Interview 10258 – Caption Index: 94
Say that again, Mark (laughs)?… Read More
Say that again, Mark (laughs)?… Read More
What zoo professionals did you respect and learn from?… Read More
What professionals, zoo or otherwise, did you respect and learn from, that have had the most influence on you?… Read More
And after the second or third such visit, the doctors realized that this was a plus, rather than a minus. And when I’d arrived there with my animals, the doctors and nurses would greet me at the door and they would take the animals and bring them around to the… Read More
And to just go to a place and put a rabbit in the sort of lap of a sick kid or in the bed with him and see the joy that that animal brought was extremely satisfying. So that was kind of the extension that sort of complemented the Traveling… Read More
I think our Traveling Zoo unit may have been the first in the U.S. to do that. I think that there were a lot of fun experiences with it, and my outreach took a different direction. I felt frustrated by the fact that we had this wonderful collection of animals,… Read More
And why would you say the Traveling Zoo was important?… Read More
Marlin Perkins was a man of vision, and one of his early positive, nice things in addition to the fact that he was able to build the Children’s Zoo at Lincoln Park, he started something called the Traveling Zoo. And Marlin was able to get, and I don’t remember if… Read More
How did you grow it and develop it?… Read More
How did it grow?… Read More
I don’t think that Bob Bean and Marlin Perkins talked to each other about anything professionally, I don’t know about socially. And in fact, there were a few times in reflecting that I was probably one of the few linkages between those two zoos. I was at that time practicing… Read More
But Ron Blakely, who had been at Lincoln Park Zoo as a curator with Marlin, went to Brookfield and he was one of the co-directors. I can’t recall the names at the moment of the other people, so there wasn’t, that I can recall, clearly a good linkage between Brookfield… Read More
Well, the zoo had a organization called the AAZPA, the American Association of Zoological Parks and Aquariums, and they had conventions, they had meetings. And certainly when I became director, I got into this organization, became a member, a zoo director member. And that was my initial sort of interlink… Read More
In the early years, first of all, my zoo experience with other zoos was pretty much limited to the other zoo doctors. And at that time, I think there were perhaps three, maybe four full-time zoo vets in the country, one at the Bronx Zoo, on a San Diego, and… Read More
Did anything make communication between zoos better or worse?… Read More
And so they weren’t about to give me an inch either until they realized that I wasn’t gonna tell the trades how to do their job, and finally developed a solid, meaningful rapport with them. But I think that Marlin was able to accomplish one expansive physical part there before… Read More
When you started as zoo director, was there communications between zoos?… Read More
It’s a little hard for me to reflect at this moment on how my time at the zoo compared to Marlins because things change and my memory changes. With Marlin it seemed to be that things ran well, but then again, I became aware at the end there of his… Read More
So I quickly lost all my visions of a great, big, fabulous major expansion at Lincoln Park, and realized that we better just to do the best we could within that little space. And that, that was a good thing. So that was how I kinda got over that hurdle. Read More
When you look back at your tenure as director from your predecessor, how would you compare your directorship with that of your predecessor?… Read More