Lawrence Curtis

What else did you want?

Your full name?

My full name is Lawrence Lloyd Curtis. And my friends call me Lawrence or Larry, or sometimes things I wouldn’t want to, you know, you don’t want it on the camera. But anyway, I’ll answer to anything. I’ve even been called Reverend Dr. Curtis. And I answer to that. When you were growing up in Galveston. That’s correct.

What kind of zoos did you see when you were growing up?

What are your recollections of those beginnings?

Well, I have to tell you, where I grew up. I was born in Galveston. But in two years we moved to a little, kind of a hick town in North Texas, north of Dallas called Sherman, Texas. And we grew up there. I did. For some reason, it can’t be genetic ’cause neither of my parents were particularly interested in natural history. But they supported me, very important. As a kid, I mean I would collect, we called them grass snakes, but they were really something else. Lion snakes in the books.

And I’d put them in jars, and I’d keep them there for a while. And anytime we were driving on the highway, we have a lot of box turtles in Texas, we did then. They’re disappearing along with the rest of the fauna. And we would stop and get that turtle, ’cause I didn’t want some car behind me or us, you know, to run over it, which they would do. And so we would take it home. And my dad built this enclosure, for the box turtles. And then I got a, we got some baby birds that were falling out of the nest, and he put chicken wire over this, built a frame. So we had an aviary.

And we had a miniature turtle-arium And I just made that word up, but it sounds okay. So I grew up and then, oh! We had a fish pond. I didn’t want goldfish. We would go fishing at one of the lakes and we’d bring perch back. We’d bring a little bass back. And we would bring turtles back. So we had this fish tank. It was a big, round metal thing, but it had a lot of water in it.

And I had things like that.

What are your recollections of the first zoos that you were seeing?

Oh. Well, Sherman didn’t have a zoo. And my recollection of zoos was quite limited. And I’m not sure I understand why, but there was a zoo in Dallas, there was a zoo in Fort Worth. There was one in Houston, but I never went to it, they never took me to it. You know, the old Gary Clark story about, you know, was in a… My parents would take me to a different zoo every week, and then by Wednesday or Thursday I’d find my way back home. My parents didn’t even do that. But one interesting story I think I need to tell you.

I love to fish. My grandfather was a great fisherman. And so we would go out, at Galveston, out fishing all the time. We made about three trips every summer from Dallas, I mean Sherman, to Dallas and to Galveston. It was an all day trip. And we would visit and all that. I wanted the… Texas was celebrating the Texas centennial.

And in Fair Park, in Dallas, they built all these wonderful, they built a natural history museum. They built an aquarium, and they built other museums, plus all the usual stuff you have at a fair. My parents took me to that aquarium on the way to Galveston. And I didn’t see any crabs. And I caught crabs all the time and we ate them. And I thought, so in Galveston, I said, “I’m gonna take, I wanna take some crabs back to that aquarium and we’ll give them to them. Then they’ll have crabs in their aquarium.” I must have been about eight, nine. So the day we went, left Galveston, I had in a brown paper sack, two of them, two brown paper sacks, two crabs.

Just blue crabs, the kind you eat, crab gumbo. And when we got to Dallas, very sad that the crabs had died. Oh, they were not in a sack, I’m sorry. They were in a metal bucket thing. But they’d died. I had it full of salt water and all that. So the director of the aquarium came out. He saw me, thanked me and all that, and thanked my father.

And he said, “Well we really appreciate this, but you know, come back.” So the next trip to Galveston I was determined to do something. I didn’t tell any, I didn’t tell my parents about this, but I managed to get two more crabs. They were pretty good-sized. These, I decided not to carry them in water. That that water, you know, I didn’t understand about aeration and all that, but the water didn’t smell good after the crabs had died. And I thought, I’m gonna…

So I got what, you know what Spanish moss is?

I got Spanish moss and I got these brown paper bags, and I filled them full of very, very wet salt water. Put the crabs in between, so they’re surrounded by that. When we got to Dallas, probably about seven hours later, long trip, those crabs were alive. And we took them immediately to the aquarium, and the director there was just delighted. I mean, the first thing he said was, “We don’t have any crabs, now we’ve got crabs.” And I was so proud of that. And I saw them. They put them in a tank and all that. And I didn’t have enough sense to, you know, say, “Well, I want my name on it,” or anything like that. But that was a big event in my life.

I guess I was about eight.

What kind of schooling did you have?

You know, my schooling was just typical. It was small town stuff. But with reference to, you know, this interview about zoo careers, and I’m thinking about other kids out there right now. I had a civics class. I guess it was in junior high, I think. And we were asked to write down an essay, what we wanted to do when we grew up, when we got big. And you know, most kids, they wanted to be a fireman, or a policeman or something. I actually told the teacher, and wrote down I wanted to be a zoologist.

I knew the word. And so that was very early. Elementary school was just standard. Now, when I got to junior high school, I was knee deep in my herpetological investigations. And I had my own snake collection. And when the biology teacher learned about this, “Oh, you’ve got to bring them up and talk to the class.” Well, I did that. And then next day the other class wants to hear about the snakes, and all that. So I became known as the snake guy.

And my biology teacher in high school, just a wonderful man. He was a mentor. And he had had some touch at the University of Michigan with Dr. Blanchard, who was an outstanding herpetologist. And he kind of passed this stuff, this material along to us, great inspiration. And then, I have to tell you this, because it relates to the crab story I told you. I was 14, and I had my snake collection. We were in Dallas then, living in Dallas, University Park. It’s surrounded by Dallas.

And University Park is kind of uptown from the rest of Dallas. And the neighbor there didn’t like my snakes. He knew I had them, never came over to look at them. And so he was a lawyer. The mayor was a friend of his. This is just a little town now, within the city of Dallas. And they passed a law against keeping snakes in University Park. So we went to court, and I mean we went to the council meeting.

I was very familiar with the people at SMU. Two of the professors came to defend me. You know, he’s studying these snakes and all that. But they didn’t budge. And so I had to look for a place to take my snakes. I went to the Dallas Aquarium, where, whatever it was. I was 14, eight from 14, six years earlier, I had delivered two crabs. The director remembered me.

His name was Pierre A Fontaine. His background was dressing windows, setting up window displays in department stores. But at home he had tropical fish. And when they built the aquarium, he knew somebody, and he got the job. And I worked in that aquarium through high school, then through SMU, three years of undergraduate and then a year for master’s thesis. It was great. And I took classes in zoology, as many as I could. In high school, My biology teacher was a great mentor.

And I would say that my schooling, especially at SMU, I had not been a very good academic student in high school. I was too busy with my snakes, I guess. And of course the, you know, females of the opposite sex, not snakes, but people, girls. But when I got to SMU, to college I decided there was really something to learn there. And it was one of the great experiences of my life was going to college and learning about everything. It was a classic education. It wasn’t real good in any one. In zoology, it was okay, but it wasn’t outstanding. But it was a great science and arts education.

And I’m so grateful that I had that. Now, you were a collector of snakes.

How did that start?

I know you were collecting other things, but how did that real interest in collecting snakes start?

You obviously, at a young age knew a lot about them. I mean, more than the average kid. Well, I got started in snakes the way many kids at that time got started. And it started in a zoo. It started at the Bronx Zoo where their curator of reptiles, it was called, was a great writer. His background, by the way, ’cause I know we’re all interested in how do you train to get, how do you get into zoos, and all that. In those days, his background was as a journalist. He wrote for the New York Times, I think.

But he had his own collection of snakes.

And when the Bronx Zoo was started, and built their reptile house, who would they hire as curator of reptiles but Raymond Lee Ditmars?

Ditmars was a prolific writer, and he was a good writer. And he made all this, he wrote about the “Snakes of the World.” That was my first book by him. I poured over that book. I could tell you… In fact, if you haven’t read it, it’s got the best description, about four pages, of Marlin Perkins when he was bitten by a Gaboon viper. It was chilling, but it was very interesting. Well, I read all of Ditmars’ books, and those were just great. And I wanted to see these snakes, and I wanted to learn about them and keep them. And so I naturally, I went around the…

This was at Galveston, Texas, during the great war. And we were living back there again. My father was in the air force in England. I would go out in the field. We caught king snakes, we caught ribbon snakes. I even got into, I shouldn’t have, but caught a water moccasin, cottonmouth, and then some copperheads. And I had this huge indigo snake, must have been six feet long. Huge, beautiful snake.

I didn’t catch it, but I had to buy it from a man in Brownsville. They called him the Snake King. And I used to get snakes from him. And that just built and built. After three or four years of that, I mean, I even had a coral snake. And unfortunately, in the process, frequently, like I told you about in school, I would teach class, you know, give lectures. And there was a Boy Scout camp on the mainland from Galveston, and they would collect snakes for me if I would come down and give them a talk, especially, on first aid for snake bite. So I went down there to do that and get some snakes.

They had in one bag, they said a copperhead. And so that was one of my, that was my payment, these snakes. And so I was getting ready to give my lecture, and I decided, well, I’ll use this copperhead. ‘Cause they’ve caught it, the kids had caught it. And so one copperhead, and I moved the bag, you know, back, so the copperhead was there. And I used a snake stick and you know, was picking him up when, chip, I got a bite. Well, there was a pygmy rattlesnake in there, maybe that long. And before I could get my hand away, a second one, there was another copperhead in there.

So the witness, it was a Boy Scout camp. And the head scout master, he thought, this is wonderful. I mean, this is a great demonstration, because these kids need to know how to you know, what to look for. He couldn’t see the snake. And I had, you know look, I’ve really been bitten. This isn’t part of the act. And so of course, you know, it started swelling up, and I went to the local hospital about 20 miles away. And then my mother, somebody had to call my mother.

Now I was about 13. Things like that happened. And oh, my mother had to drive from Galveston to, she must have hit 80 miles an hour, she said. And oh, and they gave me antivenom, and the bite was not bad, the bites. And that’s the only time I’ve been bitten by poisonous snakes. Now, you mentioned the aquarium where you brought the crabs, Yes. and that you were working there.

Was that your first zoo slash aquarium into the profession job?

Absolutely. My first job. I was almost 15, and I went to the aquarium. And the director there said, “If you want to, you can bring your snakes out here.” See, they had been banished from the little townlet, University Park. So I was gonna bring my snakes out there. And he had, the aquarium was open every day. But they had a student, a college student, who would open it up, and then close it down and had one job, count the people. Attendance was a very big thing in their reports. And so this man graduated, or something.

And so Pierre Fontaine offered me the job. Man, I was delighted. Pay was pretty good, 45 cents an hour. But got all the weekend hours, and I took that job. From then through high school and through college, I worked there. And I would, Fontiane was a big mentor for me. He really, he gave me a great deal of freedom. But he taught me an awful lot in the process.

If you can get a mentor at that age, it’s a wonderful way of getting into any field, I think particularly zoo. And I’ve got wonderful experience there.

Now, did you go from that position to another position at the aquarium?

I was, oh! I have to tell you, AAZPA. I had been in correspondence with, well, Karl P. Schmidt, whom we were talking about last night night at the Field Museum. Roger Conant, he was at the Philadelphia Zoo, curator of reptiles, and I had sent him a number of snakes. CB Perkins was the curator of reptiles at the San Diego Zoo. I had sent him snakes, of course, they would send me things. And so I had a quite a collection through that means. Now, at the aquarium, Roger and his wife came through there one time. Oh, there was an AAZPA convention, and Roger came to it.

Also Chris Coates, another big name in aquariums. But Roger, and we had an awful lot of correspondence. And he was really studying water snakes at the time. And we had, I guess six different species within 100 miles of Dallas. So we had these relationships. I think it was 1949, Mark, that the AA… Roger was the editor for the AAZPA, part of AIPE, American Institute of Park Executives. He put out the, I think it was the first roster, zoo roster.

They had maybe 40 zoos. There weren’t many zoos in the United States at that time. There were very few aquariums. And he put this roster out. And when Pierre Fontaine, my boss Pierre, called me at home, said, “Come, I have something to show you.” And it was this little roster, it was about the size of Reader’s Digest, but not that thick. And it had all about these 30 or 40 zoos.

And guess what?

The Dallas Aquarium, Pierre Fontinee, director, (laughs) Lawrence Curtis, assistant curator. So I was, I had gotten a title. And I did everything there, signs, setting up exhibits, did all that. And when I got graduated, when I got my master’s degree at SMU, the park director, the park director, the park had all the aquarium, the natural history museum, the zoo. The zoo was not very good. It was very conventional, very uninspiring. They had a superintendent for 100 years in charge of it, and they’d fired him. He was an alcoholic and gotten drunk, and done some things that were bad.

So they had a pall over the zoo, and there was a head keeper there.

And the park director said, “You want to get into zoos?

How would you like to be our curator?” Well, hell, I grabbed it. I grabbed that. And so the minute I was through with my studies, I went over to the Dallas Zoo. And I’d never really worked in a zoo. I’d been in the, by then, I’d been in San Antonio Zoo, and Houston Zoo, the reptile end of it. But I never really didn’t know much about, if you will, the non-reptile aspect of zoos. And so I quickly learned. I did what I then had all my keepers do. I, with this head keeper’s permission, I didn’t need his permission, but his coordination, concurrence, I guess.

I went out with each keeper, until the keeper said, “Okay, Lawrence can handle my route.” They called them routes, of course, and I would do his route for a couple of days. Then I would go do another route. And I did, spent probably the first two months doing that. I really learned a lot about that zoo, and about zoos. And so I spent two years at the Dallas Zoo, and did all kinds of things. But the Dallas Zoo at that time, I think it still is really, is part of a bureaucracy. It’s a big city bureaucracy, and it’s part of the park department. And their progress is slow, it’s slow.

So you’re working at Dallas. One quick question, Mr. Curtis.

Would you mind taking your pen outta your pocket and just putting it on the side there?

Thanks. Occasionally it’ll bump the mic.

Are you getting any reflection off my glasses?

Just a bit, but don’t worry about it. That’s okay. That’s fine. Thank you. You were saying. Yeah. You were at Dallas for two years.

Where did you go from the Dallas Zoo as curator?

And how did that next zoo job come about?

Well, my next zoo after Dallas was pretty simple. At the Dallas Zoo, I would go to other zoos in Texas, and I would go to the Fort Worth Zoo to get animals. They were really (clicks tongue) active there. We used to put out a surplus list, AAZPA did. And the director of that zoo was named Hittson, Hamilton Hittson. And Mr. Hittson was very good to me. Then, but I was at the Dallas Zoo, okay. So then, the park director in Fort Worth died.

And guess what?

Hamilton Hittson moved up into the park director’s job. After that happened, he calls me up. He says, “You know Jim Brown, he’s our superintendent, we need a director. But I can’t call you a director at this time, but we’re gonna call you the general curator. Would you come work for us?” I said, “Well, I’ll come over and talk.” The Fort Worth Zoo was moving. I mean, they had, were getting new animals, building new exhibits, not a lot of money, but progress. So they offered me a job. Well, I’d been at Dallas Aquarium for seven years, and then I’d been at the zoo for two years.

I really was not, I wasn’t sure. I didn’t know what to do. And I would talk to people and get advice. Finally, the natural history museum director called me up. He said, “Lawrence, take that job in Fort Worth.” I said, “Well, why? Why should I do that?” He said, “Because here you’re still the kid that was in University Park and they passed that law against you keeping snakes. You’re the kid that are kind to the people at the Dallas Aquarium and all of that. And you’re always gonna be that kid that grew up here. Go over there and be something.” That was the best advice I’d gotten.

I went over there, and it was great.

You were how old when you took this general curator job?

I was 21. You were now in charge of a lot of people at a young age.

How did they receive you?

Well, in different ways. My introduction at the Fort Worth Zoo, with the same thing that I’d done at Dallas. I went on all the routes. And the younger keepers I got along with fine.

The older keepers, “Well, who’s this young, you know, snotty-nosed kid?

He’s what, 21, 22?

What the hell does he know?

He’s just been to college. He’s got book learning.” So you have to overcome those things. But see, this was in the 1950s. And zoos were still… It was just a different world for zoos. But I did get accepted. And the superintendent and I were able to work out an awful lot of things together. And finally Mr. Hittson calls and says, “Lawrence, we’re gonna make you zoo director now.” So I was zoo director. That was after about two years. But there’s a big thing that happened in Fort Worth, right at the beginning.

Hittson had been putting out this surplus list for the AAZPA. I had written a few articles for the, which Roger had published in the magazine. Well, he says, “You’re gonna put the surplus list, so you put it out.” Well, that made me, that was a committee assignment. And there were two or three other people, but I never saw them, Hittson never seen them. So I took that job on. That made me a member, I could go to the board meeting. So here is this young, snotty-nosed kid going to my first zoo meeting, actually it was here in Chicago. We had a board meeting, some hotel, and I got to give my report.

And I got to know my colleagues who were all older than I was, much older.

What started when you took this directorship, and you were now involved with AZA?

What started to shape your views on zoos and opinions about zoo development?

Was it starting then?

When I first got to Fort Worth, I really started, I had a chance there to do something. At Dallas, it was just, I’d designed all kinds of things and they, “Yeah, that’s nice. When we get a bond issue, we’ll think about that,” and all. Fort Worth, I could do something. I was, well, the first thing, rare animals. They always, I don’t care what you say. If you say, “Well, this is a rare animal, there’s only five of them in captivity.” The public will take notice and they’ll come to see. If you have a picture of that animal, as you know, you already know all this.

They’ll come see it and all that. In my herpetological work, there was a guy in California who sold papers, books and things, on herpetology. And when I wrote him and said, “Send my catalogs to the Fort Worth Zoo,” he said, “Oh, you’re in the zoos,” yeah. He said, “My dad is in Africa,” in Zaire, I think it was. And he, it may not have been called Zaire then. Anyway, he said, “He’s got his own zoo, and he’s getting ready to come back pretty soon. He was a medical missionary. He’s looking for a home for these animals.” I got in contact, what happened in about three months, here comes this shipment of animals to the Fort Worth Zoo.

Which there were three pangolins in it. And I found out nobody else had any pangolins. I wrote a letter to the, at the Basel Zoo, Lang, whom I get a got correspondence going with. He said, “I don’t know of any of them anywhere.” I said, “Man, I’ve got some coming,” you know. And two of them were tree pangolins, no tree pangolins in the country. Not even Walker at National Zoo, they didn’t have any. They’d had one once, but it didn’t live long. Okay, so I get this pangolin.

One of them is a giant pangolin. Hell, this long. And I’ve really worked learned about, you’re in my Eden, tapeman, you know how it is. We worked with a different, I mean, I fed him the same thing that the doctor had been feeding them. But then he would kind of, she, it was. Her name was Pansy, Pansy the pangolin. That’s another thing. You have to give animal names for the public. And they have to either be alliterative or funny, you know, and we know both know.

You know, like Julius Squeezer for a snake, you know, a boa constrictor. And the best one I remember was Olivia de Javelina, all at the Arizona Sonora Desert Museum. And then of course, the mate to Olivia de Javelina was Gregory Peccary, wonderful names. And the public remembers those things. And so we got the pangolin.

Do you remember Ivan Sanderson?

Ivan Sanderson, I found out, was in Africa collecting animals. He had a giant pangolin. He had a male giant pangolin. And I wrote him and said, “I’m really interested in this.” He said, “Oh, they’re very hard to keep. I doubt if you’ve got one now, if, you know, you have to, I’ll help you when I get back. Okay, then somehow “Life Magazine” found out about this pangolin. We had a four-page spread in “Life Magazine” of the pangolin. That was wonderful PR for our zoo, and for the zoo director who at this time, he was the curator, but to have that kind of coverage.

