So when we would get a volunteer, who was a good looking volunteer, a woman who would come in to volunteer, ’cause we had volunteers, they would always pleasantly say, “Well now, you have to clean this cage.” And they were willing to do it. “Now, you take these rubber… Read More
I don’t wanna get to a far ahead of myself, but life is a bell curve. You get 50 employees, some are gonna be excellent, some are gonna be bad, but most fall in the middle. You get seven employees, some are gonna be good, some are gonna be bad,… Read More
Didn’t have to have anybody tell you, “You’re gonna do this. You’re gonna do that.” You knew when your lunch hour was, and it wasn’t a factory thing. I mean, you just knew what your job responsibilities were for the day. And that was an important lesson of managing people… Read More
I had to go back to the university of Southern Illinois, but I’d worked till the very last day because I loved it so much. And well, I was bitten. I knew the next day I’d be at school. So I’ll get my tetanus shot at school, so forth. So… Read More
So I didn’t have much to do with the, Gene Hartz, the assistant. Gene Hartz would collect the money. I’d bring the money to him from the wishing well, but we never really had much to do with the higher ups. Yeah. Yeah. Understood. So you mentioned several names. Read More
I was gonna ask if there’s any staff at the Children’s Zoo who helped school you?… Read More
Well, I think that one of the people who really taught me a lot about chimpanzees and great apes was Pat Sass. And Pat was a wonderful person. She had a fount of knowledge about the great apes. She had raised dozens of gorilla, orangutan, chimpanzees. The chimpanzees were her… Read More
“What could we see that was different that we hadn’t seen?” And we, one time, we wanted to see behind the bear line, “What was behind the bear line?” And we had to go to the zoologist who was in charge, a guy, this guy, Jim Mizaur at the time. Read More
Did you have much contact with him at that time?… Read More
No, I didn’t really. I mean, he was down there and he was pretty much a hands on guy and was doing a lot of the vet work too, aside from the temporary vet. But I didn’t have, I mean, I was just a summer helper here. I didn’t have… Read More
And then they had three zoologists. Dennis Merritt was one zoologist. He was kind of in charge of the Children’s Zoo as part of his responsibility. They didn’t call him curators at the time. Eddie Almandarz, who was the zoologist in charge of the reptile division. And a guy named… Read More
So what was your attitude about what zoos should be at that time?… Read More
Well, I’m not quite sure I was smart enough to have an attitude about what zoo should be at the time. I was just reveling in the fact that I was working during the summer into something I had always dreamed I would wanna do. Every day was a unique… Read More
So what were your responsibilities as a summer helper?… Read More
Well, a summer helper, you were responsible for cleaning, feeding, managing, showing the animals. We had a wishing well where people would throw dimes and pennies into the wishing well, it was very nice. And our job at the end of the day was to get all the money, put… Read More
But what about the senior staff members at that time? Did you interact with them?… Read More
Well, there was someone who was in charge of the Children’s Zoo and the names as I recollect, at the time they were called zoologists. Dr. Lester Fisher was the director of the zoo at the time when I first started as a summer person. There was a guy named… Read More
So when you came to the zoo, what was the keeper force like?… Read More
Well, the keeper force, when I first came to the zoo, the keeper force was all men and a lot of them had been war veterans of Korean War and World war II and so forth. There were only women were in the Children’s Zoo. And as I say, their… Read More
But ultimately, when I came on full-time time, not as a summer helper, I was one of the younger people. Read More