K-O-C-H. Koch is the Koch family of political… Read More
And they also pay for half of every membership for every employee that joins. And you’ve got 4,000 employees, that’s a good chunk, but we delivered that exhibit and it was on time. The Kochs were very proud of it and happy. They felt like it was one of their… Read More
But they’ve already eaten dinner and they come more often so they don’t spend as much money so you don’t have as high as per caps. I mean, there’s all these things that have to get tied into that formula. But we had 247 acres. The public is probably seeing… Read More
Unfortunately time, a lot of people that are riding those are the people that ought to be walking. But it’s also helped obviously over the years. We have the shade now and we didn’t when I first got there. Oh, it was a hot place to walk around then in… Read More
Not only expanded the paid staff, ‘cos she could show me that adding these staff members, we’d generate this much more money to pay for it, but she saw it and knew how to use volunteers and became a greater outreach. You know, there’s no question, the public that come… Read More
And like I said, it’s so hard to judge the impact and there’s been all sorts of studies. You know, the one major study, I can still remember dealing with it. We had their attention for 45 minutes. And after that, it was family discussions or the monkeys look like… Read More
But I think the most important aspect for me, of anybody, but I know that communication and that’s being able to talk at a level with those that are your board members and donors out in the society and with passion to keep them excited and be able to work… Read More
But you know, we had a standing thing. You’re not supposed to walk past trash and things like this. You talk about people working with people. Read More
Did you have a docent program and how important was it?… Read More
Ours was… The first full-time new staff person I created as director was a volunteer coordinator. And we decided to open volunteerism up to all areas of the zoo. We had volunteers in the maintenance department. We had more volunteers in the horticulture department than any place originally ‘cos everybody… Read More
I think it’s huge. I saw the extreme in action. I was at the Berlin Zoo in 1985 and they had done at that time, this round every morning for damn near a hundred years. They met in front of the lion exhibit. There was the director, the assistant director,… Read More