I was told that when Ivan Sanderson got off the boat, he had scheduled a press conference. And he talked about this pangolin he had. And somebody said, “Oh, here.

You need to read “Life Magazine.” So when were you working with these unusual animals, what was your general approach, not only to them, but to the animals now that you were in charge of at the zoo about the care of these animals?

The care of the animals at the Fort Worth Zoo were, I’d have to say it was a learning experience. Very little was known. We didn’t have Lee Crandall’s book on mammal care in captivity. We had a lot of material from the Philadelphia Zoo where they made up completely, I mean, natural things, but in a completely unnatural way, zoo cake as you recall. And I got with, we have a university in Texas, Texas A&M, very good nutrition. And I went down there, and took a three-day seminar course. Learned something about it. I’d never taken a nutrition course.

And in fact, I must tell you this. That getting a degree, whatever, even zoology, which my degree was, I didn’t know anything about finance. I knew nothing about budgeting, obviously, from the aquarium thing we did. And personnel management, we never learned anything like that. And time, you know, use of time, management time, management thing. Those you need, I didn’t have them. And a lot of them I learned, frankly, the hard way. Made a lot of mistakes.

But then you learn from, if you’re smart, you learn from your mistakes. And so I had your… You asked about nutrition. We just tried to, it was a lot of it was experimental. Try this on this animal. I got a giant armadillo, a little one, and I couldn’t get it to eat at all. Finally, and I had it, took it home where I could really work with it, and I lived at the zoo. We did, my wife and my kids coming along.

And this armadillo just wouldn’t eat. And finally, somehow, I guess there was some excrement on his shell, his carapace. I gave him, got some warm, tepid water, gave him a warm bath and put him back in. About 10 minutes later I was in the living room, heard a noise, you know, a little, tit-tit-tit-tit-tit. There was the giant armadillo, the baby. And I went in there and he’d eaten his food. Well, we would experiment, just like the pangolin we bought ant eggs from some company in New York. We bought larval this.

We bought all kinds of weird things and just figured, we’ll put all of this together and maybe it’ll work. And that’s how we did a lot of it. Now, we also looked at nutrition, you know, the carbohydrates and proteins and all that, we did that. The health of the animals was a big problem as far as knowing what to do. You could take an animal’s temperature. I’m talking about wild animals now, in the zoo. You could take a, take its temperature.

Hell, you wouldn’t know, is this high or low?

There wasn’t any data. So a lot of it was discovery. And the main thing I wanted to work on with that zoo, in addition to the husbandry, I just thought it was a great opportunity to teach for educate the public. And we did a lot of that. You talked about when you were starting at the zoo at Fort Worth, that there were older directors.

Were there any directors who influenced you particularly, at that time?

Well, at that time there was another phenomenon that was going on. It had been going on for about at least a couple of years. And that was Zoo Parade. The public ate that up. And it was one of the best PR factors for zoos in the United States, in my opinion. I think we all benefited. And Marlin was so smooth and knowledgeable, and it was great. Now, what did we really… I think that the older directors, well, Roger Conant wasn’t the zoo director, but he and I were extremely close.

He used to like to drink a type of cherry liqueur, and I would keep him supplied with that. And for that I would get all kinds of books and things in return, bartering. There was Frank McInnis at the Detroit Zoo. He was a landscape man. And he knew very little about animals, I found out. Another active person was Chris Coates. He didn’t have an aquarium. They had, oh! I should have mentioned this.

We lived in New York, brief, in New Jersey, briefly when I was 10 or 11, eight, nine, 10, 11, yeah. And my mother took me to New York to the Battery Park Aquarium. I was, that was my first, the second aquarium after the Dallas Aquarium. But that was a fantastic, oh, it was wonderful. And I think we spent two days. We got a hotel room, so we could do that. And Chris Coates, you know, they closed that aquarium. Robert Moses was the park director commissioner in New York.

And he wanted, he was far seeing, and he wanted to develop the Coney Island. It was just a carnival area. The anchor, like in a shopping mall, He wanted to put a zoo anchor out there, a zoological anchor. And so he told the New York Zoological Society, in essence, “You’re gonna build your aquarium out there, not at the Battery Park.” And the interesting, the rationale was they were digging one of the tunnels. I don’t remember which one. And they would be blasting, you know, with the dynamite. And Moses said, “Well, that’s liable to break the glasses and the Battery Park Aquarium. So we’ve gotta close it for safety reasons.” But then the whole zoo staff, the aquarium staff, you know, went this way and that way.

Coates stayed with it. And what happened was, he was it. He didn’t have an aquarium, the war was on, came on. And they didn’t have an aquarium in New York for 10 years or more. And finally, Coates got one going, and then he had at Coney Island. So the older directors, I got Dr. Mann. Well, he was a zoologist, he was an entomologist. He was a specialist in ants.

He really didn’t, wasn’t too interested in the zoo. And now Walker. Walker was an excellent mammalogist, as we all know. Now, he and Dr. Mann, this was an interesting thing I observed very quickly. Directors and assistant directors often didn’t get along well. Frequently, they hated each other’s guts. And that was true at Washington. And if I went there to see Dr. Mann, I didn’t see Mr. Walker, and vice versa. If I saw Walker, I did it at his house.

And so you had to, I became familiar with things like that. Davis from Columbus, he was big, and he was kind to me.

And was that the first gorilla born in captivity?

Mm-hm. No. We were doing our aquarium design at Fort Worth at that time. And we went up there to look at aquariums, and we saw that baby gorilla. It was maybe a week old. Fantastic. Now Davis was, I don’t remember what his training was, but he was a very practical person. And he and I got along fine. Oh, there were a…

Fletcher Reynolds was at the Cleveland Zoo. I think he had been an animal dealer, and he was a character. And we got along fine. He treated me like an adult. But there were cases where, “Who is this snotty-nosed kid, that thinks he knows something about?” But I put out the surplus list, and I would get bribe, offers of bribes. You know, “I want to know, I’m looking for such and such.” “Well, we’re gonna mail it out tomorrow.” “Well, can you mail we me one special delivery?” “No, I’d have to send them all special delivery.” I mean, I was very careful about not breaking any of the rules at that point. But I, oh, Belle Benchley. I was very impressed with her. And she liked me. We got along fine.

Belle Benchley, she was a great lady. She was a great lady.

When you were in Fort Worth, the Star Telegram columnist, George Dolan, described you as, “An inveterate practical joker, and in zoo matters, an unsurpassed conman.” Why would he say such a thing?

To what do you owe this description?

Well, I was called a conman, inveterate conman, I think, by George Dolan. Dolan and I were close, personal friends. He was a wonderful reporter. He really was a good writer. The one thing about Fort Worth that I don’t think I communicated, in Dallas, if you got money, I mean, they had money. You just had to wait for it, and go through all the bureaucracy. In Fort Worth, we didn’t have a lot of money, but I had to go out and get it. And very early, we had a zoological association.

I didn’t start it, Hittson did in Fort Worth. And so we had a citizens group formed like a society. And the head of that was an oil man named Kirk Johnson. Kirk was, he loved animals, but he also was really a big hunter in Africa. Guess who his best friend was? Jimmy Stewart. And the two of them, or the four of them would go to Africa together. And we had a male black rhinoceros that we had bought just after I got there. Mr. Hittson had arranged it, five grand.

That’s a lot of money in those days. But that’s the way it was. And I wanted to get a female, and I had a chance to get one, another five grand. I’ve forgotten who had it, Bill Chase, or somebody. I wanted to get that rhino. I mean, I wanted to pair up these animals. We had too many singles and all that. And that was a big factor that I worked on at the zoo on establishing a collection that at least would be animals we could make, keep properly in what we had, and breed them.

So Mr. Johnson gives me a list of 10 names to call to go visit to get the money, raise the $5,000. He writes out a check. Now, he was a conman. You might say I was influenced. You might say I was, you know, unduly influenced by this sort of thing. He wrote me out a check for $5,000. And I was, “Oh, well I won’t have to-” “Oh no, uh-uh. You don’t dare cash that check. When you get $5,000, you can use 1,000 of that. But when you get $4,000 raised, then you bring that back to me, and I’ll give you another check.” In fact, the gears were working.

He said, “Here, I’m gonna give you this check now, but it’s gonna be not good, ’cause I’m gonna call the bank, and tell them not to run it through. Now you take this check though to these 10 people, and you’ll get, you’ll raise the other $4,000. And if you’re good, you can give me the $1,000 back.” Well, I did that. And got some feelers and all that. But then on that list was Jimmy Stewart, and his home phone number. So it was the afternoon, it was after quitting time. I called him up, California being two hours different. And his wife, Gloria Stewart answered the phone.

A wonderful lady. And my wife and she, and we all got, became very good friends. And, “May I speak with Mr. Stewart?” “Yes, yes.” So Jimmy, “Yes?” “Well, Mr. Stewart, my name is Lawrence.” “Yes. And what do you, what’s Kirk up to these days?” “Well, he’s helping us at the zoo. And we’ve got a rhino and it’s a male. And we’ve got a chance to get a female now.” “Well, how much do you need?” “I need $5,000.” “What do I get out of it, Mr. Curtis?” “Well, you can name it.” “Well, okay.” Somehow he had gotten in his mind that when I said Kirk was, you know, paying for half of it, he didn’t forget that.

He says, “Well, if the animal, is the animal, $10,000 and half of it is five?

Or is the animal $5,000, and half of it’s 2,500?” “Well, Mr. Stewart, I have to be honest with you, it’s 2,500. But if you could spare the rest, we could take care of the freight and all that sort of thing.” “Well, okay, I’ll give you $5,000 for half of this animal, and you tell me Kirk is gonna maybe donate the other five.” “Well, I think he probably will, if he has to, sure.” “Okay. Put me down. I’ll get check in the mail to you.” “Okay, thank you.” “Look forward to seeing you next time I’m in Fort Worth. I’m doing a movie on the air command at the local air base.” He was a General, Stewart was, in the air force. Okay. About 20 minutes later, the phone rings. Fortunately, I was still there. “Hello, this is Jimmy Stewart again. I wanted to ask you one critically important question.

Which half of that rhinoceros is mine, the front half or the back half?” I said, “Well, which would you prefer?” “Hell, I want the front half! I don’t want to have to clean up after a rhinoceros. Thank you, right, that’s good. You go ahead and go, you go get your rhino.” He hung up. Now, there was some conning going on. But that’s how I got money for the zoo. I mean, different ways. I didn’t do anything, I didn’t hold up any banks.

But they’re ways of conning people for a good cause. And I found it to be very easy and I raised a lot of money.

You talking about black rhino, why was it important that you sponsor the black rhinoceros research by Garvin McCain and George Stepner?

Why did you feel that was important?

Who were they?

People that were working on rhino research.

Did you do rhino research?

We did some psychological research, behavioral.

Why was that important?

Why? Because we didn’t know anything about the animals. We didn’t know anything about half the animals. I mean, we knew what they were, taxonomically. Nutritionally, we were always on thin water. We’d do things that would work for 50 years, but that’s not knowing anything about nutrition. That’s just trial and error. The rhinos, well, we knew about them in Africa. We knew all about their, at that time, just terrible things going on, poaching and all.

And here was a chance to learn, really learn something about a very important animal, an animal that we had in the zoo. And we wanted to learn more. And some of that was ivory towers. Some of it was just plain, pure science. But a lot of it was also very practical. And we would, you do that, you remember the pure science, but you also can pull out the practical. Any animal, you can study the hell out of it. I mean you study its range, study it’s feeding habits, it’s reproduction, all of the, it’s natural history.

It’s a biology. And if you have any sense at all, you can apply a lot of that information to the husbandry of your animal, the nutrition and to its educational value. So that’s why we gave money to that.

Was research important to you at the zoo?

Oh, yes! I always, that was, that’s the big disappointment, though, in my zoo career. I did a lot to try to get research going. I could get somebody to come in, you know, zoologists, professors usually, and send students down. We even got, when I was at Portland, we got a grant. A National Science Foundation Grant, and we got some other grants. Somehow at that time, zoo research just, I never could get it to do anything, except occasionally. Now, you did build one of the largest herp facilities in Fort Worth.

What was the process?

Why was it important to build it, because of your interest?

My interest in this, it was a herpetarium, by the way. You have to call it by it’s correct name. I made that name up, by the way. Obviously, I wanted a large reptile exhibit for my own interest. Also though, when we built this aquarium, Mark, we charged admission to it, the zoo was free. And we made a lot of money there. We really did. And we didn’t have to pay for the overhead. I made it, we made it, this was a con deal.

We made a deal with the park department, ’cause they were over the zoo, that any money that we earned at the zoo stayed at the zoo. It didn’t have to go to the city hall. Someone told me to do that, and I think it was Robert Bean, I’m not sure, but it may have been Freeman Shelly. You know, Shelly was the director of the Philadelphia Zoo. He wasn’t a zoologist. Freeman Shelly was an accountant, a financier, a bookkeeper, bean counter. But he was a good one, and he liked zoos. He and, (laughs) well, I think it was common knowledge.

He and Roger hated each other. But anyway, that’s kind of the territory. The idea that… I’m sorry, I’ve gotten off on these tangents. Talking about the aquarium.

Oh yeah, why did we build a herpetarium?

Why was that high on my list?

Number one, we didn’t have a reptile exhibit. We needed one. If we’re gonna show animals, reptiles, well, I don’t have to tell you this. We got vertebrate animals, birds, reptiles, and fishes and mammals. And so a major, a major taxon was missing from the zoo. Number two, though, (chuckles), we could put an admission fee on that building. And that exceeded what we earned at the aquarium after we built it. We didn’t have money though, to build it. Now, if you talk about a con job.

The cost of that building was estimated at about $120,000. We could build things there. We knew contractors and all that. We really got two or $3 for every dollar we spent. And we didn’t have the money to build a herpetarium. We’d spent it on gorillas and the gorilla house, and a bird house, and all of that. I knew that with, based on what we’d learned at the aquarium, I knew that we could make more money in the herpetarium. And I needed a source of money.

Well, where are we gonna get it?

At that time, Amon Carter had died. His son was on my board, but he was not like his father. I mean, he was just, he was very interested in the zoo, but he didn’t really understand what he needed to do. Kirk Johnson was dead. I got a deal, there was a banker friend of mine. He used to, god, he’d call me before my checks would bounce. He’d say, “Lawrence, you better get it a deposit in here.” I told him about the problem. He said, “Go down to First National,” big bank.

He said, “My bank is just a pissant bank. Go down there and borrow the money, against you get some sort of a feasibility study, based on the aquarium. Hell, they give, they loan money every day to businesses. This is a business. Okay. So I went down to the bank and of all things, the man they, I knew the president well, just by name and all. And he sent me to his, to his lawyer. (chuckles) The lawyer’s name was Snakard. And I talked to Mr. Snakard about a loan.

He said, “Well, where’s the building gonna be built?

Isn’t it gonna be built in the zoo?” “Yes.” “Well, but that’s city property.” “Yes.” “Well, when we take a mortgage, we own the the land.” I said, “Well, we can work that out, I’m sure. I’ll get co-signers.” I didn’t have any co-signers. But I said, “How many co-signers will I need?” He said, “Hell, it depends if you could give Amon, Jr. to co-sign, hell, that’s all you need.” Well, I went out and I got I think three co-signers, and Amon Jr. Was one. Actually, Kirk Johnson had a son, and he was a friend of mine. He was also, he was a playboy, but he cosigned, and somebody else did. And I took that to the bank. And they gave us the loan.

And then I had an attorney on my board. Now, Snakard was on the bank’s board. My attorney was very conservative.

And probably good, because I was probably crazy on, you know, what the hell’s Curtis doing now money-wise?

“Who’s he conning now?” As my friend Dolan said. Well, he said, “Suppose you that you can’t pay, it doesn’t work, then what happens?” And I said, “Well, we will give them the herpetarium back.” “But it’s on city property.” “Yeah, they know that, but they haven’t figured it out yet.” And we borrowed that money. And we did put up the building as collateral. Now, speaking- Including the animals in it. Now, speaking of buildings. Yes sir.

the story about how the James R. Record Aquarium was built?

Sure. Oh, that was a one, that was my first real project in the zoo world. And I had come from Dallas, and I’ve told you the circumstances of Dallas and all. And here it was a new world. I wasn’t the kid next door. I was this college kid that came from the zoo, and the aquarium in Dallas. And you know, the credentials. I had found out, I discovered that I actually had credentials.

Plus a degree, masters and all. And I had a lot of publications, a lot of that I’d written, okay.

So what to do with all of that?

Well, the… I’d been in Fort Worth maybe a week when Hittson brought the park board out to the zoo to meet me. I was very, I mean I was really… It was a 180 degree switch with what I was dealing with in Dallas, there I was as a kid. So the park board was there. We were looking around the zoo. One of the park board members who ran a big department store in town said, and it was kind of of a courtesy question, I’m sure, that any factory or business owner would ask.

“Well, Lawrence, what do you think we need the most?

What should we do? What’s the major thing?” Well, I thought about that. And I really haven’t thought that I would be asked this question. But I said, “I love aquariums.” I said, “Fort Worth needs an aquarium. You know Dallas has an aquarium.” Fort Worth and Dallas are very competitive. When I said, “Well, Dallas has an aquarium.” “Oh, well we need a better one than Dallas.” And so that hit the papers the next day. And in about 30 days we had the money. Mr. Carter called, well I think I told him. Mr. Carter called me up.

His newspaper was running daily things on raising money. And I think they’d raised just, you know, 10 cents here and a dollar there and all that. I think they had maybe $2,000. He calls me up and I’ve never met the man yet, but he was a fixture in Fort Worth. He ran Fort Worth. Nothing happened in Fort Worth unless he approved it, very few things, I should say. Okay. So I go down there to see Mr. Carter. I had to call Mr. Hittson.

Somehow Mr. Hittson and Mr. Carter had not hit it off at some point. And he said, “No, I’m not gonna go with you. You’re on your own. But don’t mention,” (laughs) it was a sea lion thing or something. Anyway, actually, I think it was a poker game. Mr. Carter said, asked me about aquariums, asked me about my experience at Dallas. I think I convinced him. And I had a plan for the build.

I’d drawn up what I’d call a shop drawing, but you could build it from it. And showed that to him. He was very impressed.

I mean, he wanted to know more about, “Well, here’s a tank, but what’s gonna be in it?

Are you gonna have any saltwater fish?” He was smart. “Well, how much do you really need?” We had a budget of 75,000 that our contractor friend had estimated. And it was probably 100% under. Well, I didn’t know that at the time. So I upped it 25,000. I said, “Well, we need $100,000.” Okay.

He said, “Who’s working with you?

Who did these plans?” And I said, “I did.” “Well, who’s your architect?

Have you selected?” “Yeah, Charlie Freelove.” He was a brother-in-law or something of one of the park board members. He said, “He isn’t worth shit. He isn’t worth shit. Here, read this paper.” This man was, Mr. Carter was a great philanthropist. He said, “Read these. Everybody that I give money to has to sign this.” And it waives this. He gets to, oh, he gets to approve the architect. He gets to name the building. All that sort of thing. I’d never seen anything like that before.

