40 people, 40 people. And this was 1950 when I started. Guards, janitors, souvenir sales, ticket sellers, office help, was the director, the assistant director, a secretary, and a bookkeeper, that was there. Engineering department, six tank men, as they call them on those days. And that added up to… Read More
So it’s look at the time was revolutionary, groundbreaking for an aquarium?… Read More
Well, Walter Chute with George Morse and one of the architects from Graham, Anderson by the name of Shavani, took a trip to Europe, and they went to aquariums in Germany, and Italy and other places and collected the best ideas they could from every aquarium. They went to Naples,… Read More
It was not stocked, but they let the public walkthrough and just look and see what the place looked like. And then in 1930, open it up in June, fully stocked with fish. Read More
And then the director, when it was fully stocked?… Read More
Was Walter Chute, who had come to help design the aquarium. And I have to look back and for those days it was one of the most workable aquariums that I ever saw. It was easy for the tank man, as they call them in those days, aquarist now, to… Read More
How did the Shedd come to be?… Read More
Well, that’s a long story. Mr. Chute, as I mentioned before, came from Boston and there was a fellow in Boston by the name of George Morse, M-O-R-S-E. And he was kind of a promoter, I think in the best sense of the word. And somehow, and I don’t know… Read More
And he came to Chicago when he was 17 and started working at Field & Leiter, which was the predecessor of Marshall Field Company. He started working in as a stock boy in the linen department making something like $15 or $20 a week. And from that humble position worked… Read More
Would you tell me a little something about that?… Read More
Yeah, sure. The car was divided basically into two sections. One section, which is about a third of the length of the car was living quarters. And they used typical old Pullman berths with an upper and a lower. And for six men, there was a small gully in there,… Read More
And we had our own generator that was driven by the axle. And while you were standing still, there was a propane generator that kept electricity going, and it was quite comfortable to ride in that. Okay, a little historical thing. Read More
And when we came back with a boatload of fish, we would sort them out in these live cars, and butterflyfish here, and triggerfish here, and groupers here. And after two weeks, then the tugboat came back and picked us up. And we had loaded, taken all of those fish… Read More
I know I’m jumping all around the place here, but that’s basically what the collecting trips were. One of them, when I came back to the aquarium, we headed for the island of Bimini, which is just 60 miles across from Miami. And we just hit a tremendous storm out… Read More
And I swear it was like watching a cartoon where the plates go up, and then they come (mumbles) back like that. And you had to hold on to them, bunks we were in to keep from falling out. I was very glad to get to Bimini. You mentioned the… Read More
And I did went to Key West, came back. Oh, and Mr. Chute, who was the director at that time, originally came from Boston. He had been a director of the South Boston Aquarium and retained his Boston accent until the day he died. And as he was telling me… Read More
Can you tell us a little about that first sojourn into the world of professional fishers?… Read More
Yeah, well, those collecting trips are really a story unto themselves. We had no real boat. We had small, almost skiffs, and we rented a barge in Miami from Bacchus Towing Company, and put all our equipment on the bars. We had a little house about the size of a… Read More
How did you have and develop an interest in fishers?… Read More
Well, as a kid, I went fishing in a little lake up in Michigan, near Three Rivers, Michigan. It was called Fisher Lake, and my mother was sort of the neighborhood mother. She taught school, and during the summer, she’d go around and gather up a bunch of the neighborhood… Read More