I think our Traveling Zoo unit may have been the first in the U.S. to do that. I think that there were a lot of fun experiences with it, and my outreach took a different direction. I felt frustrated by the fact that we had this wonderful collection of animals,… Read More
And why would you say the Traveling Zoo was important?… Read More
Marlin Perkins was a man of vision, and one of his early positive, nice things in addition to the fact that he was able to build the Children’s Zoo at Lincoln Park, he started something called the Traveling Zoo. And Marlin was able to get, and I don’t remember if… Read More
How did you grow it and develop it?… Read More
How did it grow?… Read More
I don’t think that Bob Bean and Marlin Perkins talked to each other about anything professionally, I don’t know about socially. And in fact, there were a few times in reflecting that I was probably one of the few linkages between those two zoos. I was at that time practicing… Read More
But Ron Blakely, who had been at Lincoln Park Zoo as a curator with Marlin, went to Brookfield and he was one of the co-directors. I can’t recall the names at the moment of the other people, so there wasn’t, that I can recall, clearly a good linkage between Brookfield… Read More
Well, the zoo had a organization called the AAZPA, the American Association of Zoological Parks and Aquariums, and they had conventions, they had meetings. And certainly when I became director, I got into this organization, became a member, a zoo director member. And that was my initial sort of interlink… Read More
In the early years, first of all, my zoo experience with other zoos was pretty much limited to the other zoo doctors. And at that time, I think there were perhaps three, maybe four full-time zoo vets in the country, one at the Bronx Zoo, on a San Diego, and… Read More
Did anything make communication between zoos better or worse?… Read More
And so they weren’t about to give me an inch either until they realized that I wasn’t gonna tell the trades how to do their job, and finally developed a solid, meaningful rapport with them. But I think that Marlin was able to accomplish one expansive physical part there before… Read More
When you started as zoo director, was there communications between zoos?… Read More
It’s a little hard for me to reflect at this moment on how my time at the zoo compared to Marlins because things change and my memory changes. With Marlin it seemed to be that things ran well, but then again, I became aware at the end there of his… Read More
So I quickly lost all my visions of a great, big, fabulous major expansion at Lincoln Park, and realized that we better just to do the best we could within that little space. And that, that was a good thing. So that was how I kinda got over that hurdle. Read More
When you look back at your tenure as director from your predecessor, how would you compare your directorship with that of your predecessor?… Read More
I also realize that a weakness, the small size of Lincoln Park was a strength. When I lived in Riverside, that was right next door to the other zoo in town, the Brookfield Zoo. And at that time they didn’t have a full-time doctor either, and so there were times… Read More
And as a result, I benefited by that because over the years, if I needed support at the zoo, even though there were times there were bureaucracy bottlenecks that came up, usually the various support forces would respond whether it’s an electrician, the plumber, the painter, somebody would be there… Read More
But at the zoo was totally different, I had absolutely zero idea of what the work ethic, what the work load would be to accomplish different goals. How long it took a keeper in the Bird House to clean a cage. How long it took the barn people to clean… Read More
About three years before I took over, Marlin had started a Friends of the Zoo organization called the Lincoln Park Zoological Society. And here were a group of people that were committed to help the Chicago Park District, which owned and operated the Lincoln Park Zoo, to raise a few… Read More
When I first came to the zoo, I guess for me, I had to figure out how to handle a large group of people. Administratively, I’d had no professional exposure to any classes or anything about running an organization. My animal hospital was kind of self-contained unit, and I had… Read More