But I was impressed with it. Hell, I signed it right there. Then I thought, I’m not the park director. He needs to sign that. Well, I wasn’t gonna mention his name. So anyway, I sign the papers. He writes me out a check for $100,000. I take it to Mr. Hittson, I’m just in heaven. And we build that building, and it works.

And we have to, Hittson has to send the park crew in there, probably for six months to get that thing built. But we got it built. And he named it after his editor of 30 or 40 years, Mr. Record. And Mr. Record was there when we dedicated that building.

Now, in that building, did you bring in freshwater dolphin?

Did I bring in freshwater dolphins?

I did, but that was later. We opened the aquarium in ’54. Okay, about 19, one of my, I’ve made lists, of this is what I want to get for the zoo, this animal, that animal. And man, as I said, you know, I grew up in aquariums, and I wanted dolphins, but I couldn’t afford that. And George, not George, Bob Bean. Now, he had his problems. But he brought the first inland dolphin exhibits that I’m aware of, to Brookfield. To I mean, yeah, to Brookfield, Chicago. I found out about Inia, the freshwater dolphin.

And there was a guy in Florida, some springs who had somehow brought one in. And it had lived and all that. But then the cold weather came, or a cold for Florida. And anyway, it died.

And do you remember the Tarpon Zoo?

Tarpon Springs, Michael Tsalickis a Greek who was quite an animal collector. And Trudie Jerkens, she lived in a trailer with a female chimp. And we always wondered about that.

But do you remember the, this is offhand, the gorilla at Cleveland, at Cincinnati?

I think it was in the (stammers)… At one time in the early ’40s, there were only, I think seven gorillas in the United States. One was named Susie and was at the Cincinnati Zoo. And the keeper slept, I’ve heard, slept with that gorilla. And I mean there’s just an awful lot of questions. I’ve never been able to get them answered. I think the guy’s name was Stephan, the director there in those days, but he’d died.

Anyway, back to, what were we talking about?

Were talking about how you got, Inia. Oh, anyhow. Okay. I really, I had to have those animals. And naturally, I talked to Mike Tsalickis, and he had gotten us a lot of animals for the herpetarium. He was a good, he didn’t really catch them, but he knew how to go out and get them. And he was reliable, and I think he was an honest, he was an honest animal dealer, perhaps unusual. Not to all that unusual, and he wasn’t, anyway. I told him what I wanted. I wanted one of those Inia.

And so it took about two years. Pretty soon he calls up and he says, “Well,” they called them pink dolphins. “I’ve got Pinky here, you wanna buy it?” And, “Well, yeah, sure, I want to buy it. I’ll have to find some money.” “Well, you better find it in the next 10 minutes ’cause if you don’t buy it,” some other zoo I’ve forgotten which one was gonna buy it. So I bought it, didn’t have the money, but he didn’t know then. And we got the money, but I didn’t have a place to put it. I said, “How long can you keep this Inia, where it is now?” It’s Tarpon Springs. He says, “Oh, we’ve got it with some,” not, I guess it was a river.

They had fenced off, there were manatees in this enclosure, it was huge. And said, “He’s doing fine in there. She is doing fine.” Okay. So we drew up a deal to add a wing to our aquarium. Did you ever see it? Okay. It was one big pool with above water level viewing at one side. And you go down a ramp and below, see them through the glass. And we had a couple of swimming pool filters, and we had a heater, water heater. And we really did, I mean, I read as much as I could about them, but there wasn’t a lot available. So we got that built in 60 days.

I don’t remember how much it cost. By then, nobody ever asked thing, we were just gonna build it. We had this freshwater dolphin, none, at that time, none in captivity. And with a very unknown record of that kind, that species in captivity. So anyway, we brought her. I went to Tarpon and got her. I’ll never forget, they had a like, it looked like a casket with plastic, you know, visqueen in the water and all that. And I told them, I said, “Now, Mike, don’t let them feed this animal because I’ve done this with other, with fish, especially, the water, it’ll just be hell. Well, they did feed it.

We were at Tampa, you know, we had a fight, oh! Amon Carter agreed to buy that animal, as long as, so if we landed it at his airport, which was halfway between Dallas and Fort Worth. He built that airport. Dallas wouldn’t have anything to do with it ’cause it was 12 feet closer to Fort Worth. 10, 20 years later, those cities, or Dallas, and all saw the wisdom of what he had done 20 years. So you have Dallas-Fort Worth airport, but we landed it there. He insisted on that. He wanted PR for his airport. So we got it. But on the airplane, it was a cargo plane.

That crate was right in the middle of the cabin actually, in and out of the cabin. And when the guy was flying, was getting ready to land, (chuckles) the water in that thing, the top was open, just rushed out into the pilot’s cabin. And it stank to high hell, and that pilot was really pissed off. And then when he got the nose up, and was ready to land all that water came back again, you know, and to the other end of the plane. Anyway, but we got her there and it was a fantastic exhibit, but I wanted another one, you know. And so I got, now I had a little leverage with Mike. I went down there to not Balem. He had it on the river there on the Amazon.

Anyway, I’ll remember it in a minute. It’s been a long time ago. I was out last night, carousing with some narrative wells. And anyway, we caught one. They really were fairly easy to catch. And brought it back, it was a male. And we called him, let’s see, the female was Pinky and Petals, a little alliteration, again. We introduced them and they got along okay.

And later on, they bred and had a baby, after I’d left, but they had a baby. And I made one huge mistake, one huge mistake. A cosmetic mistake, but it was huge. We kept calling these pink dolphins, ’cause that’s what they call them down there, pink dolphins. Actually, George Dolan, I said they were pink porpoises, and my friend Dolan says, “No, I’ve read them up, about in Encyclopedia Britannica, and they’re not porpoises, they’re dolphins.” Well now, Pinky Paddles Porpoise, that’s the way it works. He even wrote an article about it in the column, you know, saying, I didn’t know what the hell I was talking about. And I’m naming these animals and they’re not porpoises, just because the name starts with a P and all that. Well, he was a very good writer.

Anyway, when we were building, we had a swimming pool builder built that pool. And at the, I mean, remember we did this in 60 days. The builder, we wanted epoxy in there, you know, finished. The guy said, “What color do you want?” And I mean, this is like, you know, “We’re getting ready to spray it and we’ll send down for the paint for the epoxy, whatever color you want. Here’s a chart.” Well, I like blue. I have blue eyes. I used to have at least. I like to wear blue. I like blue. So I said, let’s make it blue, ’cause that’s aquatic and all that.

Well they did that. When the pink dolphins went in this blue tank, they turned gray. Stupid. Well, I wasn’t thinking. But anyway, but they lived, they did. They were wonderful animals. They were an wonderful. You know, they’re very amorous. The pink dolphin is, the river is so, not torrid. Particles in suspension, you know, visibility is very poor.

And their sonar is just so highly developed. And we put in, you know, underwater microphones. And if we had a guy at TCU. Oh, and I also taught at TCU, by the way. I was associate, an adjunct professor there, and taught for I think about 12 years, and biology. And anyway, I had friends there, And one of them was in physics. And he brought down this thing that would actually record at a very fast rate and then you could play it back. And those animals were just talking all the time.

They were great. Now, you mentioned they had a baby after you left. After I left.

Why did you decide to leave?

Well, not by choice. You haven’t asked me about the zoo management systems yet. But zoos started out as, you know, a park in the city, just a few deer, and that sort of thing. As the cities grow bigger, then they put the zoos in the park department and park departments manage them. And at that time, most of the zoos, or many of the zoos in the country were part of a park department. Dallas was such a case. Fort Worth was such a case. Well, and many other cities. Those things were sort of a peaceful, coexistence to an extent.

The zoo was a big PR plus for the park department, but there was a lot of jealousy there. We need to, you know, build this recreation thing. We need to put park benches over here and all of that. So there’s competition. And there’s a little jealousy there when the zoo gets a lot of PR, and we got a lot of PR. Now, I’ve told you about my former boss, Ham Hittson, the zoo director who became park director. Well, he had some problems. Now, he would not have been able to teach me much about management that I learned from some other people.

But he had a problem of his own with management. They didn’t fire him, but they lowered him. Okay. I had some good friends on the park board. One of them got himself appointed as the search committee to replace Mr. Hittson.

And he comes to the aquarium, to my office at the zoo, and he says, you know, “Who should we hire?

You know all these people, give me a name.” Well, I had made a talk at some Texas Parks thing not a year or two earlier, about zoo signs. And the guy who had organized that was a guy named Charles Campbell, and he was the director of parks in a little city called Midland. Bush spent some time, Bush the second, spent some time there, much to the discredited of the city. But anyway, he, he was a very well organized park director. I was impressed with him. And so I told my friend Charles Haas of the the park board, I said, “Oh, there’s a guy in Midland, and he’s interested in education.” Of that talk I gave on signs, he had sign. He had a little zoo, you know, in his, one of the parks. And he put signs up. I sent him the copy.

And so he says, “Well, call him up.” So I call up Campbell and I’m, you know, first name basis. And he says, “Well, what’s going on?” And I said, “Well, Mr. Hittson got relieved today of his park director duties. And I have one of the chairman of the park selection committee, director’s selection, is in my office, and we’d like to come out and talk to you. Or he’d like to come out and talk to you.” “Oh, really?” You know, you could hear the, you know, the interest building at the end of the telephone line. So in a nutshell, Charlie was, had his own airplane. We flew out there the next day. He interviewed Campbell. He’s very impressed. Campbell is, he’s not, there’s nothing…

He’s just very a simple person, but very organized, very well organized.

And not show off-ish, or what do you call it?

Someone who’s outgoing. An extrovert. Huh? Extrovert. He was more of an introvert, so they hired him, and he was my boss then. He was very friendly to me and I helped him. You know, he’d come ask me, “Tell me about these people,” you know. And I was sort of a pipeline for him. But then after a while, Dolan was very aware of this.

Charles became a little bit unhappy, with the publicity that the zoo was getting.

And he calls Dolan says, “I want, could you?

Here’s some stories for you on the parks.” And Dolan just said, “Well really, that isn’t. When you have something different, let me hear from you.” And Dolan really didn’t like Campbell from the beginning. And I never, I never took advantage of the fact that I had helped him come in there. And I knew that after a while, I knew that would be something he would be very sensitive to. And I was, just played the very low key role. The Zoo Society Association, is what it was called in Fort Worth, they wanted to take over that zoo. They wanted to get it from the city. And what the hell they owned, you know, they brought, built all these buildings.

They had done all these, bought these animals. And Campbell just was against that. In no uncertain terms, he said, “I do not want you to cooperate to that. The city has built that zoo, I mean, it was the beginning. And we don’t want to lose it, it’s good for us. And I don’t want them to take over.” Well, those people didn’t work for Charles Campbell, and they had other ideas. Pretty soon there was this big schism going on between the city parks director and the Zoological Society. Now, I was in the middle.

It was hard to keep a low profile in that, but I did my best. But finally, Campbell… My budgets were always a problem. And nobody taught me about budgets, including him. But I did learn, and I was able to with his, he had a guy in there who was his accountant, or whatever. That guy taught me a lot, and I was able to get realistic budgets, and all that. But there was, the jealousy was tremendous, envy. And now, I made my a lot of mistakes too.

And so I was not without blame, but he did fire me. He fired me. And it was the city… Our senator, our state senator, who was a friend of mine, said, “Who is this Charles Campbell?” I said, “Well, he’s my boss. He was my boss.

He ran the park department.” “Well, hell, I never heard of him, but everybody knows the zoo.” I guess nobody ever thought about, well who does he report to?

I said, (chuckles) “Well, it’s, you know, I do report to people occasionally.” And anyway, the AAZPA sent Dr. Ogilvy, he was new at Oklahoma City, sent him down to represent the AAZPA, and Ogilvy was very good. And within about two days, Campbell had given about 18 reasons, that I was incompetent and all.

And after Ogilvy got through and there was some talk of, what do you call it when you appeal a ruling?

For some reason the park department did not fall under that rule for the city. If the city fires you, you have appellate departments, or committees and all that. It could go all the way up to the city manager. And interestingly, the city manager was another good friend of mine. And he was very helpful to me, but not in this. He had to leave his hand, he had to keep his distance on that. I had no one, no appellate. There were probably six of us that did not have that available.

And so I didn’t have anybody. But it became, the society finally quit.

When you left Fort Worth, were there things you wanted yet to accomplish?

Did I want to accomplish things at Fort Worth before that I was unable to do since I got fired?

Is that right?

God, you know, I have to tell you, Fort Worth was, of course, my first zoo. Warren Thomas, who has a way with words, told me that Oklahoma City was his first zoo. And he said it was like a mistress, your first mistress. You just are in love with them. And you’ll never forget them. You may have 10 more, but you’ll ne never get out from under the spell of that first one. Well, I don’t think I’ve ever had a mistress as such, but that zoo may have been it. And that was my life.

I never had even thought about leaving there. Oh, I had an offered to go to the Los Angeles Zoo once. I turned that down. And offers to go to, I had an offer to go to New York twice. Coates wanted me to come up there. Well, I wanted my own deal.

Did I have plans for the future?

Hell yeah, I had all kinds of ideas. Probably half of them impractical. But dreams are that way, good dreams. And if you just do, half of them, or a fourth of them, you know, you’re probably gonna do okay. So yes, I had plenty of things I wanted to do. There were some zoo people that worked for you that went on to other things. Just to quickly mention and talk about them. Gary Clark. Oh!

One of the big problems at Fort Worth was money, as I’ve already said. And since, (chuckles) I was in the park department, I couldn’t pay my people any anymore than, you know, the guy that would trim the trees. Or the horticulturist at the Botanic Garden and all that, the big restraints. And so I couldn’t really attract, I would find people. I’d go out and find them. There’s a lot of people out there that wanted to work in the zoo, but they just didn’t know how to apply, or that sort of thing. And so when I did get somebody, I’d keep them as a keeper for six months or maybe a year. Then I’d give them a title.

No more, maybe $25 more a month or something. When Gary was there, I told him he was the curator of birds. Hell, I mean, he was just a kid. At the Kansas City Zoo, he was in charge of the birthday parties at the children’s zoo. But a title can be something, can mean something. Well, when I was at the Dallas Aquarium and just a kid, and here Roger, I get this thing, this zoo roster, and I was a name there, an assistant curator. I was no longer a people counter. I was an assistant curator.

So titles mean something to people. To compensate, people for lack of good salaries, we gave them titles. And we also trained them. And I think there was, we trained a lot of people there. And Gary Clark went from Fort Worth to director of Topeka. His boss there, who was a very nice guy. Showwalter, I think was his name. Mm-hm, yes.

Called me before he hired Gary back. Gary had been there as a keeper. And he wanted to know if Gary was mature enough by then, and how he’d done. And he was not ready to just, you know, take him back. And I told him if he didn’t take him back, that somebody would grab him.

Frank Thompson, do you remember him?

He was at Catskill and he was at Indianapolis, I think. And somewhere in Indiana. Frank, his background in zoos was circuses. His wife was an acrobat, I think. And so they come from different places, but he’d gotten some excellent experience at the Catskill, very good experience. And this is the thing, at least in those days, I thought that… I mean, college was good, but experience was, in a zoo, was even more. And hell, I taught biology for years.

I think I’m a pretty good teacher. If you really want to learn the business, and you came and worked for me, by god, we’d give you a run for your money. And we didn’t charge you any tuition, you know, it was free. And along with the title. John Mertens. John Mertens. Mertens was a risk. John Mertens, he’s dead now. Mertens was in Dallas.

No, Mertens was the curator of reptiles at the Columbus Zoo, as I recall. And they stole him away from Columbus, to the Cleveland Zoo, so he was in two zoos. Actually, they didn’t steal him. He was fired in Columbus. And then he was fired at Cleveland. And he didn’t have a zoo to go to. Like, you know, you don’t have a pot to pee in. And a zoo person who’s really got what I’ll describe somewhere in this interview, which is a very important factor, character, Mertens somehow ended up in Dallas. And he would come over, and at that time I was designing the herpetarium.

He gave me ideas and all that. But everybody who he had worked for just was so, “You don’t want to hire that guy.” And finally, it was a double-edged sword, I think. Mertens was very good with reptiles. He really was excellent. And he was good with people, to a point. He had his problems. I finally hired him. And he did some wonderful work there, wonderful work. I think I made him, yeah, I made him a general, when Frank Thompson left, made him a general curator.

Then little things would start happening. You know about palace revolutions. John wanted to, he wanted to move up. He wanted his own zoo. He and Charles Campbell sort of got together, and that wasn’t good for me. There wasn’t anything that was any big deal. That was a role that he took. He went to a zoo in South Texas.

I’ve forgotten the name of it. I’ll remember it in a minute. But he went down there as director. And then he went to a zoo, but he had a problem there. He didn’t last there long.

Then he went to a new zoo, was it in Charleston, South Carolina?

Is that where?

North Carolina. North Carolina? That’s where he went. Well, he built a new zoo there. And then he had some kind of a problem there, and he got fired. And then he became an animal dealer. He worked for Bill Chase. And Bill Chase even said, you know, “You gotta watch that guy,” ’cause he was trying to take over. (chuckles) He was getting the names off of the shipping crates when they came in, so he could buy the stuff from them. He was getting the names of the customers that they were being sent to.

So that was a, Mertens was a problem. But he did excellent work. I learned a lot from the man. But I’d never hire him again. He came to Oklahoma City and wanted a job. No, no.

When you left Fort Worth, how old were you?

I left in ’87. So I was, 47 years old.

Now, you went from there to the Portland Zoo?

Yes.

How did that happen?

Well, I was in deep depression for about, after leaving Fort Worth Zoo. And in fact, what’s his… Ernest Hagler, I had hired him as a hamburger cook. He’s told this story many times, but I ran the ad on it, we were gonna take over the public services in the Fort Worth Zoo. I mean, we needed that money. That was another good source of money. So I needed a hamburger cook. We went through about three or four of them.

They were either winos, or… Cooks are very, very undependable in certain respects. And so I ran this ad and Ernest applied. He was about 18, I think. He said, “Well, what do you want to know?” And I said, “Well, I’ll tell you what, I want a hamburger. Now there’s the deal. I wanna see you fix a hamburger.” By god, he fixed a good hamburger and cheeseburger. We used to call them tiger burgers and lion burgers. And we had a little sidewalk cafe that we had built.

I mean, he kept moving up. Finally, he was our public services manager, and did a good job. And we made a lot, he made us a lot of money. Ernest went to, was at Fort Worth. When I left there, he… I went to Chámeza as part of a… The one I mentioned, Kirk Johnson, Jr., the son of one of our great benefactors at the zoo, was making a deal with National Geographic. There’s a cenote, a sinkhole.

It’s a sacred, it’s part of the Mayan group there. He wanted me to go down there. And he knew, I mean, I needed, I was in deep depression. So Ernest and I went down there. We caught iguanas, we caught some snakes, and we helped with the… First, they wanted to drain that cenote. The archeologists had been dredging very, you know, the mother load of Mayan artifacts. They’d been dredging them out of there for 40 years.

The first consult with State Department was an amateur. And he went up there and dredged, discovered it, so to speak. So they pumped the thing, it went down about 10 feet, it was about 40 feet in deep. And then next day they kept pumping, and it went down about two feet. And then finally, I put some dye in the water, and it was coming back in. (chuckles) We were taking the water out about two miles, and it was just coming back in.

And we caught a, do you know what a Cantil is?

