One of the joys, I guess, that I had in Chicago once I took the zoo job was that I became part of the Chicago community in the broadest sense. And one of the satisfactions of my job was interacting with the Chicago community. The zoo is kind of one… Read More
So I think there was an area of an undertone of resentment between the curatorial staffs in the country of the biology people and the medical people, the veterinarians. Fortunately, I guess, it resolved somehow comfortably and the biologists retain the great majority of the administrative positions, and the vets… Read More
His father had been a pathologist at Ohio State University. And Len became director at the Cleveland Zoo, and so he was a friend and a colleague. And there was a man down in Florida, Gordon Hubbell was another veterinarian who became a zoo director down there. And in fact,… Read More
My contacts with the other professionals in the zoo world were, of course, primarily through the meetings. George Rabb and I were solid here in the Chicago area. And eventually George Speidel went out from Brookfield to Milwaukee, and started a whole new wonderful zoo out there in the edge… Read More
You’re drawing a blank. Charlie, anyway, it’ll come to me. But the director of the San Diego Zoo was a veterinarian. And he had been a part-time zoo doctor, and he worked, I think for Pfizer Pharmaceuticals, and ended up being a director there at San Diego. And he became… Read More
And who if any of them had influence on you?… 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