And the zoological society hired him for nine months. His goal was to develop a master plan. I worked with him. And to build a model,. Was seven feet square, as I recall, of the zoo. And he finished this in nine months, and we presented this before the county… Read More
And the county hired a firm. They wanted to hire an architectural firm, to design a new zoo. We said, no. We’re the designers. What we need is an engineering firm to make it work. And they did listen to us, and we did hire an engineering firm, not the… Read More
And then he eventually became curator of birds. And so he had zoo experience. Had, I dunno, six, seven years zoo experience. But being a good artist, he decided he would get out of the zoo field. He moved to San Diego and started doing art shows all around the… Read More
$10 million for a new zoo. Well, this was later reduced $8 million (chuckles). But we did get $8 million for a new zoo. I convinced the zoological society board to hire T.A. Strawser as our zoo designer. I had known Terry Strawser since I worked at the Columbus Zoo. Read More
Did you have a role to play or was it beyond you?… Read More
No, I was on the zoological society board and the people were good friends. And when their terms expired or whatever, I would urge them to put certain people on the board. And I think that they were professional enough to realize what we had to get done, as far… Read More
What was your part in trying to change the character?… Read More
The zoo society was there when I started and it had monthly meetings. And I think they had been in existence for four or five years before I got there. We tried to change the character of the board so that we would have a few prominent politicians on there. Read More
And so we did get a little help from our zoological society, but not a whole lot. But I always felt that the future of the zoo depended upon the zoological society. How well they could develop it, and whether they could eventually take over management of the zoo. Read More
Was the zoo society there, when you started this veterinarian?… Read More
Okay, the zoo was funded by the county. It was a county zoo. We occasionally got a little help from the zoological society, if we needed money for an animal. For instance, we got an Indian rhino, and they paid to have it transported. And paid whatever costs were necessary. Read More
Was it just a public zoo that was funded by the parks department?… Read More
Or how did that work?… Read More
How was the zoo funded?… Read More
Did that first public relations surprise you the amount. No, we knew a strange looking animal. If it it’d been a mouse or something we would’ve never gotten it. But it was such a strange looking animal, and an animal that’s one species representing an entire order. So I guess… Read More
So I’ll have to give our veterinarian at the time, Ron Samson all the credit. ‘Cause he developed a formula using (indistinct) which was a formula use for big cats primarily. And he adjusted it as he thought need be and hand raised this aardvark. And we went way out… Read More
What were you trying to do there?… Read More
With the African… Well, the small animals, the African exhibit area we had porcupines, big crested porcupines. Aardvark. Aardvark were interesting. We came in one day in 1967, September 67. And we found this baby aardvark in the exhibit. And so we didn’t know what to do. And we tried… Read More
Did you do anything with small mammals, or the Africa wild scene?… Read More
But he was a interesting guy to work with. He went to Brownsville, Texas, as a director there. I remember he had one horrible experience there. He used LSD on an elephant. The elephant went crazy, killed himself. But he was Warren Thomas. That was the thing he would do. Read More