A Mexican moccasin. I caught one of those in there. That scared the shit out of me, because they’re very deadly. Neurotoxic, they’re very neurotoxic. Then, but we had… I finally began to come around. And there was a medical doctor, excuse me, a professor. He was a biochemist at the University of Oregon Medical School.

And delightful guy, he had talked, he loved zoos. And he’d gone to the Bronx Zoo, and apparently Bill Conway took him to lunch, took him to dinner, or vice versa. Anyway, they had a very good relationship. And he said, “You know, you,” oh and Mason. What Mason wanted to do, they had a society in Portland, and they ran the children’s zoo. But they wanted to take over the whole zoo. The same old schism. You know, city owned and all that.

And I was hired as a director of the society to prepare this presentation to the city, and sell them on it and make the transition. That was a very politically loaded job. And the commissioner of parks was really, didn’t wanna, same old thing. it was turf battle, but we did it. And we got the thing going and we had a lot of public, oh, there I learned about citizen support. That we had wonderful citizen support. There was a lot of problems in the zoo. Baby elephant, though, had been born there. First one in decades in the United States.

And it was quite a feat. Jack Marks was the zoo director, and he was having an awful lot of problems. It was a bittersweet thing. I mean, I needed a job and I wanted to get that done. And I told Jack, I said, “Jack, I’m just gonna be here long enough to do this. And they’re gonna need, still need a zoo director.” Well, he was gonna quit and all that, but he did hang on, and he finally did quit. Or maybe they fired him, it’s hard to say. Things like that go on.

And so I went up there and did that. And then in with the zoo conference was in Oklahoma City the next year. And the society at Oklahoma City was asking for applicants. And I applied for Ogilvy’s job that he had left. There had been the problem at Oklahoma City.

Or do you wanted to switch to Oklahoma City?

No, no, but you were, you became… After you, the Portland Zoo Society took over. Yes.

You became director of the Portland Zoo?

No. Never did. Never did. It was of the society. I would’ve been if I’d wanted to be, and if we had been successful, but we were successful. But I left probably two weeks before the city signed the contract to turn the zoo over to the society. And it was a… We didn’t wanna let the city know that I was leaving, that my board was emphatic on that. If they know you’re leaving, they’ll find, that’ll be an excuse to not sign this contract and all.

So I was sort of a front man for the society. Yeah, I’m sure I mean, there’s no doubt in my mind. I mean, I got along great with the society. And they were delighted with, you know what we’d done. We had to do an awful lot of work.

Now, you wanna go to Oklahoma City?

So you applied for then a job at the Oklahoma City Zoo. Okay. And having been burned already, I wanted, you know, here we are and again, park department, and the Oklahoma City Zoo. Every zoo, I guess, has an angel. And in San Diego it was Dr. Wegeforth. Supposedly in Bronx it was… Oh, I’ve forgotten his name, I’ll remember him. Anyway, I told, I mean, Mr. Kirkpatrick interviewed me, not the city manager, Mr. Kirkpatrick.

He was not with the city, he was the society. And I thought, well, it’s kind of like Fort Worth again. And he said, “Well, would you like to come to Oklahoma City?” And I said, “I’d love to come, but I’m not gonna work for the park department. I’ve already been through that. Somewhere I’ve got to learn my lesson and that’s it.” And he said, “Well, suppose we get the zoo made a department.” And he said, “Dr. Ogilvy has been talking to do this.” They didn’t like Ogilvy. And Ogilvy made some mistakes there. He also did some good things. He hired Jerry Lynch. But see at Oklahoma City, they had been, Warren Thomas was there for about five years.

Did a good job, did a great job. It was his first mistress, as I said. Thomas was, took Jillian Frazier’s place, he was at Denver.

It was just moving, what do you call them, moving chairs or something?

But Thomas did a great job there.

Then there was a director briefly, named Birddog Rogers, do you remember, Birddog?

And then there were two city employees in the park department who were moved in for brief periods of time. And so you had all of those personnel changes. And this is a big problem with zoos. Zoos, you know, as you know, you’re looking years ahead. You’re building this thing for pygmy hippos. And maybe it might take you from beginning to end three or four years just to bring that to fruition. Then you got something else, so you need what I call continuity. You need continuity of marketing, you need continuity of development.

Zoos are so expensive and it takes so long to build a zoo structure that you’ve got to have somebody there for 15, 20, 30 years. Conway is probably the best example of that value. So 15 years ago at Fort Worth I was just beginning to get going. So at Oklahoma, I wasn’t gonna… There was a complete lack of continuity at Oklahoma City. And the society was very much against Ogilvy. And I could just see, you know, them turning on me. Kirkpatrick was the man’s name.

He was the angel, the sponsor. And he used to come to the Fort Worth Zoo, and he would talk to me. In fact, he wanted me to come up there when Warren Thomas had left. But I wasn’t about to do that, leave Fort Worth. And I think he may have had a friend, a lady friend in Fort Worth. So I knew Kirkpatrick, and so I just told him no. Well, he said, “What would you do if in 30 days the society managed to get the city to make the zoo its own department?” He said, “Ogilvy has been working on it, but there’s been a lot of reluctance. And part of it,” Kirkpatrick said, “they don’t want the society to be running the zoo.

And they buy animals, but then we have to feed them. The city has to feed them and build facilities for them.” Okay. So I said, “Well, then I’ll come if that happens.” Well, it did happen. And then he, I was interviewed by the city manager, and Kirkpatrick at the same time. And that was apparently sort of a formality, because the job was offered, and I came down there. Well, I had to finish that job at Portland. I had not left Portland yet. And so as soon as I got that contract on signed, sealed, and delivered, I came to Oklahoma City.

When you became director, when you came to Oklahoma City, what was the condition of the zoo?

Well, the condition of the zoo when I came, it was 1969. The total lack of continuity was a big problem. And I had not been used to that sort of thing. There was no master plan. And I’m a firm, I’m a firm believer in having a realistic master plan. But I’m also a firm believer in having that master plan flexible, and revising it. I used to revise it. We started making master plans when I was at Fort Worth for five years, five year master plan.

But after a while, too many things were happening at Fort Worth, good things. We made a master plan for three years with some long range stuff, you know, listed, but an operating plan for three years. Then every year we would sit down, the staff, and we would review that master plan for the next two years. And what we had done and what we hadn’t done, and the problems and the solutions. And we would write up and add a year to that, so we always had a three-year plan. And I think that’s critical in running anything, but especially a zoo. And if you can, you should have a good five-year, and 10-year plan, which we did add to that, too.

What did I find?

The ungulate collection was fantastic. Warren Thomas had done that. There were then holes in it though. I mean, there a male had… He was very proud of the, a gazelle that he had gotten from I think Sudan. Excuse me, it was a white-eared cub. And the male had died and nobody had any. I even went to Sudan, to the zoo that he’d gotten those from.

They didn’t have any. It was probably, I don’t know whether it was extinct, but couldn’t get any. Well, that whole herd, I mean that, there was about eight animals, nothing sustainable. The golden, they had a pair of golden tamarins in their herpetarium. By the way, they named it The Herpetarium. Ogilvy had taken care of that. They were together and they were producing babies, but they did a dumb thing. They would separate and leave the baby with the mother.

And as you know, tamarins, the father raises the babies, and passes them back and forth to the female. But he in effect carries them, but they had two. And it had had a baby, and the baby had been lost. So there was a problem. The herpetarium, was, I mean, I was used to the one at Fort Worth and I was embarrassed by this one. But, you know, we’ll do something. We’ll make, do something with it. So the collection was…

Oh, a big problem was it had been sort of pawned to an animal dealer.

Ogilvy had signed a contract such that VanDerBrink, remember them?

They had first choice on any animal, any angulate animal born, maybe even others, over the next five years. And I knew VanDerBrink. I’d bought a gorilla from him at Fort Worth, first gorilla we ever had. And he was a reasonable person. And I sat down with him at a zoo conference, and just said, “I want to honor this, but it’s gonna be to your benefit. I’ll make it to your benefit, if we can revise this slightly.” Which he agreed to do, and we did. We got out and all that stuff. But we gave him an option, but we didn’t, it wasn’t automatic.

Okay. What else about the Oklahoma City Zoo?

The staff was pretty, I started to say immoral. Pretty demoralized by all the changes that had happened. A good thing was we had some bond money that some of it was being spent. And a lot of it we could do with other things with. So in a nutshell, probably not a nutshell drawn out. That’s what I found in Oklahoma City. What was your first…

What is the first thing you wanted to do when you saw this?

What did you want to address or enhance right away?

I wanted, there were some fantastic animals there. I wanted to get those tamarins in a proper facility, not in a cage in the snake house. I wanted to get them and I wanted to get some more. And they were… You couldn’t bring them in. And San Diego had some. And Debra Clemons at the National Zoo had a large group of them. We had two.

And I think there were one or two others scattered around. I spent the next three months, not the whole time. Trying to find out, checking all… Well, you’ve already told me you found it in your animal control. I think you said you found a lemur once. And people had these things and nobody knows about it. And I finally located seven and got them. And I mean, conned some of them, but got a group that would be make a sustainable group.

And for the next 15 years that I was there, we had an excellent breeding program with Golden Lion tamarins. Did the same thing with the gorilla. We had a mountain gorilla, the only one in captivity. Marvin told me, wrote me immediately. He says, “I think the one in Tel Aviv,” they had a gorilla at Tel Aviv, and that I think is from Rwanda. And it could be a mountain gorilla. So I wrote to the director there, and we… And it seemed that the data was correct.

And I didn’t see them, well, he sent me pictures. But we then, we flew him, the only way we could borrow it was to fly him and the gorilla to Oklahoma City, which we did. So then I had a female mountain gorilla. And the Makumba, beautiful male, just didn’t know he was a gorilla. And he’d beat the hell out of her. Probably, you know, Oklahoma has terrible rednecks that beat their wives, and so he’d been there too long. Snow leopard, we set up, we built a breeding area. Quote, survival area, about a 20-acre area.

We built about 20, one to an acre, 20 modular enclosures where we could put a bird, or a mammal, or what have you. And that was good and bad. Some of the animals we got, we had to modify. It’d been better if we just build them as we got the animals, but we didn’t. But it worked out fine. We started popping snow leopards out, so that everybody that wanted one could have one. And that was good. I mean, they were sold. That was good money.

Oh, I had worried very… At Fort Worth I’d started an antivenom committee where we had a national inventory of all the antivenoms that were available in zoos, or in laboratories and what have you. We never had, while I was there, a snake bite at Fort Worth. And we never had a serious accident, either. Safety, I think is an un… Is a non-addressed deal in zoos, still. Complacency kills it. So at Oklahoma City, I wanted to have…

I was the chairman of that committee, and brought it to Oklahoma City.

And we tied it in with the national, what do you call them?

Poison Control Centers, and the zoo became a poison control center. And we didn’t get any money out of it, but we got a lot of contacts, and we were part of the system. That was a, I think a big thing. I was very pleased with that. The zoo, Oklahoma City Zoo had a terrible, the guy had been killed by, the welder there, had been killed by a Cape Buffalo. The zoo was demoralized. And we started with safety programs and all that. And I must say I was there about 16, 15, 16 years.

We had a very good safety record. And every accident, I don’t care how small it was, how insignificant it was investigated by three people, who were different areas.

And they had to tell us, they had to find out why, what was the cause of the accident?

Every accident has a cause. When somebody says, “There’s no cause here, and we can’t tell you the cause.” Now, this is bread and butter, you know, safety program. But if you have people get killed, then you better address it. And so I was extremely concerned with good safety, and we had a very good safety program. We won a lot of awards.

Did you have an overarching, when you became director, vision for the zoo, that was already in your mind?

No, but in about six months I did have. And we had, the zoo was about 70 acres. And one thing that Phil Ogilvy had done, well, the city had done it, but he was very close to them. There were two granting agencies. One, was the Bureau of Outdoor Education, recreation, excuse me, Bureau of Outdoor Recreation. The other was Land Management. And we got, oh, and I had some pretty good contacts in Washington that I had gotten. My congressman in Fort Worth was named Jim Wright.

By the time I got to Oklahoma City, he was in line to be speaker of the house, which he did become. I mean, Jim was very helpful. We got several million, I think we got about eight or $10 million from these two grants. But they had to be matched locally. And so then I went out and got, and the city was very cooperative. They wanted something good at the zoo. It was too much controversy there for years. My concept of any zoo, the more space you got, the better.

Now you have, I think ingeniously, you, in the Lincoln Park Zoo, I think how you have handled, I mean they’re like a locked in sea. Uh-oh, she’s asleep. Oh no. Handled a very small land mass.

Have you ever added to it?

How big is it?

32 Acres. Oh god. 32 acres. Well, I think that zoos, to be successful, really over the long run need to be just huge. Chester Zoo is huge, and they’ve done a lot with it. Well, you know, Bronx Zoo is huge, but they don’t have access to a lot of it, but it’s huge. San Diego is huge. Over the next 15 years, through these grants, and through manipulation with the Park department trading back and forth, we raised the land area of Oklahoma City Zoo to 525 acres. And I was very proud of that.

And although some of my trustees at the end said, “Well, you’ll never use that. Let’s use it for this racetrack.” I had a terrible, the worst idea I ever had at Oklahoma City was to build a race, to join… We needed a parking lot. Business was just, we had zero, zilch, maybe 40 cars. And on a Saturday, or a Sunday, or any nice day in the summer, cars would come up and then just go by, no place to park. And that city is automobile. There aren’t any taxis, that’s too expensive. Oklahoma City is the biggest example of urban sprawl.

It’s 650 square miles. So you have to have, people have, are gonna move around by a car, and you have to give them a place to park. All the evidence was that Oklahoma, the state, was gonna approve paramutual betting, which I don’t understand. But I knew that it meant people, and that would be good for the zoo. And they were looking for a site. It would either be in Tulsa or Oklahoma City. I hired, of all the things, the country’s leading expert on paramutual betting was at the University of Oklahoma in the economics department. I hired him. He did a feasibility study.

And we got that, we got our site was approved. There was a guy named DeBartolo, who was mafia, very mafia. I mean he, and it was well known. He later I think died, but his son went to jail. So says, “Here’s 25 acres for you,” you know. And then he said, “Well, we need,” a week later, “We need more. I need to have a grandstand and all that.” And I said, “My god, there’s land there you can buy.” And this was the whole idea. They were gonna have to have the parking lot across the street from the zoo, but they’re gonna have to add to the property, the land.

And it was, there was private property available. Well, they didn’t wanna do that. And so the next thing gave them 25 more acres, 50 acres. That’s a lot of land. And then some of my trustees I found out were speculating. They were buying property up. And they were gonna sell it either to the racetrack, or somehow, there’s a egret.

You have those very often?

Is that a snow egret?

Yeah, I think it was a American egret. it could have been a snow. It might even be a cattle egret. Anyway, so he wanted more property. And then finally, I just said, we didn’t buy that land. We didn’t acquire it for a racetrack. This is great, if we get a parking lot out of it, fine. That’s our plan.

I had a few other problems, but that was the biggie. That was the biggie. And I wasn’t gonna give that guy all that land. So they build the racetrack. Well, I left. Okay. When I found out the trustees were doing this, this was inside trading. I mean, they put them in jail in New York now for that.

And so I left, I left.

When you were there, were they, were you trying to negotiate just a parking lot, or revenue from the racetrack?

Both. Both. Hell, if we give them 50 acres, I want some of the action. Mm-hm. I want peace of the action. So anyway, they yeah, the racetrack was built, and then it just about went bankrupt a year or two ago. People shouldn’t gamble. I mean, if they want to gamble, it was a big mistake to even do that, in my opinion. And I regret it very much.

And the Indians now have taken it over, and they’re making it work, of course, with white man’s money. Well now, as we talk about fundraising and so forth.

Why was it important to develop the Oklahoma Zoological Trust?

Well, that was the best compromise that I could come up with. We were a city department. But the price of oil and the oil glut in the late ’70s. We were raising money for an aquarium, dolphin area, or porpoise-ry is the word I used to like. We had about $12 million raised. When that ha oil glut happened, we also had a bank to fail there in very unfortunate circumstances, Our $12 million within three months went down to about $5 million. I mean, the price of oil just dropped, and that’s what this was based on.

Well, why was it important?

Your question, why was it important to what?

Develop the trust. Oh, develop the trust. Okay. So the city cut our, they cut… Well cut, they cut everybody. But they cut about 10 positions out of the zoo, just like that. We had a city manager who was, I mean, I don’t blame him. He didn’t have any choice. But man, we’d go through, “Research curator.

How long has that been vacant?” “Oh, about three months.” “Cut it.” “Keeper, such-and-such keeper. What’s that?” “Well, that’s a swing keeper and they can work anywhere in the zoo.” “Is it filled right now?” “No, but we’ve interviewed applicants, and we’re recommending to the city who to hire.” “Cut it.’ I mean, in 10 minutes I lost 10 positions in the zoo, plus a lot of money. I was so depressed, I went by to see Kirkpatrick on the way back to the zoo, and I said, “You know, I think now is the time to just keep the city’s money, but get out from under their control. Because we can’t go through this every few years. We need continuity.” And he agreed and we sat down and write up, in other words, it wouldn’t be controlled by the society, but they would be a big participant in it. But the city, who’s gonna keep, if we want their money, we’ve got to have. But those were more honorary. I mean, the mayor was on that trust, but the mayor liked the zoo. I told you about her.

And so even though it was just ceremonial, so to speak, she was listed, she’d participate. And we used to, ne thing I used to do, Mark, and I found this to be very effective. Every Friday Kirkpatrick would come to the zoo. He was an ex-admiral. And apparently, there’s a walk, a captain’s walk on every ship or boat in the navy. Every once a week when the captain goes around, looks at things and checks for, you know, dust, and all that stuff, looks for rust. Okay, so he would come out every Friday. And I said, “Let’s get some of the trustees out here.” And we can, well, con them again.

We can take them to wherever we’re gonna do something, and we can educate them, though. So we got the zoo trust was approved. And within the next month or so, every one of those trustees had been to the zoo. They got the treatment. I mean, we weren’t trying to get money out of them. They controlled the money, though, the city money. We had to keep that city money, really. And I had another ace in the hole, a millage tax strictly for zoo improvements.

That had a few political problems. One of my society trustees was a complete asshole, and a Conservative, ultra-conservative. One of the, redneck senators that I had lined up on the millage, it had to be approved by the state. He didn’t, he hated him. And this guy hated, it was very bad. He wouldn’t participate, and he’d been in the zoo society for a long time. So I figured well, we’ll get rid of him pretty soon though. But the millage was all set up, ready to go.

And one of the trustees used to be the city manager, and he knew everything about it. I mean, he helped with it. And as soon as the, we got rid of this redneck on the council, on the trust, we would move on it. The other thing is that…

I’m sorry, what was the question?

So it was important to have this trust in here. Oh, the trust! It was the best… I thought, and still do, it was the best medium. It was the best medium between having a society, which in this case they never really raised any money. The city bought, they bought the animals and all of that. But no real participation between the society and the city. And as long as that was balanced, I thought that would be a good, happy medium, because we had to have that city money.

And we weren’t gonna get any more bond money until we get did the millage thing. It was a truce between the, normally the two opposing forces, and most zoos in this country, the city municipality and the society.

Can you rank some things?

What are the, were the most to you, the most important factors at the zoo?

The public, animal exhibits, breeding programs, education.

