I mean, someone might say, “Well, they can’t lift or whatever.” You get people to help you. I mean, it’s always a team effort to do whatever you wanna do, but it was a positive thing when women came into the workforce. Well, and I’m thinking, this is kind of… Read More
But how did women coming in as keepers affect the zoo?… Read More
Well, I think it affected the zoo, women keepers affected zoo in a very positive way. They brought with different job skills or ways of looking at it. There were no differences and I think, again, if you get 10 women, some are gonna be excellent, some are not gonna… Read More
It was, at the time, it was up to the curatorial staff to kind of take a lead if they wanted to. Yeah. Had good foresight. If I could switch gears a little bit. First women keepers were hired in the early 1970s is my understanding. Read More
And as were if you could talk about Pat Sass whose name has come up as one of the very first women keepers at Lincoln Park Zoo, how’d she get the job and why was it possible for her to get the job?… Read More
Well, I think what happened at the zoo at the time was there were no women keepers. And when the civil service exam started, women weren’t allowed to take the exam ’cause it said male high school diploma. That was an animal keeper at the time. When the next civil… Read More
So you were pursuing the advanced degree at this time and I’m wondering, did the zoo help? And if so, how?… Read More
Well, I think at one time, the curators or the zoologists and certainly those positions were, it had a lot of latitude. And I said to Dennis Merritt, and I said to some other people, but mostly to Dennis, I said, “I saw, I’d like to do my work on… Read More
Yeah. So this is pretty cool because at this time, this, to me, it’s like probably a more of an evolution of a conservation and joint breeding programs leading to research in zoos. And you were on the early cusp of that. Well, we were early and I will give,… Read More
I think it, I was very fortunate that as a zoologist, many of the senior keepers took pity upon me or were just good guys, some were not, but most of them essentially said when there were circumstances which I hadn’t done something, they’d say, “Step back, son, let me… Read More
And I’ll tell you one quick story about when I was a zoologist, I was walking through the zoo and they were trying to, again, we used tranquilizer, but it was starting out, didn’t use it all the time. There were a lot of methodologies for hand grabbing and doing… Read More
And I knew the principles of roping. I mean, I had roped, but I really wasn’t the world’s greatest, but I knew how to do it. And I commented as I was watching it. I said, “You guys are doing it wrong.” And they looked at me and the one… Read More
And I walked away. And from that day on, reputation is a funny thing. I was, they always, “Mark is an expert roper.” (interviewer laughing) “He’s really good.” I couldn’t do it again. And I tried, never did it again, but your reputation sometimes is built upon hopefully doing things… Read More
You’ve always spoken highly of Pat Sass. Read More
Now, I’m wondering, did the older senior keepers help you out at this time?… Read More
Or were you kind of like, “Hey, you know what to do.” Are you on your own? I mean are the?… Read More
Reptile guy at hearts, yeah? (laughs) I had no, what do I do?… Read More
So I said to him, “I don’t know how to handle it. If you show me how to do it, all I need is one time, and then I’m good, but I need that.” All right. So he goes up and he, (grunting) I said, “Thank you very much.” He… Read More
And then later, when I booked it, I had to book it all over the place and it was fun. And I would go out and that part of my job was going out and talking with the people. Was ambassador for the zoo. I was ambassador for the zoo. Read More
No. Well, yes. In a way, she had. We would take the animals from the Children’s Zoo every day and load them up. And Pat Sass was, she, one of her father’s friends had homing pigeons and we would take, she would bring them down. We would take the homing… Read More