The staff did not have access to the board or we knew the board at all. It was Blakely just basically handled the board himself and minimally at that. He was a very much old style of pretty much kept in the dark. And as a lot of people said,… Read More
She asked me, “What did I think the attendance was capable of being?” Well at the time, we were under 300,000. Not much, the population of the actual city itself. The metropolitan area was a little bit bigger. And I said, “This zoo ought to be drawing 650,000 people in… Read More
I went to a zoo, my first visit at any zoo, I had an expectation from something. And if it exceeded that, I looked at it as a great, super day. If it didn’t live up to what my expectations were because I knew the people or something, I was… Read More
And it always made you feel good. Now 1991, you become the director of the Sedgwick County Zoo. Read More
What happens to allow you to apply for the job of zoo director and why did you want to do it?… Read More
Again, I had promised Ron five years and actually it was at six years the first job I applied for came up, Seattle, the one that David Town got, and it was a good experience for interviewing. And I interviewed for many more, pretty competitively came in second or third… Read More
Because a lot of things that have been built cost a bloody fortune and you can’t see the animal. I can still remember Louis DiSabato draging me in to look at this picture when they did the great looking exhibits. It was in the old lion house at the Brookfield… Read More
So that was one of the things that Ron was really creative and challenged me personally in my designs when I became the director, which led to me constantly trying to learn more. One of the first things I did in my early days at Sedgwick County was take the… Read More
So your philosophy under Ron Blakely you indicated is your own personal philosophy, zoo management and managing the zoo is starting to form. Yeah, I would say that I knew when I was at Sedgwick County that we could do great things, that the biggest challenge would be that I… Read More
You know, was Ron Blakely was a brilliant man. I mean, no question this guy I’m sure would classify as a genius. And so we liked that. And it was always challenging. As he said, he had a psychology degree too so he’d brown bag psychologists at times and how… Read More
It was one of only two or three that I caught him on something. This guy was well versed in knowing his biology of the collection and animals. But admittedly, he didn’t get out in the zoo hardly at all. At the end, he had a special interest in the… Read More
And that was an area that I feel like that I looked back in my career that it was most fascinating to me, especially with the challenge of the cost benefit ratio. Read More
How much do you spend and what do you get out of it?… Read More
I liked the philosophy. And my immediate responses was the biggest thing I was given when I was there was they had a new general curator, Ken Redman, who later went on to become the assistant director and director of the Honolulu Zoo, was recently promoted up from the ranks… Read More
And some people will call them a yellow cur dog and other people will tell you it’s one of the earliest forms of domesticated dog and I don’t get involved in that argument anymore. So you have a new director. I presume he has an absolutely different management style than… Read More
How easy or difficult was it to adapt to this new environment?… Read More
You said it was a new zoo. Read More
What kind of zoo did you find that you were walking into and what were your new job responsibilities?… Read More
Well, the thing that hit me immediately was that this zoo had been master planned from the beginning and that they were following this master plan. They had already done a Farms of the World Complex, a herpetarium, the African Veldt had been done, but not the Asian part. And… Read More
And I felt like I’d seen too many people in the profession two years here, three years here and jumping around and you know, what did they have to look back that they could say they did or accomplished in that short of a time?… Read More