What were some of the, if you could rank them, were these the important factors?

And what were you think would be the first one, or what’s next or?

Well, you’ve asked about education. Animal exhibits. Animal exhibits. The public. The public. Breeding programs. Breeding programs.

That’s it?

Four qualities, four factors.

Which is the most important?

That’s a hard question to answer. I’m not sure if I can answer that question. I think you’ve got to have the public. You can’t have a zoo without public support, in my opinion. So you have to work on public support. And if you don’t have it, I don’t think you’ll have a zoo for long. I mean, everybody will cut you off. The animals, god, if you don’t have animals, you don’t have a zoo.

So we seem to be hitting a brick wall here. The breeding programs. Today, I mean, when they’re putting these intrauterine devices in animals, and they’re castrating males and all that, the breeding programs seem to have sort of tapered off, the importance of them. But there’s still an awful lot of species that need the best breeding circumstances we can give them. So I think that’s important. And education was your other one. I believe you need to have a balance of all of those. And I think it would be hard for me to say, well here’s one, two, three, four.

They all need to be present.

As director, how would you describe your style of directing?

It’s changed. It has changed from… In Fort Worth, I, you know, grew up with that zoo, and built it, and was familiar with every little brick, and all that stuff. I think I had a pretty good. At first, I did a lot, which I needed to delegate, but I didn’t have anyone to delegate it to them. But as I got people like Frank Thompson, even Mertens, and others, competent people, I like to kind of leave them alone, unless they get a problem. I don’t like surprises. I don’t want to be, I don’t wanna get a call from the Humane Society that they saw some guy, you know, kick the zebra or something.

And I want to know about it. Those things will happen. In the best of zoos, you’ll have problems. But I want to know about them, ’cause I’m the one that’s gonna have to, either, not necessarily solve them, but bear the brunt of it. And communicate to the public, and communicate to my bosses, “Here’s a problem. We’ve done this,” and all that. Nobody wants to be surprised.

What were some of your managing strategies?

Well, I think the planning was a big factor. I think we need to have, you know, you knew how to get here this morning. And you had a mental roadmap. Well, you had that gadget too. And if you hadn’t had that, you might not have known where, we might have hit… We hit one cul-de-sac only, and the other day the taxi hit three or four when I was, we were looking for that place. You need a roadmap. You need to have objectives, and you need to dream. Some of these things may be far out, but you need to have a few of those.

And I think if you have that roadmap, if the staff has it. More important, Mark, if the staff has participated in it. And sometimes, staff doesn’t want to participate. I mean they’re too busy doing something, and they don’t wanna, but it is very important to get them on board, and to make sure they understand the overall objective and how to get there.

Speaking of staff, what was your relationship with the staff at Oklahoma City?

And how did you change, and develop their training and upgrading?

Well, in the first case, in a very interesting observation. We had, I think I had… At Oklahoma City, I would say, if you were to ask me what is my weakest management area, I would say it’s hiring people. It’s very strong in one area where people are committed, and so forth. But it’s weak in areas where you don’t have that kind of commitment. And you can’t expect to get equal commitment out of everybody. I believe I, so I think I could have learned more. I could have done better in who I hired.

But I had a very good staff there. And you were there when the accreditation was done. Several people said they were very impressed with the staff and their overall. But in three or four years, there can be changes. I don’t like to micromanage. I don’t wanna be micromanaged myself. And as I said, I like to leave people alone. And if they can’t solve the problem, then I want to hear about the problem.

But I don’t want to hear about the problems in between. That’s their job is to solve those problems. It’s their job also to come to me if they can’t do it. And that’s my form of management. And I think the roadmap is very important.

And sometimes, now, Tom, you ever heard of Tom Foos?

I hired Tom Foos, and he had terrible credentials, terrible credentials. At the Philadelphia Zoo, they, I’ll tell you what, they were very critical of him, and his wife for some reason. I always found his wife pretty nice. Tom Foos was a very difficult guy to work with. He was very introverted. He was monomaniacal on what he was doing. And his main deal, what we were trying to get him along, ’cause he was excellent at it, the coefficient of inbreeding. The inbreeding of coefficient with founder stock and so forth.

And I had him do that for every animal that we were breeding. Well, he wanted to work, he wanted to do that. But he also was doing his doctoral dissertation on digestion by rhinos and elephants. And it was kind of intruding on him if he needed to be part of a meeting on planning something or other. But you know, you put up with so much. And Foos did an excellent job of those tables for us. And I understand they’re still following them there through three different zoo directors, since I left. The idea of, well, I’ve mentioned micromanagement, that’s terrible.

And I think I used to do some of that at Fort Worth before I had people. You get in the habit of something, and it’s hard to change it. But I changed it. I damn sure did. I’m sorry, I’ve… Oh no.

What was the last thing you?

Well, the question that kind of leads in is as you began to change direction of the zoo, what hindrances, what major hindrances occurred from what direction?

Oh! Well, the lack of money for, we just didn’t have money for capital improvements. And, Mark, when we… When the trust was formed, this was a big transition, because we went from one system, the city system, and getting a lot of work, help from the city to doing it ourselves. Now, that’s what we wanted because we felt that we could do it better without the hindrances of the city’s controls and all. That took time. We had to build up our own purchasing. We had to build up our own managerial system and what do you call, the job descriptions. We had to really redo all of that for the trust.

I’m very proud of one fact. I was dealing with two unions in that zoo, two. One, was the public service employees. And we, by the way, we took that over when we became the trust, and all that money and that. And we developed that. We had the highest per capita net income of any zoo in the country. About a year before I left, I gave a talk at Miami. I had surveyed all the zoos that had their own public services.

By that I mean admissions, food and beverage sales, gift shop sales, any grant money or donations, and that sort of thing. Those were bread and butter. And it seemed to me that if we could get those better organized under the trust, it would, but it took time. And in dealing with the… When we transferred all these guys that had been on the city payroll to trust payroll, there was a lot of, and I don’t blame them, suspicions. And there were two, as I said, two unions.

Well, one was the whatever, who was the?

They were in a lot of zoos.

[Mark} Teamsters?

Teamsters! Yeah. One, was the teamsters, the other was the public service restaurants, and all that that they were in. And I’m happy to tell you that when we became the trust, every employee in the zoo had the opportunity, one, stay with the city. The city guaranteed them a job offer within six months that they would accept, and they would extend it if specialist circumstances. The employees could come to work for the trust. But it was gonna be a closed shop. Because we just felt that we’d really worked at trying to satisfy employees’ problems. Without the necessity of representation from the union.

So they had a choice there. They could stay with the city in some new job, or they could come with us, or they could quit. But they’d have a job either way. Both of those unions voted to what’s called de… There’s a word for it, when you get out, when you dissolve the union, de-certification. De-certification. We had about, I guess 175 employees over all of that staff, including public services. And most of them were in the unions.

They really were forced into it before, and now they didn’t have to be. And we had built up, and I’m proud of this, and I don’t think I’m tooting my own horn. But we had developed enough confidence of zoo employees in their jobs and in the management that they didn’t need a union. We had employee picnics. We had, we spent a lot of time on that. I fired a guy, an exhibits curator. And this is where you’re in a fishbowl. At some point, I mean, we carried this guy, but he was a terrible exhibit curator.

And he was all, had all kinds of bad qualities. And I fired him. And he had a chance to go up above to whatever you call it. Appeal. Appeal, and he went to city council. They have to listen to whoever’s there. And that was not helpful. And a few people in the zoo, “Oh yeah, old Don, he really tried.” Things like that can happen, and they have a snowball effect.

And just firing that one guy had that effect with several people who were not, they were kind of… I think they were worried about the trust coming, not having, I mean, they wouldn’t have a job at the zoo anymore, but they would have a job. And they wanted to stay at the zoo, but they didn’t. Nobody liked the weekend work. That’s, I think, is one of the big work conditions that’s difficult for people to accept in the zoo business.

What was your first big development at Oklahoma City Zoo?

The condor, what we called the Condor Cliffs and Patagonian Panorama. It was temperate, South American animals. We had maned wolves. These were, they were not, the big exhibit was condors, but we had a gillions of birds in there. We had lizards, we had iguanas in there. We had… God. Oh, there, I’ve lost my vocabulary. We had a number of mammals mixed in there, this was an innovation.

I mean, it was a little risky mixing animal species. And we did it, if it looked like it would work, if it seemed like it would work, we’d try it. And then we’d watch them like hell, and if it didn’t work, get them the hell out of there. But we had a lot of excellent combinations. And the condors, they laid eggs and raised babies, but they didn’t bother Patagonian cavys. We had a lot of different animals. We had the maned wolves next door, and we had rheas. We had rheas in that big enclosure.

We had to kick a few of them out. And that’s another thing, individual animals, and behavior and all, you have to watch for that. You can’t draw conclusions from just four or five animals. You may need to try 25 animals on a certain diet, or on something or other. Let me talk about a little controversial thing here. Go ahead.

How’d you get involved in the stopping of the rattlesnake hunts?

Well, we didn’t get it done. I didn’t. How did I get involved? They’re cruel. They go out and catch those rattlesnakes. They put gasoline into the boroughs. They hook it up, hoses up to exhaust systems. And what they don’t kill, they catch and bring in and, terrible! I could show you pictures of some big redneck with a five foot long rattlesnake, and two or three kids there and, you know, touching it. And now they’d say, “Well, their mouths were sewed up.” They weren’t half the time.

Oh yeah, I’ve forgotten all about this.

So you never got it stopped?

We never got it stopped, but we managed to slow it down a bit. This is an activity sponsored by the Jaycees. You know who they are? The Junior Chamber of Commerce. The Jaycees, are the big deals in any little town in Oklahoma. I mean, that’s the organization. And by god, they want to have their rattlesnake round up, and no city guy is gonna stop them. Well, what real, I said, we slowed them down. This was in, oh god, it must have been about ’74 or five.

There were a lot of demonstrations going on in Washington, DC at that time, the Vietnam War. I got the game, the Federal Department of Interior guy who…

Remember they kind of made, was putting sues, they had some law, humane laws on, on federal offenses, which may have been involved the zoo?

Department of Agriculture had their area on importation and all that. Department of Interior had the Endangered Species Act, but they also had a Humane Animal Act. And I don’t remember the details except, it was very, if you really had evidence, it was good. And I got the local bureaucrat in the federal government who was responsible for that. I took him to a rattlesnake roundup, and he didn’t have any problem, as he said, it didn’t take a rocket scientist to see this is bad. Then, so we managed to, we managed to stop, oh, at least half a dozen of them. Now, they go from city to city, from area to area. They start in Texas and they move up north, as the temperature rises.

And every weekend there’s a rattlesnake roundup somewhere. Okay, so we got several of them stopped, and made a lot of enemies, of course, in the process, including the local, the Jaycees in Oklahoma City. I never could get them on board. I finally got them to not oppose it. They said they couldn’t, you know, just sit by, and their fellows out in the hinderlands. Okay, an interesting thing happened, though. The police called me one night, and said, “We’ve just stopped two cars, and one of them’s a van. And both of these, the car and the van, there’s two drivers were holding them.” One of them was drunk, and the other one was high on something, maybe even the dreaded marijuana.

The cars, both cars, they said, were filled with rattlesnakes. Okay, so what can you do? Well, we… Found three rooms that were snake proof, and we just started, well, I mean, they brought them to the zoo. And we’d open up a box, or these sacks and all that. It was very chaotic the way they had these snakes. But there were over, there were almost 1,000 Atrox. And these guys had started out in Texas, it’s called Sweetwater Roundup. That was one of the first ones.

And they just moved up north, getting these snakes, buying them or stealing them or something. And almost 1,000 rattlesnakes. I mean, I couldn’t, I talked to, went down to the jail, and talked to both these guys when they were sober. And they were doing it for somebody, which they would not divulge his name. But it was not, it didn’t have anything to do with rattlesnake skins or selling the rattles, or they’d chop the heads off, and shoot formalin, and then they would varnish them, all of that stuff. They were not involved in that. And finally, the FBI came in, because they had crossed state lines from Texas to Oklahoma, which is a great law. I mean, that’s what makes it an offense, a federal offense.

Where they were taking them was to Washington DC, and they were gonna turn them loose on the mall. I think they were anti-Vietnamese war. They may have been anti-somebody else, but that was the plan. Change pace just a bit. I within talk a little about crypto zoology, and I know that you have some opinions about crypto zoology. Some people in the professional field have opinions.

Can you gimme yours?

Of course. First of all, I’m a romantic. You’ve asked me about crypto zoology. Let’s take the Loch Ness Monster. I’ve read everything I can find on that alleged animal. Remember the, who was the Birdman, who he was? Oh me. He got the law passed that would protect the Loch Ness Monster, if it was ever caught, they couldn’t keep it. They had to take it, and put it back in the water. He had the bird park there, the, well, I’ll remember it maybe later.

Anyway, I think that that animal may very well exist. I’m not telling you it does, but I think it may. Now, these sightings of dinosaurs in Central Africa. And I think we’ve seen, or somebody has seen drawings, wall paintings and all. I don’t think they have, again, we’re dealing in statistics, probability. And I think the probability of that animal existing in our lifetime exists. But it’s a minor, it’s a small probability. And the Yeti, or the Bigfoot, all of those creatures.

You think, well, it’s absurd, it’s stupid. I don’t think it’s stupid or absurd, but I think it could very well be. Now, when they pull out of the Pacific Ocean, a shark 22 feet long with a mouth this wide, and heavier than, I guess two and a half, three tons, when nobody’s ever seen that fish before.

And they just pulled it out, what, 20 years ago, who would’ve thought that fish was down there?

So yeah, I’m interested in crypto zoology, and I think that there may very well be some of those creatures. I wouldn’t laugh at it.

Is that how you came to view the Momo tracks?

Of the what?

Momo?

Did they, in Oklahoma City, did they provide you with some- Oh! We’re talking about Chicken Man, yes! I’ll tell you about, PR in the zoo. You have to really, timing is a big thing in PR. And this farmer called one day, and he told me about this big hand print. He called it a paw print, on his chicken house door. And all his chickens were, most of them, some were killed, most of them were taken, and there were a lot of feathers on the ground. Well, that’s kind of interesting.

Now, was that a, just a chicken thief?

The neighbor next door who wanted some fried chicken?

I said, “Well, bring it in. Bring the chicken house door in if you can. Can you unscrew it? Or I’ll have to come out there.” He was off in the boondocks somewhere. Well, he did bring it in. Apparently there had been a lot of charcoal around here. And whatever made that print it, it was a good cross. You would’ve called it a webbed, small, maybe a eight, 10-yeah-old’s print. But it was, it looked very human.

Now, did somebody fake that?

I don’t know. I really don’t know. And I didn’t, the farmer seemed sincere. But I said, “Would you mind coming back here?” This was in I think February. And I didn’t want to release this for, during the, we still have cold weather in February.

I said, “Would you mind coming, leaving these things here?

I’m gonna research, do my research on them. I want to do some measurements. And I have a friend at the police department.” I was kind of thinking these things up as I talked. “And I have a friend at the police department, and I think he can lift the prints off of that, and we can find out.” And he said, “I think it, could it be a gorilla?” And I said, “Well, we’ll take them over there, and he can get the fingerprints of the gorilla. I haven’t seen them, you know, published recently.” So he said, “Sure, you take your time on it.” So we had a very nice, I think Easter was coming early that year. So someone did call, let the “Daily Oklahoman” know about this. And I said, “Yes, that’s true. I’ve got the materials here. We’re researching them.” Now, I mean, of course…

Of course, this is bullshit. The following Sunday weekend, Easter weekend, this story ran. And then TV came out there and ran, all four of the TV stations, they took stuff on it. And the Oklahoman interviewed, we had the detective come out who’s a specialist in. So it was a big story. And it happened just before maybe on like on a Wednesday. Wednesday’s a big newspaper generally, a lot of shopping ads in. And if you can make the Wednesday paper, you’re good for the weekend.

If you make the Sunday paper, it’s all over. You know, it doesn’t help you. So we managed, I think that the… We used to watch this on our PR, and we had a graph. I didn’t keep it, our PR person did it. And it was a very useful thing, on the effect of publicity on zoo attendance and our gross. I’m bored by that kind of stuff, except if I don’t give it some attention, that’s what opens our gates, that’s what opens the door. Anyway, we had a lot of PR on it, a lot of publicity, nothing concluded.

You know, maybe it’s this, and it was called by the “Daily Oklahoman,” the Chicken Man Monster. And it was picked up, things like that, are picked up on the wires. And I had calls, amazing. Apparently there’s a lot of call in shows at night, at least at that time there were. And these guys take calls, and this is one that called me. He says, “I’ve got somebody here who said he saw the same thing in Nevada. And a bunch of chickens were taken. And he even found where some of them, the heads had been twisted off.” I have to talk to these guys, and it was kind of interesting.

Our income went up about 25,000, this is net, $25,000 the next weekend. Which was okay, could have been higher, but it was okay. Wouldn’t have happened. Wouldn’t have happened if it hadn’t been for Chicken Man. So I still had, I kept those that door to his chicken coop for years, just it was nostalgic.

But does that answer your question?

Yes. Talking about, I do have a question.

What did you guys end up, (laughs) what’s the end result of that story?

$25,000 more at the gate.

What about the mystery, was it solved?

It’s still a mystery. (Mark laughs) And I’m surprised. I mean, that was, that was a long time ago. I don’t know where you got it, but- Our research department. Well, it’s a pretty good research department.

Anybody I know?

There’s a, it’s a, just moving ahead. Okay.

(Lawrence laughs) To what extent did space constraints, we’re talking about the zoo, indoors and outdoors hinder, or did it, your ability to plan improvements?

No.

It did not?

Space constraints in the Oklahoma City Zoo were just non-existent. If we wanted to, well, they just built an elephant area, and I think it’s something like three and half, four acres. That’s a lot of space. That’s a lot of space. And I think I told you earlier that we had 70 acres when I went there, and when I left we had 525 acres. And that was beautiful to think about. It was beautiful to plan in your mind, conceptualize. And I really believe this, space is a good space. Question, you talked about going from 40 acres to 500 and some acres.

You said that this process was the most educational, yet depressing activity in your professional animal care career.

What happened with that evolution of bringing the zoo up, was that such a difficult thing?

You have to fight a lot of battles to get all that land?

Just had to work the bureaucracy, and then go out and work the BRO, both of those would give you half of the price. And it was well known, I mean, I’m not gonna tell anything that’s out of, it was common practice, I learned it. That if, for instance, there was a very wealthy man in Oklahoma City. He owned about 20 acres right along the freeway, and I wanted that land. And he was gonna, he wanted to sell it. Well, the front part of the land was level, very clean, very developmental, ability to develop it. The back part was a creek bed, which periodically flooded. Okay, so to buy that land, I had to get a estimate of it, appraisal, okay.

I took the appraiser over there. He said, “You want the whole thing appraised?” I said, “No, I want the part. I just want half of it appraised. Because you know, I’m gonna have to buy half, and the Feds are gonna buy half.” “Okay, which one do you?” “I want the good part of the land.” So he appraised that at, let’s just say $50,000. Okay, the back part he could have sold for, I don’t think he could have sold it at all, ’cause it flooded all the time. But the Feds, if the front part was 50, there was some deal in there, probably put there by Lyndon Johnson. So that’s how we got through that. Now, but I don’t remember saying that that was, I guess it was educational, but that’s not…

There were other more educational experiences that I had.

