And then they came a group of ’em, the Sioux Society president, the the Metro Parks director, the commissioner they came to, to Sacramento and interviewed me there and walked around the zoo and saw me interact with staff and stuff. And somehow they decided I was the guy. So… Read More
So it was quite an expansion of the staff and we were able to do much more. That’s why the attendance screws and everything else. But then we did a master plan and we probably should have had more of the neighborhood involved around the park and I’m not sure… Read More
We did that about three times. And so that’s when we got a curator. So we were able to add a curator to the staff. So we then had to keepers report to a curator and, and then we were able to, then the society kept growing. ’cause we grew,… Read More
So, and we did a lot of smaller things too. We took the, the chain link fence around the flamingos. I know you and I were talking at lunch about little moats they do for, for camels in Europe. But we took down this fence. I just made a mound… Read More
Could we use half the money to expand the staff?… Read More
When I, when I left, we also went from 300,000 to 600,000 guests. We, and then I’ll tell you why I moved in a minute. But when we were doing a master plan and all this, what we were able to do, we were able to go to city council… Read More
Well, let me go back a little bit and talk a little bit more about Sacramento and what I was most proud of. The city of Sacramento, like any city, the money was difficult. But again, I had a very supportive boss, Bob Thomas and act actually a supportive city… Read More
Why did you decide to leave?… Read More
But yet your tenure at the zoo as director is relatively short. Read More
And that was finished when I was there. And then they had already started the design of an outdoor ranu, a better orangutan exhibit. So when we got rid of the gorillas, we could put the rings in this, well we could, didn’t matter about the gorillas, but we could… Read More
It had a lot of small cages, but it also had some single animals, single gorilla. So, and it had some exhibits that just weren’t acceptable. I think they had two penguins in a pit and had some maybe one seal left in a, a pool. So those things, first… Read More
And the director you replaced, did you interact with them?… Read More
What were your priorities in the new position To make it better?… Read More
Yeah, bill Meer. Bill Meer was president of a ZA and he’s the one that gave me the assignment to do the infant diet notebook. And Bill went on to, on to a private place up in the foothills of the Sierras. And, but he had been in the zoo… Read More
It was fairly modern, a very good collection of reptiles, including a lot of venomous reptiles and then some mishy mhy cages around, had cheetah, had a cheetah yard too. So I mean for a small 12 acre zoo to have cheetah, have, you know, various endangered cats, had great… Read More
We had a staff of 10 or 11 animal keepers. We had a staff of two maintenance people. And that was it, I think. Read More
What kind of, who did you find? Sacramento?… Read More
12 acres small. Had a nice little administration building and had pretty good animal collection, pretty good animal. It had giraffes, it had elephants, wallaroos Eland with ostrich. Had a nice primate collection. It had chimps in the world’s office. Awful world’s most awful chain link exhibit you could see. Read More
I had my own zoo and I was a zoo director and at 34 years old or whatever. And I, that was pretty cool. Read More
But I also think Steve Graham, where was Steve Graham at the time?… Read More