So it was a beautiful natural moat system. And there was no need for concrete retaining walls or anything like that. And then the night house areas or the holding pen areas, we disguised behind artificial rock work. We made out a gunite wire, reinforcing gunite, and it worked beautifully. Read More
Oh boy, we see as far as how long it takes to build the zoo. We started building that zoo in the late 1970s. We opened it in 1980 fall of 1980. I would guess we had been working there at least three years, maybe four years. And what we… Read More
And then the African area after that. But it took quite a while. But it wouldn’t have taken… It didn’t take us as long as it would’ve up in the cold climate, like up in Chicago. Because all we did was we dug the moats right out of the limestone… Read More
Now your association with the Metro Zoo, how long approximately does it take to build a brand new zoo?… Read More
No. Read More
And I said, you’ve had a lot of personnel go through here. And I said the people that work with animals are different than concession people. You just can’t treat them the same way. They have kind of an empathy towards animals and they get involved with the animals and… Read More
So they didn’t ask you to come back?… Read More
Looking at their exhibits, and their holding area. They had a beautiful holding area. It was north of Gainesville. It was quite away actually from Disney, about three hour drive. And we had a good working relationship. But one day now the guy I would work with, he retired actually… Read More
With Disney?… Read More
Well, I got involved with Disney because our designer then after a few years quit and went to work for Disney as a designer. And they were going to develop this new African or this new wildlife area, animal kingdom area. And (indistinct) was working there, but they just wanted… Read More
Let’s see. Yeah, I was director of zoo at the time. Did you have to get permission from your bosses to do this or- Whenever we did anything outside like that, we always had to get permission from our bosses to do it. And they said yes. And how did… Read More
A guy had a garden over there. It was not very big couple acres, and he had some birds in it. And so he hired us to design it and put some like a hummingbird exhibit and a few other things in it. And we got involved in that. But… Read More
And you were director at the time?… Read More
And so we put one in the middle of this zoo and made an area where people could sit down, and visit and talk. And then we designed a zoogeographic zoo and I thought it’ll be a beautiful plans. But I guess it never got built. We got paid. So… Read More
And he said, “They don’t make any sense to me either.” So I went back to the guy and I said, look, we’ve looked over these things. They don’t make any sense. I don’t want to get into trying to improve this, ’cause I think it’d be too much work,… Read More
(indistinct) Freeport, Bahamas. After we got into the design of the zoo, we had a fellow come through that had been commissioned to design the (indistinct) zoo. And he wanted to know if we would look over the plans. Well, I sat down and looked at him and I thought,… Read More
So I went over them with our zoo designer and I said, what do you think of these?… Read More
When we were going back to design, did you have anything to do with designing other zoos?… Read More
And that kinda was the motivation for him to get out of the Miami area. And he moved over into West Florida. I think it was Sarasota area someplace, and he’s still alive. And he has looked like he was dying or dead for the past 40 years, but he’s… Read More
Bill Haast was one of the strangest people you’d ever want to meet. He had his Miami Serpentarium and he routinely had himself bitten or injected with venom to build some kind of a resistance against it. But when he looked at you, he looked right straight through you. His… Read More