How important was science and research to Oklahoma City?

In one area it was excellent. Every zoo needs medical help. When I got there, we needed equipment, we needed specialists. And we didn’t, we had one vet, excellent vet. One of the best things about that vet was he could ask for help from an MD, and they would give it and he would get it out of them. And it was no competition, no jealousy at all. And we put together what I call the Animal Health Council. We had a list of about 25 practitioners who were, most of them MDs, some DVMs.

And we have a veterinary school just 40 miles away. And we had the dean of that and all that. This group, we would feed them once a month. They met on the same day of the month. They didn’t just eat. And we also gave them a little to drink. But they also, whoever had done something in the last month would report on it. And they were interested in it.

I mean, it was knocking the gorilla down, and taking it in to x-ray it or something. Or you know, how the things you get. And you need equipment and you need help from these outside people who are specialists. I had a TB guy that’d read every x-ray we ever made of a primate. My vet could have done it, but he couldn’t spot TB the way that guy did it. So we used him. He’d come to the meetings, and when he’d talk and all that. The others, his colleagues, “You know, man, this is a good deal.” And it became prestigious to be on this council, Mark.

And it was invaluable. Now, I tried to do the same thing with research. That was a form of research, what I just described. But research on I would hope behavioral, and maybe some taxonomic. I had the university, both universities were on this animal research council. And we would, anytime we had any research going on, they would report on it. We had a deal with Cape Hunting Dogs. I think she had 13 or 14 pups.

And I had a student on a little, we had our own scholarship. And she stayed with, she went there every day. She loved dogs anyway. And she was there every day for about three or four months observing that litter, and seeing if any of them, if they all got equal care in all that. You know, we can’t have any preference in the zoo. She gave a report on that. It was excellent. But that was one out of, once out of probably six months. We could not get anybody to become, apply for that kind of a program.

We really proselytized it. We had a few people, but not enough. And there were many problems, research problems that we identified. We sent that thing out and we had a response, but not enough. And I had a curator of research that the universities, both of them paid half his salary, and we paid the other half. The one I got that was, went down the river. Did I tell you? Maybe I didn’t tell you all about that. He was drowned.

We replaced him with a guy who had, was excellent behavioral experience and all that. Once he got there, all he did was trap mice for a taxonomic study.

During your career, what would you consider to be major events that affected zoos in general?

And of course, then the Oklahoma City Zoo?

Well, the first to answer the what affected?

Major events. Major events that affected the zoos.

Or events at the Oklahoma City Zoo? Is that what you?

Well, effected zoos, but obviously, affected- Gosh, I think that we had… The problem of pairing rare animals up. We’d have maybe a herd. I had about eight sable antelope, and I needed a new male. They were beginning to, we were about to have some inbreeding, and I didn’t want that. So we moved that male out and tried to get another male. Well, I couldn’t find an adult male sable that someone would part with, plenty of calves. Well, finally we got about a yearling, but it took, we lost three years on breeding those sable antelope.

And they’re a beautiful antelope. And we already had about a 10-acre area that we were gonna set up for African belt. But we lost three years on that, just that one problem of not having a breeding male. So that’s when we started a policy of having two groups of the same species and we could move them back and forth. And when we had a problem, we could get rid of one of them and bring a new, bring some fresh genes in. I think that was a problem that zoos didn’t know they had, genetic inner breeding, because nobody really knew where they were coming from. We had a big problem with ostrich. We were raising tremendous numbers of ostrich.

And they’d come with deformities and all that. Finally, we bought an adult male redneck ostrich in Kenya, that had been on an, there was an ostrich farm there. And this one was one they still had, he was a breeder. We brought him over. It cost a lot of money. But once we got him in there with those hens, we started getting excellent, excellent, normal offspring. And then there was another problem with what they call egg torsion. They would grow, ostrich if you feed them too much, they’ll get, one of the legs will be splayed. And then they’ll, you’ll have to PTS.

You’ll have to kill them, euthanize them. And we finally figured out, well the vet did it. They were just such big birds. And if you fed them too much, their weight gain was so much that their legs, they’re developing now in this chick, just couldn’t hold them up. And so what we did was to set up in a big field, and this is where space came in. This field was, it was an acre, I believe, a full acre. Okay. We had four feeding stations. And each one had a, and this is the kind of thing you have to do in zoos to solve special problems.

And those four feeding stations had a little light on them, and they would, they were hooked up together. And they would open up and spit out some food pellets, some pellets. But it was strictly random. We put all these baby ostrich in there just the minute they started eating. And they would spend all day running back and forth a full acre to get their, to get a little, we didn’t give them much. There weren’t any fights, but whoever got there first got the deal. And they all developed about the same. And that solved a lot of problems.

And then we sold those ostrich, and we made a lot of money. Ranchers bought them, everybody wanted them. And then the, you know, it became a… I don’t know if you’re aware of it, the ostrich, and all those large birds became farmable. And McDonald’s was gonna offer ostrich burgers. And they’re very high, very low in fat apparently, and all that, and so there was a big market for them. And so we were using the zoo to raise animals to sell, in this case ostrich to private owners. But again, you have to look at the cost.

And raising ostrich was extremely labor intensive before. No longer was it really, and we were able to. But again, we got, maybe in a year we’d get really 50, $60,000 net profit off of ostrich chicks.

What were your most frustrating times as director?

With trustees that wanted to tell you how to run the zoo.

How did you deal with that?

Well, first I tried to reason with them. And I would say 25% of the time that would work. They would get the picture and all that. Then though, another 75% it didn’t work. Then I would get one of their colleagues, that I could talk to, and just not complain, you know, no tattling. But you know, “He’s kind of beginning to tell us how to, tell the vet what to do and all that. And you can’t have two bosses in the zoo. You can only have one.

And that vet doesn’t need any help really. If he needs help, he’ll go up to Stillwater, the Ag station”. So that would work about a fourth of the time. The colleague would take him aside and say, “Look, you know.” and they would listen to a colleague, but not to me. Okay, the other half of the time the head of the society, in this case, Mr. Kirkpatrick, he understood this perfectly. And he said, I mean, and I talked to him, “How do I solve this problem?” I had already did the first two men. He said, “I’ll tell you what. “When that person’s gonna be there.” We had these Friday walks.

When that those trustees were there, that’s when it became pretty bad. He says, “I’ll come down that morning. And then I’ll take them aside, and I’ll tell them they can’t do that. And if they want to be on this prestigious zoo board, and be able to go to monthly, you know, meetings, and talk about the zoo. And you can give them some stupid assignment for, you know, that they can report on, something that they can do in two hours time, and then brag about it.” He said, and that stopped it, pretty well. We still had it come up, but that worked pretty well. I don’t know what you’d call that. I think you just kind of have to apply common sense and people generally wanna help you.

They don’t want to hurt you. Generally, you’ll notice I said.

What was your impression of the AAZPA when it was part of the Parks Association Group?

And what was the evolution as you understand it for AAZPA to break away from the parks?

Excellent question. Excellent question.

Do you remember Walter Stone?

Walter was president of the AAZPA, and I was on the board. And here again, zoo directors didn’t, they didn’t wanna rock the boat. You know, a lot of them were in park departments. And their park directors, you know, they didn’t want them breaking away. They needed our money or something. American Institute of Park Executives, what we used to call AIPE. Walter took it as one of his objectives for the year he was in office. We were gonna make the break, get away from AIPE.

Walter was pretty good at politics. And we didn’t get a lot of support from the zoo people, but we got it on the officers. With a problem that began, you know, with our own people. Then there was a huge problem with the park people at the head. At that time, they were in Wheeling, they had moved to Wheeling, West Virginia. And we didn’t want to do that, most of us didn’t. One person did, ’cause he got the job there working with the AIPE. Anyway, we got that thing almost through, but it didn’t, it took three years, and a lot of arm twisting.

And a lot of zoo directors that had to decide what’s best for the zoo association, and not your particular park director and park department, and got it through. It was a lot of bloodshed, it was bloody, bloody. That was a, they didn’t wanna turn this loose. When I wrote that book that I have here, they were so intense on keeping the zoo. I think there’s one or two, one forward, one preface. Every one of those park people wanted to write something in that book, so they could say, “Well look what we are doing.” You know, the park executives. And that was offensive to me, but you see they’re in there. It’s a small book, but it’s got all those, it’s terrible, it’s stupid.

Well, let’s just kind of talk about that. You wrote edited material for the AZA book on Zoo Fundamentals.

When did that start and why?

Did they come to you and say, “Do this?” The AAZPA published a paperback called “Zoos, When, Where, and How?” And it was a committee deal, and it was really pretty bad. I mean, as far as solid information, it really didn’t give you guidance. but they sold a lot of them, and a lot of people had them on their desks, but they were really not very effective. And that finally became a common attitude, thought on the board of directors and all that. And I don’t know who it was, it was not Walter Stone, and it wasn’t Conway, maybe it was FryHeight. Anyway, they asked, they said, “Well, look who would be willing to revise this thing?” And nobody really raised their hand. And then I raised my hand, I said, “I don’t want to revise that. I think it’s better left to die its own death.

But I think we do need a publication.” At that time, Mark, there were new zoos popping up all over the country. There were a lot of new between, in the ’60s, there were a number. If I had the access to the public, to the rosters and all, I could give you some figures. But there were a lot of new zoos coming, and they needed help, and they needed something to study. And I thought that’s what we should do.

So whoever it was, Conway was there, said, “Well, Curtis, are you willing to do that?

Then do it. Do it.” So I took that, I was at Fort Worth. And about that time the shit hit the fan, and I went to Portland. And so I didn’t do anything on that for about six months or about a year, but I finished it. And then you remember a guy named, his father was head of the, ran the Denver Zoo for a while.

Clyde Hill. Do you remember Clyde?

Well, Clyde somehow got, took it upon himself to read the manuscript and find all kinds of things that he disagreed with, nothing factual. I had made a comment that among the different, you know, you can have a taxonomic theme with a zoo, a whole zoo, or geographic. You know, there’s all kinds of themes you can have, but you should have a theme. I think I said something like, I think from an educational standpoint, and from public, from a visitor, they understand that zoo, I mean they’re in Africa here. They’re in South America there, and they’re looking at, you know, all the cats are not together. And this occurred when you say the shit hit the fan, this was occurred at the time when you had were leaving. I left Fort Worth and I had arrived in Portland.

And I remember, oh, Ron Ruther! You remember Ruther?

Ruther was my counterbalance on Clyde Hill. I told Ruther, you know, “I’m not gonna change.” He want Hill, I guess he didn’t have anything else to do. Now, Hill’s a very nice guy. And he and I were very friendly before this. but I just, you know, this is… My name is listed as the author. And I did, we did have a committee which did very little. Which is usual in organizations and think projects like that.

And Ruther finally, really told Clyde, took him aside. We were having a meeting at Portland. I’d been there about a month, and I wanted to get this thing out. And Clyde just insisted. He’d take something then I’d say, “Okay, that’s good, let me, I’ll rewrite that.” And then he wouldn’t like that or he’d find something. It was just interminable. And so we finally got it out and it was, it was pretty well, well, they sold them all. I’ll say that. But you wrote about mammals for AZA.

Why not reptiles?

What?

You wrote about in the book. “Fundamentals,” you had a chapter on mammals. Did I? Well, I haven’t read that in years. Okay.

I didn’t have anything on reptiles?

No. Well, now there was another book, which Conway edited, I believe in the ’70s.

I think it was “Mammals in Captivity.” Is that correct?

Yes. I wrote two chapters for that. That’s not what you’re talking about, though. Okay well, I guess I just dropped the ball if I didn’t say anything about reptiles in there. I’ll have to revise that and offer to update it.

You were at the Oklahoma City Zoo approximately 15 years?

About 16 actually, yeah, I started a little early.

How did you decide, or when did you decide that, “Well, enough’s enough?” And and what was your frustration with the convention?

The West? Oh, with the convention, wait a minute now. When you were at Oklahoma City. Yes.

When did you make the decision that, I want to do something else?

‘Cause you left Oklahoma City.

You mean, a different career?

Yeah. You left Oklahoma City. Yeah, the racetrack was the last straw. I didn’t get all those 525 acres to have some goddamn mafia racetrack owner grab the best parts of it. And I wasn’t gonna do that. I quit, I didn’t get fired. I quit. In Fort Worth (chuckles) I got fired, He fired my ass, (chuckles) as the saying, expression goes. In Oklahoma City, and I had, for years I had worked on several different dissertations, subjects.

I was gonna finish it in Portland, ’cause I had time there and I didn’t do it. Then in Oklahoma City, I even had a contract to write a book on zoos with apprentice. And Conway wrote me a letter. He says, “I understand you’ve got a contract.” And he said, and this I’ll never understood, and I’ve never really thrown it up to him. He said, you remember Morris, Desmond Morris. And he had, there’s a big article in “Life Magazine,” “The Naked Cage.” Do you remember that? Okay. And then he wrote his book on, whatever it was, man. He was pretty critical of a lot of things in zoos.

Bill wrote me and said, “Well, somebody has to respond to Morris, to Desmond Morris on ‘The Naked Cage’ stuff.” Well, I wrote Jim, I wrote Bill back, and I said, “If you’re saying the naked cage doesn’t exist, and this is propaganda thing from Desmond Morris, I’m afraid, I disagree with you. I think we’ve got too goddamn many,” I didn’t say that. Too many naked cages in our zoos. I’ve got some right here. That was in Oklahoma City. I never heard back from him. And I’m not even sure if he, I never talked to him about it.

And did give he leave an alternate?

Or if you mean we’ve really got to get our act cleaned up and clean, get rid of these naked cages, fine. You know, then that’s how I would respond to him.

So you leave Oklahoma City?

Yes.

Did you have a direction that you wanted to go after that?

Or your next job was in Saudi Arabia?

Well, I went to, I talked to some universities. And I was, I felt that I needed a time out maybe from zoos for a while. Leaving Oklahoma City wasn’t as bad as leaving Fort Worth, but I was there 16 years. And you know, you put a lot of your life into these jobs, in zoos. It’s inherent. I think it goes with the territory. And it probably goes with Sears Roebuck, or a factory and all that. People, we call them workaholics. We call zoo people, you know, dedicated public servants.

But they’re (chuckles) about the same. So I decided, I had an offer from LSU to come down there and do a doctorate in aquaculture, which kind of appealed to me. Because I think one of the biggest problems that we have, one of, is the food, availability of food, feeding this planet. Harvesting, you know, utilizing the water, as well as the land for food, I thought made some sense. And so I went down there. I taught a couple classes and I, took several classes, and then I got my dissertation. My dissertation, of all things, was on crawfish. But that’s part of aquaculture.

And what happens in crawfish, have you ever eaten a crawfish?

Yes. It’s very good. Very good. I use to love shrimp more than anything, but crawfish I’ll take any time over shrimp. Anyway, but those were good shrimp that we had today at lunch.

Momentarily, where was I going with that?

We’re talking about after you left Oklahoma City. Oh yeah!

How did you get to Saudi Arabia?

Okay. So I went to LSU and I was there for a year. Oh, on the crawdads crawfish, because it’s kind of interesting. And I think this is one of my strengths is innovation of design, of concept, of theme and so forth. And so what happens in Louisiana, and all over the south where crawfish are harvested, the crawfish are in the water most of the year of the summer months. Then they dig a borough in the fall, and they go down into that borough. And the water table is in the borough, so they can hang down there and you know, with their tails, ass end underwater. And they’re gills underwater, and they’re claws and all up above. Then, and along about February or March, you can seine that pond and it’ll be full of crawfish.

So what happens?

And I wondered, you know, here this whole industry, and it’s a hell of a big industry in Louisiana, in Texas, and in Alabama and this raising crawfish, but nobody knew what the hell, the key factor.

What happens? How do we keep them?

‘Cause if we have a big problem, then, you know, if they stop being harvested, being reproducing, then where is the problem?

So I had had (laughs) a colostomy, no, not a colostomy. Where they insert a tube, which is vision. Colonoscopy. Colonoscopy, yeah. And I went to a, urologist, or no, a digestive disease specialist. And I said, I want to borrow your longest scope. It’s a fiber optic thing, and it’s about, they keep getting smaller. At that time they were about, oh, less than an inch in diameter.

And you can look through them. There’s a little water windshield wiper on the other end, fantastic. Nowadays they take pictures through them. But I didn’t have that out there. So I got that and I started going around, this was in the summer, in the late summer, going, looking in the boroughs, and taking notes and finding out. And you could get very close. And when those eggs are laid, they’re on their swimmerettes. So you could see the whole process.

And the only thing that, well, I found out a lot of things, but one of them was that the breeding probably occurred much earlier, before they even went down into those deals. The breeding occurred in the pools. Anyway, that’s what my deal was. Then I got a call from a guy who was in Teranga Park. Not a call, I got a letter from him. He used to be in the States. At this moment, I’ve forgotten his name, but he wrote me. And he said, “Saudi Arabia is looking for a zoo director.” And he said, there’s an Australian, he’s in Australia now, there’s an Australian company that is helping him.

They’ve hired him to stock the zoo, and they want a zoo director. And if you’re interested,” why he gave me the contacts. So I was very interested. I mean, here again, I’m so close on my dissertation, but I needed a job, and I didn’t wanna just get out completely and start a new career, especially if I could go to Saudi. And there was some interest there. And so I wrote to the people in Saudi, they had an agent in the States who was handling this, and they put him, he contacted me. And he said, “Well, send me your CV, and all that,” which I did. And then he calls up and he said, “I want to interview you.

So I’m in Los Angeles, I’ll send you a ticket.” Okay, fine. So I went to Los Angeles. And this guy knew nothing (chuckles) about zoos. He knew all about Saudi Arabia. He was not a Saudi, but he was a, Syrian, he was a Syrian. And so he said, “Well, I’ll send a report back now to my bosses in Saudi Arabia,” which he did. Then he calls up and he says, “They want to interview you in Riyadh. I’ll meet you. Well, you’ll have to come to Los Angeles, there’s a consulate there, and we’ll get your papers lined up.

And I said, “Well, why don’t we meet in New York?

And then, you know, we’re that much closer.” “Well, I, it’s not convenient for me, and so I’d rather do this.” “Fine, I’m with you. I wanna make it easy on you, wherever we meet.” So I went to Los Angeles, we do all that stuff. We get on the giant bird in New York, and we go 16 hours to Riyadh, New York to Riyadh. And it was Saudi Airlines. And for the first time I saw there was a giant compass, which of course, always, no matter where the plane, which way they turned, it would point to Mecca. And every few hours on that 16-hour flight, most of the people in the plane would say their prayers, which is part of the religion. So I got there and I was met by what I call the Three Musketeers, my three Saudi bosses. And one of them was brilliant, one was the gladhander, and one was the businessman.

They had a company, they were a company.

And they had a contract with the city to stock the zoo and to hire personnel in there, and then to run it, okay?

First, we have to go have, you know, they eat at night. And this was very close to Ramadan, as I recall. So I was their guest. I mean, I had my summer suit on, from LSU, from Louisiana, and this was in October. What happened was, for a week, we would go out at night and then they’d disappear, and they’d be sleeping. So I went to the zoo, there were a few animals there. It was about 3/4 finished. And so then finally, they said, “We have to take care of some business this afternoon, and we need you to be there at the zoo.

