‘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
And it was impressive, the detail. And I’d heard Charlie Schroeder tried to do it in San Diego and Charlie got out on the grounds every day. And I saw Louis get out on the grounds every day. That was probably an impossible situation nowadays, to be able to do… Read More
But you know, they want to see you. I learned real quickly that it wasn’t good enough to be out in the zoo grounds after hours walking around. Your employees wanted to see you see them working ‘cos it also gave them a chance occasionally to dialogue with you. I… Read More
I think the biggest thing for me was passing on what I saw and learned at other zoos. I was pretty good about giving a slideshow and then eventually a PowerPoint on these travels that I did that I would show. We called ’em Lunch and Learns and all the… Read More
Mickey, what was it?… Read More
Lubbock’s Place, or you know, it was just something to expose the staff to what other departments were doing or in my case, exposing what other zoos were doing. You mentioned rounds. Read More
How important is it for a director, for general curators or whomever, how important, especially director, is it to make rounds?… Read More
Part of it was just this elephant thing was time consuming and overwhelming ‘cos it was a double thing. It was the issue of importing the elephants and the issue of getting this elephant exhibit built in time to receive the elephants. I mean, it was a race against time… Read More