Nobody had bothered to look into his credentials and it rearranged the staff a little bit. But I went in and talked to our parks department director and I said, look, this guy is really responsible for the whole screw up. Read More
Why is he still working here?… Read More
Oh, this is gonna cost so much more, where’s all this money going and all that. Well at that time Strawser and I breathe the sigh of relief ’cause it wasn’t our responsibility anymore (chuckles). It was his, and he’d been handling for the past couple years. Well, at that… Read More
And he came in and he hired a fellow who kind of a strange duck, in that he didn’t get along with anybody. But he put him in charge of the project. So he essentially took the design thing out of our hands out of Strawser’s hands and my hands,… Read More
And we took Fred with us up there, and were able to go through the haunted house, a lot of the attractions. And they showed us behind the scenes, how everything worked. I mean, it was quite a fantastic trip. We knew a guy that was one of the designers… Read More
Then of course, we got things well along. Well we had some problems with the architectural firm, engineering firm. Because they ran into over costs on overruns. And instead of… I think they had a $450,000 contract. It ran it up to around 600,000. Well, about that time, we got… Read More
I wouldn’t say there were any major hurdles in getting the zoo opened. The major hurdle of course, was trying to get a new zoo built. And that was an interesting proposition. That is a lot complicated experience. Playing the political game again, we knew that we should get the… Read More
It probably took us two weeks to reopen the zoo again. And then of course all exhibits weren’t there, but there’s construction out there, was basically chain link fences, concrete buildings with outside exhibits so that water didn’t hurt them at all. Few trees fell down, maybe tore down a… Read More
Was there any major hurdles in doing this?… Read More
We didn’t notice any behavioral differences with the animals after the hurricane. No. Things went pretty well back to normal again. Read More
How long did it take to reopen the zoo after this devastation?… Read More
Did you notice any behavioral differences with the animals after the hurricane?… Read More
Were the animal dealers helpful?… Read More
Were you looking to replenish your specimens. The animal dealers after the hurricane, I wouldn’t say that they donated animals to us or anything like that. They helped us in securing what animals we needed, but mainly again, they were reptiles, ’cause the male did pretty well. There was a… Read More
After the Hurricane Betsy problem, we knew we had to refurbish the zoo as best we could without getting into a lot of big expense. And we knew we had to build a new zoo. One thing the county did was they instituted an admission charge to the zoo, to… Read More
How do those things start to evolve?… Read More
That are that dangerous. And did other zoos… You lost a number of animals. We lost a lot of animals during that hurricane and the other zoos, some of them offered to keep some of the animals. And it seems like we did ship some of them out to other… Read More
So in the aftermath, you lost animals. Were your thoughts, let’s build a new zoo. Were your thoughts we need to replace the zoo, was the city government coming to your assistance to say, okay, we have to rebuild and we’ll do it right here. Read More
The only adjustments we made to that plan after the Hurricane Betsy was we didn’t put the reptiles on the floor anymore. We put them up in the exhibits. We bagged them all. We only had a few poisonous snakes ’cause I really didn’t like keeping poisonous snakes. We just… Read More
And afterward, were there adjustments to the plan, as you looked at the devastation and what had occurred?… Read More