And we’re gonna meet with the contractor.” They had a British contractor. And so, 6:00, 7:00, I said, “Well, what time is the meeting?” “Well, we told them about 6:00.” “Well, it’s 7:00 now.” Well, we’ve still have, they drink.” And the one, two of those three guys were alcoholics, my Saudis. It was about 8:00 we go to the zoo to meet with these guys that been waiting since 6:00, and there’s about six of them, Brits. And the Saudis don’t particularly like Brits. The Brits really were running Saudi Arabia for several years, Lawrence of Arabia and all that. And by the way, they started calling me Lawrence of Saudi Arabia. They’ve read the books, too. I would go in there, and this was an interesting exercise.

They talked to the contractor and they said, “Well, we’re not satisfied with the work you’ve done. And we’ve told you about it, and here are the letters.” In Saudi, every time they would send you a letter, or anybody a letter, they would have another copy, and they would the recipient would sign it and date it. So there’s never any question, “I didn’t see that, you know, well, I don’t know what you’re talking about. You know, I haven’t read anything on that.” So they put all these down and the contractors, of course, are very belligerent and all that. And finally, they said, “Okay, well, we’ll get our equipment together.” They had a lot of heavy equipment and supplies, and they’d bought a lot of stuff to, they were working on a contract, turnkey job. And they said the business, no, it was the smart one. He said, “Well, unfortunately you don’t have that much time. Now, this is our new zoo director here, and he’s going to pick up where you all leave off.

And we’re going to use some local labor. I’m sure of what we’ve done as well as you do, but here are your tickets.” Well, it was at midnight. “You mean we have to leave at midnight?” “Yeah, yeah, midnight. There’s your ticket.” “Well, what about our equipment?” “Well, maybe we can send it to you. Who knows? We’ll do our best.” The key was the passports. And said, “Well, you get to the airport at midnight, and whoever Abdula here, our bagman, he’ll meet you there with, and he’ll give you your passport as you get on the airplane.” So they hold your passport. You can’t leave the country until you get your passport back. So your bosses are holding that passport. And if it expires, too bad.

If your visa expires too bad, then if the embassy picks you up, I mean, then you’re in deep trouble. So that was a great, that was a very interesting experience watching that happen. And they meant business. And then when the contractors left, (laughs) quickly go out to the airport, and it’s about 30 minutes away, they show me a architectural, set of architectural drawings of the zoo. It’s fascinating. Someone had taken, it was from the Regents Park Zoo in London, and somebody they hadn’t even marked through thoroughly Regents Park Zoo. And somebody had typed in a thing, Riyadh Zoo, the kingdom of Saudi Arabia. And it was the cat, there was a cathouse, and it was just like, it was transplanted from London to here, and very bad, very bad.

Complete, I mean, the climate difference, and all that. So anyway, and I said, “But look, you know, you haven’t hired me yet.” “Oh, well, we’ll take care of that.” There’s a favorite expression, (speaks foreign language) which means, you know, we’ll get to it tomorrow. And the other one, is God be willing. And if you get it done fine, God was willing. If you don’t get your work done, or whatever it is, well, God just wasn’t willing to do it. So they have these, I learned these, pick these up very quickly. And then, “Well, when do we negotiate my contract?” “Oh, Hussain will take care of that. He’ll get with you.” So it was about another three or four days.

And we did sit down and we did negotiate a contract. And he was the most difficult person. You talk about a conman. I mean, he was, this is the one, he’d spent five years in Miami becoming an engineer, most of the semesters he spent in the bar there, he was an alcoholic. But we finally hammered out a pretty good contract. And it was full of all kinds of caveats and all that. And so I was hired. And then I’m ready, I’ve got okay I said, “Well, I’m gonna go back to the States.

You all are gonna pay for it.” They’d already agreed. I’ll pack up and they’ll close my classes. I was teaching two classes. I’d just come there for the weekend, and I’d already been there. And I said, my classes, I’d called them up, you know. So they said, “Oh, you can’t leave. We’ve got to get this zoo opened in 60 days, or the city is gonna fine us $10,000 a day for every day we’re not open, and the king is gonna open it. And we’ve got to, we can’t keep him waiting.

You know, that isn’t done.” And I said, “Well, but I don’t even have anything to wear. I’ve got my summer stuff and it’s getting chilly here.” “Oh, Abdulaziv, you take him”. So he took me they call them souks, the shops, and there was tailor. And he, of course, this guy was very suave, this Saudi that took me there. He’s one of the three, he was the gladhander. He said, “Do you want, what kind of a suit do you want?” And I said, “Well, I just a suit. “Well, here’s some gaberdine. This is all from London and from France,” and just big whatever you call those things.

And finally, the tailor comes out and he, he takes my measurements. And they say, “We’ll have it ready tomorrow.” I mean, that’s pretty quick. They probably sewed all night. When I go in there to get it, it’s not a suit, it’s a, the robe type that you wear, and the guthra, and the, we called it the fanbelt that you wrap around it, and sandals, sandals. And I said, “This isn’t a suit.” “Oh, well, we’re gonna have you wear, become, we’re gonna adopt you, Lawrence. And we’re gonna take care of you. If you don’t mind, would you wear those?” “Well, that’s okay.” “It’ll be good.” They said, “It’ll be good for business.” Okay. So from that point on, I was a Saudi.

You had only four months to put that zoo together.

How’d you do it?

We didn’t. We had to get extensions. And the Saudis, this is built into the culture. This was the most, one of the most educational events of my life. One of them was taking over the animal welfare program in Oklahoma City that was very educational. And another was getting fired at Fort Worth. But this was, this was a new culture. I didn’t know anything about that country. And I think I’d led a pretty secluded life.

But I liked if I was in somewhere Africa, or I’d get in with, you know, talk to them, and make friends with them. It was interesting. Oh, and there was a big villa that was mine. And with a swimming pool, and I guess about 20 rooms in it. And that was mine to live in. And so it was very nice and there was a big wall around it. And so that was…

What was your question? Have I answered it?

You didn’t get the zoo put together though. Oh no, we did. We had to completely redo most of those cages and structures. And we had… The sea lion pool was huge. And the water I knew it was just too warm.

And so we built a huge evaporative cooler, you know, like a swamp box, what they used to call?

Excelsior water, running down. Our well water, we had well, the well water came up at about actually 70 degrees. And the pool under after it had, you know, gone in, the pool was running 104. So we built this thing and the gladhand boss, he was very good at working with his hands. Saudis don’t like to work and, but he was okay. And so he helped contract that for me. So we were able to have sea lions in a pool with 72 degree water, ’cause the thing cooled it off also. This would cool it off even more.

We did a lot of changes. And oh, one big thing, there was a cave building, cave exhibits. And I went in there and there’s nothing had been done in there. The exhibits were bare, but that’s what it was. And I said, “Are we not gonna finish this?” “No, the mutawa, they will not let us.” The mutawa is the religious police. They have a different garb. You can easily recognize them. And they have big beards that they never shave, so they’re very curly. And they don’t wear the (speaks foreign language) on their kerchief.

They are everywhere. And depending on the politics of the moment, they can be very powerful, or they can be powerless. I was told that the cave was gonna be dark. And if men and women went in there together, terrible things might happen. So don’t open it. Okay, so we didn’t open it. Then the big problem be in all this four months, which extended to about six months was the visitation. And I was told that, well, there’ll be three days for men, three days for women. And then one day I told them we needed a day to clean up and all that.

But I don’t understand this, three days for men?

When do families go?

“Well, the fathers will bring the children and all.” But that’s not, I mean, you know, here I am telling them how to run their country. But I said, “You know, really this is zoo can be a great family thing.” Well, we went down and talked to the mayor, the high sheik. He was kind of Westernized. They all speak English, by the way. They’re all, they all speak fluent English. And if I would go into a room where there was a meeting going on and they’re speaking Arabic, which they would normally do, the minute I got in there, they switched English as a courtesy, as a courtesy. So we got, I went down and talked to the mayor, they were with me. And we got three family days out of him.

And let’s see, three then, and one day for ladies and one day for men. And I’ve forgotten what the rest of it was. But we were warned. It had to be, you know, we had… We had male all of our purveyors for the public services, they were all men except some that were gonna be in the gift shop. And said, “Well, the man will have to be very careful.” They cannot touch a lady. They can’t look at her really very long. Just enough to fix her hamburger or whatever it is.

So I learned about things like that. And the family days lasted about 30 days. And there were so many complaints from the mutawa. We had a pygmy hippo born about that time. And I’d forgotten where I’d gotten that one from. No, this was later, now that I think about it. This was about a year or two later. But I was walking over to take a picture of the pygmy hippo baby.

And the mutawa obviously saw, they reported me to the head mutawa, that the American Zoo director was going over to take pictures of ladies on ladies day walking through the zoo, and that’s not permitted.

Well, how do you know I was gonna take pictures of a lady?

My bosses said, “You didn’t show us those pictures. We wanna see them too.” I didn’t do it. You know, I’m innocent. So things like that. The concessions guys, we got so many complaints from the mutawa. Well, they said, “This one pinched her, and this one leered at her,” and all that. So I finally, we got armbands for each one of them with a number on it. And then I told the mutawa. We had sat down with the mutawa once a week, and, we would talk, they would make their complaints.

And I said, “Now, each one of them is gonna, has a armband. If there’s any complaints, I insist that you give me the number. And we will bring him in, he or she, and we will take solve the problem.” Well, the complaints dwindled quite a bit, quite a bit. But that was what we were dealing with. And we did get it open. The king didn’t make it, but his son did. And he was the governor of Riyadh. And he was a very interesting guy.

And I’ve got a picture, it’s still in Riyadh of him. He and I going through the gate, and all. It was interesting. And before he came, two guys came in with like torches, except they were burning incense. And they stayed together and they went everywhere in the zoo where the king, where the prince was gonna go, and I thought that was interesting. Well, when you opened the zoo, you had to bring in many animals from a mix of cultures.

How did you acquire these animals?

Well- You have the final say?

No, they had a list that the alcoholic, the one who spent the time in Miami. The night they submitted their contract, their bid for this contract, he was making a list of the animals. And he had a book on animals of the world, or something. We got it at the bookstore. And he went through that, and he wrote down the names of these animals. You were talking about an elephant shrew. They were on there, they were on there.

And muskrats, have you seen a muskrat in an American zoo?

I don’t think I have. Things like that. I was able to say, “Well this is really, you know, this is a muskrat. Or this is, this is that animal,” and all that, without going into too much perjury. And we also got some animal names withdrawn ’cause we just said they’re not available, we couldn’t control that. So that’s how we… But I went to, I went to the Philippines, I had to go out and get people before I had a lot of animals. We had a few Egyptians in there when I came.

So I went to the Philippine, the Manila Zoo. I had had a letter from the director of the zoo. He wanted a job. And so I met with him. I said, “Well, why do you wanna leave this zoo?” “We haven’t been paid in six months.” So I needed elephant keeper. So here came about the next day I had about 20 CVs, very well written, neat clean paper and all of that. So I interviewed them, and they all had experience with elephants, and some had mentioned African elephants, some mentioned Indian elephants and all of that. But most of them didn’t know anything about elephants when I talked to him.

And they all speak excellent English. So the deal was that they would, the next day, I hired a couple, that did have experience, convinced me that they knew something about it. Then the next day I was gonna hire a reptile keeper. So we posted that. The next day here were about another 20 CVs. Half of them had applied for the elephant job. Now, today though, they were experienced reptile keepers. So I talked to them and…

Is that a hummingbird again? Yes it is. No, that’s a moth, I think. Anyway, that went on for about four days. But I did get some people, and I hired the zoo director, ’cause he’d allowed me to come in and raid his people. And went to India and hired some people. And went to Kenya, because I like Kenya, and I wanted to go back there. There were two guys there that had worked at the, for this company planning. I had their name and all that.

So I hired them, real nice guys. And they played Scrabble with in Swahili. But when, once a week I would, they would invite me and we would have a feast, and we would play Scrabble in English. And they always beat me. They’d use these little three letter words and all that. And I wasn’t used to that. Anyway, it was very educational. I got the zoo staffed.

The Australian company, they were gonna just take them to the cleaners. They had already delivered one giraffe. And I think they wanted, they got $25,000 for that giraffe. Now the city paid that, paid to the company. Now then the company paid him about five. I told them, I said, “It’s worth about five or 10,000, but you know, you all have paid the freight.” And so they cut it down, the Australian company. They didn’t wanna lose that deal. So for about six months, no, about three or four months, they were messing around.

They could never could deliver anything. And I said, “Look, American zoos, I can go over there, and probably in 30 days I can get the rest of these animals.” “Yeah, but how much will it cost us?” “Some of them they’ll give to us.” “Why would they give them to us?” “Well, they might want a sand cat, or they might want an Arox.” And there are a few Arabian Arox there, and they get a permit and all that. “But just trust me and I can go.” So okay. “But I’ll need some money.” I was beginning to learn that they don’t give you, I mean they promise you, but they don’t deliver. They just don’t trust Westerners that much. Plus I think it’s their nature. They love to haggle. I guess we haggled for three hours when I had my contract there on how much I was gonna get for this, and that and the other thing. Anyway, we got the, I came to the United States.

The night before kids were coming into the zoo. We had these pools, a lot of large pools and were swimming. And I had the, my boss, the smart one, had gone to the bank and had $100,000, in a briefcase in, I don’t remember, $100 bills, I guess. And he said, “Now, here is $100,000, and you know how much much that is and how valuable it is. I want receipts (chuckles) for every dollar you spend.” She just like Loretta and you know, taxi fare. So I said, “Okay.” About that, and I put it in the back of… They’d given me a car, I had a station wagon, kind of a Jeep station wagon. So they’d called, I was ready to go.

I had my tickets and all that, still three or four hours to go. And we got a call from the watchmen, watch people, that there was a kids swimming in the pool, and one of them looked like he was in trouble. So we drive up there, I get my thing and drive up there. Park as close as I can. We go in there and here’s this kid in the bottom of the pool. And we pull him out and I give him, no, the Saudi, “You take of care of it. You know about these things. You’re trained in it, I know you are, ’cause everybody in the States at the bar knew about mouth to mouth, especially with pretty girls.” So I gave mouth to mouth resuscitation to this guy, and we turned him over.

I mean, we did everything we could to bring him around. And it didn’t work. He was dead. We took him to the nearest hospital, and they pronounced him dead. And his family was then there and they were Palestinians. And the biggest, the only problem I ever heard over 13 years about Americans was we are the patsy for Israel. Which we are. We will not vote or we will… We will always vote for Israel.

And that’s what they think, and to a great extent it’s true. And outside of that, no problems, no problems. But those Palestinians, they didn’t like Americans. They’re prisoners of the Israelis there.

So you went to the United States with $100,000?

Well, first the parents are there to claim the kid’s body. And you know, they were pointing to me, “He’s an American. Well, he didn’t try to save our son, because our son is a Palestinian,” you know, and all that kind of crap. And they did bring, take the zoo, the company to court for public nuisance, you know, that sort of thing, but I was cleared. Then my boss said, “Let’s get you to the airport. Where’s the briefcase?” And I thought, oh my god, I left it in the back of my car. And there were a lot, we let people come in there for picnicking and all that sort of thing, even though we didn’t have many animals. I was scared to death.

Ran back to the car and there was my briefcase. Opened it up, there’s the $100,000. There is really a minimal amount of crime in that country. And one of them is, you know, if you do certain things, they’ll behead you. And every Friday at the main center, city center, they have, they behead people. And in fact, one time I never did attend. But one time they had two of them. My friends called it a double header.

He was talking about baseball, of course. But anyway, it was a great experience.

So you were able to go to the United States?

Oh, I went to the United States, took half the animals that we were, you know, they were surplus, you know how it is. They wanted to get rid of them. We pretty well hired a Saudi freighter to carry all this stuff. And I got my, hired my son to coordinate it all, and then to get it all in on the airplane, and then bring it over there and take care of en route. So we did that and we opened the zoo. It was probably a year late.

Would you explain the Science Oasis Museum, why it started?

Sure. After the zoo, the zoo was an experiment in many ways. They had had a zoo, but it had been closed for a long time. And they thought it would work well. And my bosses really thought we could have at least a few family days. We finally lost them and never got them back. The mutawa, they got less, we became kind of friendly and all of that. And we had a minimum problem.

But one of the people that I met at the American Embassy, there’s, you know, it’s the capital of the country. And we have an embassy, huge embassy, huge, with big battlements to keep anybody from driving in. I met a prince there, Prince Abdulaziz Al Saud. He was the grandson of the king, of the first king. And there were plenty, I mean, there was probably 60 grandsons. He spoke perfect English. He also spoke perfect French. He’d gotten a degree in economics from the Sorbonne taught in French.

He went in 1983, he circled the planet in the shuttle. He was an astronaut. So he was pretty Westernized. And he came to the zoo. I met him at the embassy, then I invited him to come to the zoo. He came over there.

He said, “Well, Lawrence, what I want to talk to you about is a science museum.” He said, “I went to one in San Francisco called the Exploratorium,” you ever been there?

And he said, “That was fascinating. And I think it would go over well here in Saudi Arabia, but I don’t know that. And I would like to build. We’ve got a big building out in the diplomatic quarter that isn’t being used, a lot of empty buildings.” They always overbuild there. And he said, “Look at that building, see if it would work. And I’d like to hire you to work for me.” It’s another governmental organization. It’s the only country in the world only owned by a family. And in this case it’s the royal family.

So they own everything and they run the, it’s all run as a business. I went over and, you know, studied the building, and I kind of sketched up a science museum. And, you know, “Well, how much will it cost?” Will I learned my lesson on that one, and so I gave him a huge figure. Then he, he was a very fast worker. and he talked to some people, and about two days later he said, “Well, you’ve got that building. You’ve got to tell the zoo people.” He says, “I’ve already told them that you’re gonna be working for me.” They would never cross royal, a prince, especially one that it was as prominent as he was. And so I got, really, I wanted to stay at the zoo and all that, but it became too complicated. And so I left the zoo.

And told them, I gave him a list of people to hire. And one of them, I’ve even forgotten his name. He used to be at… Anheuser-Busch, was that at Tampa? Yeah.

What was his name? He was a bird man, do you remember?

Jerry (mumbles). No, no, anyway. He was short little guy, kind of a smart ass. Anyway, they hired him. I was hoping I could go over there and hire him, but I had to do this other. So I mean, anytime I… The beauty of living in, and working in Saudi Arabia, Mark, all the airlines fly there. And if you want to visit Africa, you just fly to Kenya.

And that’s about a three hour, two to three hour flight. And you’re in Africa. And you can stay there as many days as you want, and then fly on the States. If you want to go to the Frankfurt Zoo, you can stop at Frankfurt. If you want to go visit with Dr. Hdieger, which I did several times, then you go to Zurich. And if you want to see France, you go to Paris. All these airlines will let you stay, when you’re going that direction, they’ll let you stay as long as you want. I mean, within reason.

So it’s a great way to travel and visit other countries. So I thoroughly enjoyed it. The science museum was interactive. You’ve been to the Exploratorium, so you know how it is. We hired the exhibits to be made. I did come to the States to do that. There’s a company in California that made our exhibits, fabricated them. They do that for museums.

We opened the Science Oasis. Oh, and I had some, an animal area. And I would, I’d put Saudi animals in there, had the vipers. There’s some beautiful animals. Beautiful lizards there, blue (indistinct). Anyway, oh, and a big deal was in the summer, or in the, yeah, in the spring. We’d get, sometimes we’d get rain. And when it rained, there was an oasis that I would go to.

