He put a million dollar check on the corner of the table for me to look at and said you match this million dollars and I’ll give you another million. Now, normally that’d be fairly easy. This guy had also earned some major enemies in town because he’d gone bankrupt… Read More
And my instant reaction was penguins is in the master plans. It’s combined with the sea lion and an aquatic complex, aquatic complex. And it took me a while before I felt comfortable realizing that the penguins, if it was done right, could be the first phase of the aquatic… Read More
But on the design bill was getting that price down. ‘Cos at one point I shut down construction on it from August for four and a half months how to figure out how to cut some money out of it without affecting what I’d promised and what would be noticed… Read More
And we did it and there’s not one person that’s ever gone through there That’s noticed anything that, why didn’t you build this or why didn’t you do this?… Read More
I mean, you just had to be creative. And we already had the walls and the foundations for the building and the outer walls done. So we had the area, but it was something I sweated over a lot and I’d never do another one that way. And I never… Read More
And I said for us to look at as the best one in the country is Congo. We flew to the Congo. The staff there did a great job and I picked it. For one, it’s a great exhibit, but it also encompassed bongo and okapi and red river hogs… Read More
And they bought into that and the Olivers decided they liked the okapis and said, can we get those?… Read More
And I said with your help. And so they made a four million dollar donation. The Olivers made a million dollar donation. Raised the rest fairly quick. I figured about 6.4 million dollars, which goes a long way in Wichita. And you saw a quick script. We learned a lot… Read More
And you can’t see what’s holding him in there and been successful breeding them and have babies there now. But it was my first design build ‘cos this guy wanted the money quick and he wanted babies. And all I could get was males. And I had a choice of… Read More
Could I do that?… Read More
And I looked at them and I said, “With your help I can.” Because I knew that it was in our master plan. And you can’t ever turn down money when it’s offered. I don’t care if it’s 10,000 or whatever. Oh, we can’t do gorillas now, I gotta do… Read More
And they basically said, what’s the best one in the country?… Read More
They’d already picked out a 75th anniversary gift, but some of them weren’t happy with what they were doing. They wanted to think bigger. And they came to me and I gave them, here’s an elephant exhibit for this much. Here’s a lion exhibit for this much. And they chose… Read More
They just kept adding more. And it’s how I met my great fundraiser through this program ‘cos she was the one doing it in junior league. And this was done with the recommendation on the final vote when we made our presentation of somebody from the national office being there… Read More
They were more nervous about, could they raise that much money?… Read More
‘Cos it was the biggest thing they’d ever done. Well, that went open to a huge success. And that’s what led to the Downing Gorilla Forest. I just got a note from my other patron saint at the zoo, Mary Lynn Oliver, who’s from the Beechcraft family, the Beech family,… Read More
Can you give me some highs and lows about these things?… Read More
Well, some were exciting, neat. The interesting one, the first one right off the bat after North American Prairie, which you talked about a little bit was the Koch Exhibit, which was the outdoor chimp and orangutans. You spell that, right, Koch, K-O-C-H. Koch is the Koch family of political… Read More
And they also pay for half of every membership for every employee that joins. And you’ve got 4,000 employees, that’s a good chunk, but we delivered that exhibit and it was on time. The Kochs were very proud of it and happy. They felt like it was one of their… Read More
But they’ve already eaten dinner and they come more often so they don’t spend as much money so you don’t have as high as per caps. I mean, there’s all these things that have to get tied into that formula. But we had 247 acres. The public is probably seeing… Read More