And I got to the point that I saved myself for the major important ones when you needed to have a critical thing. And the example would be, we had just finished raising the money and got the matching money for the tiger exhibit. And the incident in San Francisco… Read More
How high are your walls?… Read More
And you know, we were saying right what was in the standards, 16 feet. So we knew it was important that I get on and how we were gonna address it. And you know, we upped it six inches. It was real easy in the design thing to move the… Read More
I personally think it’s essential. And I made a point with my staff to, you know, I gave them copies of Conway’s paper, how to display a bull frog. I lent out my copies of “Man and Animal in the Zoo,” Hediger’s book, quite a few times. I really believe… Read More
And yeah, it upsets me, but I learned. I consider Hediger’s two books the Bibles, “Zoo Biology” and “Man and Animal in the Zoo.” It’s two of the books that I kept and I owe a lot to my zoo career. I’ll never forget that. There’s no such thing as… Read More
Did you have a good relationship with the press and how do you nurture that relationship?… Read More
Oh, he did. The greatest story of all time was appropriations. The guy from the, I heard this indirectly, started with the director of National History Museum who took down a volcano demonstration for this wing on volcanoes or something. And he said my dad didn’t play fair. And my… Read More
And yeah, she was a very attractive lady and my dad, when he got questioned about it said, you know, it was one of those things that dad said until you run the zoo, your responsibility is to take advantage of everything you can. You don’t make your own luck. Read More
How important for the future of zoos is it to keep this link with the past?… Read More
Is it true that when he would go to the congressional hearing for the National Zoo’s budget that he would bring animals to the budget hearing?… Read More
And sometimes the keepers who accompany him were attractive young ladies?… Read More
Identify him, that was?… Read More
That was Ernest Walker who wrote “Mammals of the World.” It’s a classic printed by John Hopkins and still in, new additions coming out. But it was the start of the rebuilding the National Zoo, which started with the birdhouse in 1960. And he literally to the day he retired,… Read More
The monkey house was totally redone. The reptile house was overhauled. I mean, the whole zoo got overhauled at least once and new office and new veterinary hospital and conservation center. So he had a good run. A lot of that stuff is being redone a second time. Sometimes some… Read More
Dr. Mann and his wife Lucy lived for a long, long time and she was part of the family. No zoo likes to have tragedies occur. And the tragedy occurred I think when your father was director of a child killed by a lion. Read More
How did that, if you know, how did that affect him?… Read More
Oh, hugely. Can you kind of give a little– Yeah, what happened was a girl got on the other side of the guardrail and the lion reached out of the cage and swiped and decapitated her on a Sunday afternoon I think it was. And not a pretty sight. I… Read More
Washington was segregated almost still at that time, just breaking away. And grandparents, these were the grandparents with little daughters. So there’s all those little things that were involved in it. But I can still remember the absence of my father there for a couple months and the stress he… Read More
I saw him just about every Saturday when I was five, six, seven years old. ‘Cos after we’d do the rounds and I’d go to the zoo and go around with him and Ralph Norris, who was the head keeper. Read More
And that was also necropsy day so after we’d do the rounds of the zoo, we’d do necropsies and I’d ask all week, what died that day?… Read More