You could tell them anything you wanted to and they were there. Now, I can’t tell you they retained everything, but you definitely had their attention. But I have a distinct image in my mind right now from your book, “The Ark in Park,” which we’ll talk about in a… Read More
How cool was that?… Read More
And they had pony rides that you could, I mean, here was a city kid getting on a pony and going around, albeit in a oblong kind of circle thing, but how wondrous for a child to do that?… Read More
And it was a great hall as it was in London. So it was a very traditional, classic zoo. Okay. I’ve always been fascinated by the Children’s Zoo at Lincoln Park Zoo. Read More
What can kind of animals were there?… Read More
Well, the Children’s Zoo was essentially way more exotic than a lot of Children’s Zoo where they had primates, they had chimpanzee babies. They would have young animals there. They had, it wasn’t like a farm kind of thing where you had domestic animals. They had a lot of, I… Read More
So if you went to the Children’s Zoo, there were handlers. I was one of them, the laborers in the summer that you could, they would handle a snake. You couldn’t go to reptile house and get that experience. But in the Children’s Zoo, in theory, with the zoo leaders… Read More
So they would have, that’s how it was laid out. And Lincoln Park Zoo was, depending on how you measured it, it could be 29 acres or 30 acres. It was very small. It was locked in to this park, Lincoln Park, that on one side, the east had the… Read More
And that was the zoo that I first encountered, but you know, it wasn’t like I was so visionary to go, “Well, this is an old zoo.” It was wondrous. Well, Mark, this was the late 60s when you started. Read More
And I’m wondering what was like the, what were the cages, the conditions the animals lived in? What was it like?… Read More
Well, it was, as I say, very traditional, the monkey house had bars for all the primates, for the gorillas, bigger bars and some of the other animals, the birdhouse was a lot of cages. For example, the monkey house had 31 exhibits inside. The bear line had a very… Read More
So a little while ago, you mentioned about you’re starting as a summer laborer at Children’s Zoo. Read More
What was the zoo like at that time?… Read More
Well, the zoo was a very traditional zoo, Lincoln Park. It was, had a reptile house. It had a monkey house. It had, which was all the primates, the gorillas, the great apes, everything. It had a bird house. It had a Children’s Zoo. It had a place where the… Read More
Like, “You don’t wanna be a teacher?… Read More
You don’t want to go into research?” I said, “No, I wanna work in the zoo.” And they had no experience and they couldn’t tell me. Read More
I said, “What do I have to do?… Read More
What classes should I take in?” They had no idea. They had no idea because they were strictly academics. And later on in years when I started work at the zoo and I kept in touch with my professors, when they would have students, undergrad students who said, “I wanna… Read More
Well, I knew, I think intuitively that I had to have of education as well as experience here. I was working in the Children’s Zoo in the summer, but I was, I had gone to Southern Illinois University and I gotten my bachelor’s degree, and then I pursued a master’s… Read More
Do you think the university understood about somebody wanting to work in a zoo?… Read More