No. I had a board member who was a large construction company. He did the project, we designed it, but he did the project and we paid him for doing the project. And at the end of the project, I just happened to get a donation, which was about the… Read More
Were you able to hire then your first full-time veterinarian then or was there already one on board?… Read More
No, we finally did hire a full-time veterinarian and vet techs to work with him after we got the veterinary hospital built. Read More
And from that, we had Galapagos Island, we had a reptile, small reptile building for amphibians and lizards where you could walk through. I had fennec fox exhibit and they were diorama’s. Read More
So this was funded by Rotary ultimately?… Read More
Yes. It was funded by Rotary to the tune of 2 million of the $3 million that took to build the project. Now that’s pretty small amount of money today, but then it was still pretty small. Marvin Jones tells me, Marvin told me one time, “You do things here,… Read More
Now, did you use your own crews to build the veterinary hospital?… Read More
How was that combination something that you wanted to see develop and how would it develop?… Read More
Usually we think of a children’s zoo as a– Yeah, I didn’t think of a children’s zoo as, again, I wanted to get, I wanted to take those kids, I wanted to transport them somewhere else. So the children’s zoo wasn’t petting zoo. I had a petting zoo, but that… Read More
And I put a tunnel in it that was the shark tank. I put a shark tank on one side of the tunnel, over the water going through and on the other side, tropical fish. And you could only see that if you took the boat ride. You could see… Read More
So as your hands are full trying to do all of these projects and get the zoo kind of up to the speed you wanted it to, you were a member of the Rotary Club, because you had gone from the New York area as a Rotary member, and you… Read More
Rotary was very supportive of the zoo. And our Rotary Club in San Antonio hadn’t really never taken on a single project until I talked them into a children’s zoo that I wanted to build, which would be the central education facility and a place for the docents. Because by… Read More
You mentioned that you talk to them about building a children’s zoo, Rotary, because you wanted to kind of incorporate education area in it. Read More
What was your thinking about a children’s zoo in education?… Read More
And did you have a bigger vision in mind to do it, or you just wanted to just make sure it was more of a zoological garden?… Read More
I had a vision of being green and flowered because everything grows so well down there. But what I wanted to do first is get a horticulturist interested in coming to the zoo. And I found one in the park department and I offered him a job as the first… Read More
And I want it to be close to the exhibit.” And that’s how we developed even the walkthrough any exhibit. I would build out of artificial rock crevices with glass in a just so big for one child to stand in. So that that little kid could be right there… Read More
Now one of your projects was to regreen the zoo. Read More
How much support did you get for that?… Read More
And what kind of effort did it take to do it?… Read More