And she freaked out. I was not there, I was still in Africa ‘cos I didn’t come home on that plane. I’ll explain that later, but they unloaded the smallest female first, the one without the tusk. And Stephanie had been moved over and been the test animal a couple… Read More
She was the boss. And even though she was bigger than our female, she never once made any attempt to be the head honcho. And Stephanie let him into the water and let him out of the water, disciplined him. It was so heartwarming to see this ‘cos I came… Read More
Came up with this island in the middle, a bridge over the island. Elephants can come out, they can be behind you, next to you, in front of you. You become part of the herd. You’re immersed in the actual exhibit and it worked. So we had two great features… Read More
We had Semrock come in and do the artificial rock work. We had the elephant restraint device with a full tilt after seeing a demonstration on that and what it could be used for being done by out of Springfield, Missouri, Todd Ricketts. Our horticulture department did the entire landscape… Read More
The actual barn, we spent a lot of time. It’s only got one place that has a cement floor and one stall. It’s got a huge herd room, small stalls coming off that, nightstands, but it’s all on sand substrate that drains real easily. We can flush it out, drop… Read More
And that was the exact cost of the actual elephant barn as we would call in our profession, that was not gonna be a traditional elephant barn. And we got a vote on that just before the commission changed where it would not have happened, but that $5.3 million gift… Read More
And coming up with that and the space and the acreage. And it took a while in the design to get it there, but we came up with over a half million gallons of water that they have access to, five acres. But we all know it’s not the quantity,… Read More
And somebody said at the very end of this meeting in an executive session, where’s the million dollars coming from?… Read More
It’s not assigned to any place. And by the next board meeting, I came back to them and I said, this is a go. And oh, by the way, we really need to have about 12 million dollars raised and the exhibit built within the next two years before the… Read More
And it was going on as good a knowledge you can get. These were wild elephants out there. And thank goodness I’ve got a can-do board that said they would get it done. And there were some challenges. The economy had never fully recovered. And it’s just now really the… Read More
It hit our membership. I mean, these were our members. These $90,000 jobs putting in rivets and running lines and cables and things like this. Wichita is a major aircraft manufacturing center in the United States and it affected the whole town, so it made fundraising hard. Thankfully, and we’d… Read More
We went over there, it was 11 days before we could actually do the shipping out. We knew that paperwork was falling into place. And you know, you had funny stories about when you see the mamba going over towards the crates where the crates were in storage and lifting… Read More
I went over to Africa with only my board president and my major fundraiser knowing, the first time to look to see about the possibility. I came back and met with him privately and said we can do this, but we need to be willing to commit a million dollars… Read More
They knew all that, that this was the easy part. And the million dollars, I said we don’t need to have it right now this minute ‘cos that’ll get paid out over time. And we didn’t identify where that million dollars was coming from because as I mentioned earlier, I… Read More
We’d gotten exceptions for that, but basically I can still remain remember the Reillys, the three zoos and the logistics people that we were working with that had done these thousands of elephant transfers, the trucks and handling of all this, we basically looked at each other and said the… Read More
And the taxes involved with that day, it was the most physically and mentally stressful thing any of us had ever been through. And two of the people had actually been in the South African special forces at one time and they said nothing like that. I mean, it was… Read More
And they tore in the forklifts, the wrap up things to keep the urine and the feces within. And so they flew to Wichita and unloaded six more. And the flight from Wichita to Dallas, apparently enough of the urine and stuff had gone down into the cables or controls… Read More
And after 24 hours, it was an extra $7,500 an hour. And we ended up being a day and a half late from the original time. And thank goodness Mike Vester was able to beat him back down to the original price, but the 747 parked on the runway made… Read More
They were moving rhinos in that were needing attention and food and care to live. And it was real clear that they had made a thing that if we didn’t get these elephants they were gonna have to cull ’em. And we were at the point on the airport that… Read More
The first thing he said was four of ’em have to stay here, we can’t do this. And we said no, no, no, that doesn’t work that way. We’re getting all 17. Well, by six o’clock when we didn’t have more than, I think we had two crates on the… Read More