I took my wife there the first time. Within two days, the water is just teeming with shrimp. Looks like a king crab, like a horseshoe crab. They’re little, and those are desert shrimp. And I had a perpetual exhibit of those. We would get the eggs and hatch them out. And the eggs supposedly would be viable for 10 to 20 years. I would keep some eggs, I put them in a jar.

One was for one year, two year, and then 20 years. All 20 jars with eggs in. They’re on a shelf still in Riyadh. But they’re aging, they’re aging. Lived in a, what they called the Tuwaiq Palace, which was a hotel, combination hotel and conference center. And guest place for the government authority that ran the, that did the science museum for the prince. There was three swimming pools, there was a bowling alley, there’s everything in this place. And three of us lived in it.

The lawyer for the agency, and some other guy, a bean counter, and me. And the rest of the place was empty. Somehow it didn’t go over. And Prince Diana had been there, and spent the night there with, what’s his name, Prince Charles. But then they closed, they just closed it except for guests.

Now, you still consult for the Zoom?

I do it frequently, frequently. For anything or do you specialize in something that they- All kinds of weird things. And the prince, also, on the science museum… By the way, it was opened, and I told you that the king’s son, his oldest son opened the zoo. Prince, the governor of Riyadh. He also opened the… I talked to the Prince Sultan. He said, “I’m gonna get the governor to open.” Oh, I said, “That’s good.

Here’s a picture of him and I with, at the zoo.” So I have a picture of the governor, six years later on this. And it was, I enjoyed it very much. And it was, the public ate it up. Well, we set telescopes out, they were hungry. So you went from the zoo to the museum, to the Oasis Center. Yeah, with the Science Oasis.

And then from there you made a decision to leave Saudi Arabia?

Yeah, I wanted, this was in ’97. And I decided I really wanted to do my thing in the States now. And I’d done the museum, and I’d done the zoo. During the Desert Storm, I went up and helped with the evacuation in Kuwait city of the British Embassy. There was a party, parties are the big thing in Riyardh. I mean, each embassy is a sovereign property of that country, so they can have all the booze they want. So half of the booze that comes into the country for the, goes to these embassies. And half of that is bootlegged.

That’s the source of… The Indian trade minister at the Indian Embassy was the king of the bootleggers. And when I was at the zoo, it was like Christmas, he would drive into my, I had this big high wall around my villa and my bosses would be there. And this, the embassy guy, the Indian would drive in. We’d would close the gates, then he’d open his trunk. And it was full of everything, and the back of his car had a lot. And my bosses was just like, Christmas, you know. “Let’s have one of these.

Oh, and Lawrence, you like wine, don’t you?” And Black label. And I mean, it was, I don’t know what it cost, but a lot.

So when you finally left, they gave you your passport back?

Oh, yes, yes they did. I couldn’t have left without it. Okay. What is the large, this is more of your opinion.

What is the largest professional problem facing US zoos today?

And what can we do to correct the problem in your opinion?

I think the biggest problem facing US zoos today is we’re running out of wild animals. I mean, today we’ve got, you’ve got a coyote over there, our coydog. But the the wild creature, the space is just, they’re just doomed, they’re doomed. Maybe it’ll take 100 years. Tigers are supposed to be gone in 20 years, according to the best estimates. If you read Conway in an article that you sent me published in 2009, I believe, or ’10, “The Future of Animals in Zoos,” could not be said more succinctly. And I think he is dead on, right on track. We’re not gonna be conserving animals per se.

We’re gonna be preserving them. We’re gonna be preserving a small population of them, scattered around the world, and that’s gonna be there. And people will enjoy it. I think there is, you know, one thing that’s happened in the last 20 years, this amount of natural history photography, it’s fantastic. I mean, I never thought I would see some of the things that I’ve seen on television on Nova, on the National Geographic and all of that. It’s just fantastic and it’s educational. I’m educated every time I see it. That’s great, but that’s not the real thing.

And what zoos offer is the real thing. If they can touch it, that’s good. I think we need to have as many touchies and feelies, and as many educational things, where the animal does something on its own that it’s specific or significant to its behavior. I really like to see natural units, I mean a herd of this or a group of that, or a single one if it’s a single, if it’s a solitary animal. And show those, and I think that the more we work at causing, or fixing it up, so you can see those animals do something. And the aquarium I had at Fort Worth. Right away we got a bunch of archer fish. And every, twice a day I think it was, three times a day on the weekend, we would put hamburger meat on the glass.

And those archer fish would just spend 20, 30 minutes shooting it down. People were spellbound. I was the first time I saw it.

Have you ever seen it?

Yeah, it’s a common thing in an aquarium. Electric eels, we had a exhibit of electric fishes, eels, ghost fish, catfish. And we would demonstrate that, tickle them, and had them hooked up to the loud speakers and all of that. And we had enough so we could rest them for two or three days, and that worked out very well. And the public, you know, it was something. Now, they can look at an animal in a cage, and enjoy it, and learn something from it. But periodically, I think we need to be challenged to show something actually happening. The ostrich thing, I think you could do the same thing like with cheetahs to where they would catch this animal, and then catch that animal and show some speed.

What made you a good zoo director?

What made me, well, assuming that you’re right, that I was a good zoo director. I think I was willing to take risks. I was willing to do things differently, not be caught in the rut. I think I did have some good ideas. I think I still have some, which I’ll tell you about if you ask me nice. I believe, well there’s one quality that I think I have that several other people have, actually, I think you have it, and we’ll get on that. That’s something I would like to discuss for just a minute or two when we get it, when you start asking more questions. I believe, well, I studied.

I’ve worked hard. I really worked hard at school. I worked hard in the field doing the field work I did in herpetology. I haven’t told you about my red wolf. I think I caught the last red wolf in Texas, the last survivor. And it died from something, dog, canine distemper. We need to do more exhibits like that. And the big thing is that we need to make zoos ultra, ultra educational, but in a compatible, acceptable fashion, so that people are not turned off.

So they don’t have to say, “Oh god, now we have to listen to this lecture.” You don’t want that, and zoos can do that. People love zoos, they really, they even love bad zoos. They’ve loved bad zoos for years, and there’s a lot of them still out there. So those are the, I believe the things that I would tell you.

What skillset qualities does a zoo director need today as compared to when you started?

Compared to when I started? Well. Many zoo directors do not have a good training in the arts, and sciences, and even in zoology. Somehow, at least the ones I’ve spoken to don’t demonstrate that to me. And I, maybe they just, maybe I’m missing it. Maybe I’ve talked to the wrong group, but I when I was, you said when I started in zoos, yeah. I had a good liberal education in the arts and sciences. My knowledge of natural history, of zoology was, really at that time pretty limited, but I’ve made up for it. I’ve studied, I’ve worked.

I never got an animal in my zoo that I didn’t know everything that was possible to know about that animal based on the literature available, and based on watching it. Now, you are, and you have had a big love of herpetology. Yes.

Any recommendations or words of advice for the next generation of herpetologists?

Sure, right now, herpetology has taken, or not herpetology, herpaculture has taken a strange direction where they’ve done great at breeding reptiles, that is a plus. I think the herpetologists may have done better at raising their animals than the aviculturists, except for some common species, and then some mammals. So they’ve developed ways of initiating breeding, successful breeding. Now, the problem is that somewhere along the line, these herpeculturists have taken to breeding different color phases, different pattern phases, snakes without pattern, snakes with a different kind of pattern. This is all artificial in that you don’t see this, these things in nature. I think it’s sad, but a lot of resources, a lot of effort is going into that. And it’s, to me, it’s kind of like stamp collecting. You know, you want to get this one.

Then somebody else gets a reticulated python without the retics, or something, then that’s becomes the fad. We’ve had our fads in zoos, really. But this is one in herpeculture. It is not really herpetological. The genetics are not, they’re not really being studied. It’s trial and error. There are big zoos like the Bronx Zoo that have done a lot for conservation and the San Diego Zoo.

But in your opinion, what can a small, or medium sized municipal zoo do today to get involved in wildlife conservation nationally or internationally?

I think they need to look in their backyard. And I think every zoo should do this large, small, what have you. And there are opportunities out there for… Well, for saving or retarding the inexorable march of development, of industrial development, of pollution, of all those terrible things. And that’s taking a terrible toll of the animal life. Here, you’ve got a lot of lights in this outside, on this building, I noticed. And if you turn them all on 20, 30, 40 years ago, there would be dozens of moths and insects flying in there. Today, I dare say we’ve killed them all.

We’ve used so many pounds of pesticides and fertilizers that’s gone down into the water table and all. Really, our wildlife is I think in a terrible state. And I don’t think it’s gonna get any better. It will in pockets, but, I think it’s in trouble, I think it’s been in trouble. And I think we all know that. Some people don’t wanna pay the price to get it out of trouble. Zoos in many cases today are afraid to confront animal welfare rights groups that are against zoos.

Could you give us your thoughts on how best to deal with these types of groups?

Well, in my zoo lifetime, I never really had to confront that problem of people that wanted to get rid of zoos. Now, I’d have to say in some cases I’ve seen a lot of zoos that should be done away with, quite frankly. And so I would have to agree with some of those people. But maybe they don’t need to be done away with, they just need to be educated and raise their standards. You were on an accreditation program once at the zoo I had in Oklahoma City. And by the way, that program I think was really promulgated by one person, Bill Conway. And that was one of two excellent things that he initiated. The other was a species, the SSP program.

Well, the other was ISS, I know he was behind that. But he’s a genius. He really is, he’s a genius. And he has done more for zoos, I think, than any other single individual. Marlon did his thing. Never met Dr. Hornaday. All I really know about him at this moment is, you know, you can’t keep gorillas alive in captivity. There’s a lot of good zoo directors out there. But that was a big thing, and when, what he did.

And I think that the key to zoos surviving in whatever mode they’re gonna survive in should encompass those qualities, which you looked for when you did your accreditation.

What changes have you seen during your years in the zoo field regarding visitor attitudes and administration at the national level?

Visitor attitudes have been 1,000% improved by education with TV, or with our zoos and aquariums, greatly. People know things today that they, that they never could have known before. So I think our public is much, is very well educated on zoology and on animal life. I don’t think they’re as well educated on the threats to that life as they need to be. And one of them is the global warming problem right now. Nobody wants to do that, but we’re gonna have to. Your question though, about other changes at the national level. Are you talking about the federal government or the AA- AAZPA.

Okay, AAZPA. Unfortunately, I really can’t answer that. I don’t have enough current knowledge.

What issues would you like to see zoos address in the future?

Excellent question. Well, first I think they do need to clean up anything that borders on inhumaneness, on an animal that is not behaving normally, and living in normal, reasonably natural, I’ll use, the natural life. And if they’re, they can’t do that, then we either need to change the environment, or maybe that animal isn’t eligible for captivity. I think we need to make the zoos, as I’ve said, much more demonstrable on seeing things happen, learning something through observing behaviors and activities. Just eating, we used to feed our snakes on every Wednesday. We fed them on mice that had been euthanized. But some, we had to feed them live mice. My mentor, my best mentor, Pierre Fontaine, he was scared to death, “Oh, don’t do that, please.

‘Cause if you do it in Fort Worth, they’ll want me to do that in Dallas.” You know, he later took on the Dallas Zoo. So he’s been in the business. He was in the business a long time. We did it. We did it. We kept those feeding things going on.

The only question I had, which I thought was a very val valid question, how do you kill the mice?

If you feed them dead, how do you kill them?

I hate to tell you this, and I hope you don’t pass this on. But I think I told you we had a meeting, national meeting, of the Humane Society at our herpetarium, when they met in Fort Worth. And the head of one of the societies asked me that question. “Well, Lawrence, you don’t, you feed dead mice?” “Yeah, sometimes we feed live mice.” “I see. Well, do you have to?” “Yeah, we have to. There’s some animals, a meal worm. Hell, they ain’t going eat a dead meal worm, that’s got to be moving around, and so forth and so on,” okay. So he wanted to know how we kill those mice. Now everybody who’s in zoos knows how their zoo kills the mice.

So I won’t have to go into it here. But it’s, I think it’s humane, and it’s effective and it’s quick. (snaps fingers) And if you’re gonna kill it, it’s probably quicker than what the steaks you had for dinner took for that cow to be killed anyway. And that happens every day. I didn’t know how to answer him. And I decided this could be a loaded thing. So I told him, in the way this is funny, but I think, I hope it’s funny. Anyway, I said, “Well, we have a little electrocution chamber and we can very quickly electrocute oh, a dozen mice at a time. And it’s quick and it’s painless.

You know, that’s what they use in the prisons to do away with fellow human beings and it works fine.” He said, “That’s fascinating.

Does the Denver Zoo know about that?” I said, “I don’t know.” He said, “Can you send me the schematics of that device?

And I’d like, I’m gonna see that some other zoos get to look at it.” “Sure, I’ll get it in the mail to you.” Well, okay, I dug a pit and now I’m trapped in it. I got my friend in the physics department at TCU to give me a schematics with the resistors and all that, which would work exactly the way I explained it to that head of the Humane Society. And we actually built one and it worked. It worked. And I sent that to him. So it wasn’t completely bull, it was bullshit at the time, but it was, it became an interesting thing. Now, the fact that, I mean, I would go back to the herpetarium on a Wednesday, and I would see them still using the old method. Animal keepers get set in their ways, and I would have to harangue them about using the proper method. Now, when we talk about animal keepers, talk about curators.

What would be the top, the three top qualities you think a curator should have today?

I think number one, he has to have empathy for life, for live animals. He has to be sensitive, by that I mean he needs to be sensitive to what their needs are. He needs to know about those needs, and he needs to respond to those needs in a functionally successful way. He needs to work, in other words, I think they need to understand what’s happening out there. What’s happening with the threats to our natural, our wildlife. And I don’t think a lot of them, I’m sure they know about it, but I don’t think they are cognizant of it in such a way that they’d go out and hand out circulars about it, or go from door to door and seek votes. They need to get into politics. That’s where the laws come from.

Now, they’re brought about by lobbying agencies, and all that, but we can lobby. And we need to lobby for better protection, for fewer problems in the environment. And I think that’s paramount for the zoos to do, because they get the bulk of the people coming through them more than museums do. And it’s our opportunity, we need to grab it. Talking about politics.

What’s the most efficient way to deal with elected officials and municipal bureaucrats in order to develop and manage a zoo today?

Well, I think number one, you, of course, you educate them. How do you educate them? I believe you get them to the zoo. Everybody likes some special treatment. I think I already told you on Friday, we did a zoo walk. And I would suggest anytime we had a new city councilman, he was in the zoo within a week. I mean, he didn’t come on it, we went and got him. And I mean, we arranged it with him ahead of time, but we wanted to educate that guy. And after he two or three hours with my curators and with me, and with my, with the junior curators who were kids working in the zoo and all that, he was sold on the value of zoos.

And they never would vote against the zoo after that. Some of them, you know, you can’t crack all the nuts. I shouldn’t have said that. Some people you cannot educate, but you need to make that effort. And if it doesn’t work from you, those people are usually sensitive to power. And there are people in power who like zoos. And you need to get the people in power who like zoos to go on these to educate one way or the other, these people who don’t understand.

Any advice- Yep, any advice for the neophyte zoo director about the importance of marketing zoos?

What are the most important aspects of marketing?

Well, I mean, I don’t want to answer it with a simpleton, a simplistic thing. But the purpose of zoos is to be visited, to be educated there. You have to use the zoo, usage is the big thing. Attendance figures may be part of the, well when I worked in the Dallas Aquarium every year though, I counted the people every day that I was supposed to.

And then I would, I was told, “Well now, up at about five or 10%,” “Why?” “Well, we get our budgets based on this sort of thing, show that people are using the zoo.” I never did that because I really wanted to know how many people were coming into that aquarium?

And I think zoos need to be very sensitive and do whatever they can within discreetness, within the realm of, that we’ve all pretty well agreed on of what a zoo should do and what it should be. They need to work on that, and make sure it gets across to people. I believe that when you’ve accomplished that, that’s the first step. And then of course, education comes along.

How can zoos improve their connection with kids and teenagers to heighten their zeal and awareness about the natural world?

Well, I can tell you what worked for me at three different zoos, but I have to go back. I was about 18 in Galveston, Texas. There weren’t any zoos in Galveston. And I went to the Houston Zoo. And right in the middle of the Houston Zoo was a natural history museum, a beautiful place. I mean, it was small and all that, but gosh, it was something I’d never seen before. And I went there on a Saturday. And before I knew it, there were kids my age scurrying around, using keys to go through door, and obviously they were part of the operation.

So I stopped one of them. I said, “You know, I’m from Galveston and I’m interested in herpetology.” “Oh, well you need to talk to so-and-so, Bill Millstadt, he’s our curator, junior curator of herpetology.” So they took me to Bill Millstadt, who’s became quite an active herpetologist in his years. And he talked to me. I made a friend there. And those kids, the museum would check them out, talk to them. You know, you have groupies and everything. You have groupies for jazz bands. You have people hanging out. Zoos have groupies. And those kids are gonna be there, and they’re either gonna force their way in, or get into trouble or you you put them to work.

And what we did was start a junior curator program. We did this at Fort Worth, we did it at Portland. Big deal in Portland. And we did it in Oklahoma City. And it worked. And we had, when we started out, we had about six of them. And I had a guy that was in charge of that. Hell, he could take kids anywhere, and they’d be following him. When I left there, we had about 100 junior curators.

They would go through the routine was they would spend Saturday morning in class listening to zoo people give talks on the zoo, on our zoo, zookeeper. Or we had a visiting zoo professor, zoo director. If you’d come down we would’ve had you to give a talk to them. Then in the afternoon, they go to jobs that they’ve been assigned, that they’ve been trained for, and they actually work. Now I’ve been told, “Oh, you can’t do that, because if one of them gets hurt, then they’ll sue the zoo and all that.” Well, I had a good criminal lawyer on my board. And he was also adept at dealing with labor problems and with public facilities. And I told him, I said, “How do I solve this problem?” Because, you know, there is a danger there. He said, “I’ll give you a waiver.

And you need to get it signed by both his parents, his guardian, whoever is his legal guardian.

You need to get it. What is it?

Notarized. Notary. notorious public. He needs to, you need to get that on there. I mean, it needs to be absolutely legal. You don’t want any holes in it, because there’s people like me out there in law, and we’ll look for those holes, but I’ll fix you one that will be foolproof. It’ll be within the state in this case of Oklahoma. And I think you can rest easy. But you’ve got to give them responsible leadership.” So we did that.

14 years at Fort Worth, two years at Portland, and 16 years at Oklahoma. We never had a problem after that.

What issues would you like to see the National Zoo Organization addressing now?

Very easy, a good question. And I think it has an easy answer. Today, the biggest problem facing you and I, and our families, and zoos is, I would say five problems. Now, about 30 years ago when computers were really (indistinct) there was an organization called The Club of Rome. And there was an auto manufacturer, wealthy, very, very, very wealthy, and he was very smart, and he was head of that club. And he hired the primary computer people in Europe to make a model of the Earth, and the problems that it faced. Population, food availability, water availability, pollution, environmental issues, and the quality of life overall. And after that, after they did their deal, and that, it was prediction.

This is what science is all about, prediction. You know, if you put that that switch up, the light will come on, that’s scientific, cause and effect. He led this. And the models that they got back after that were terrible. Well, the zoos and the world were just gonna be in terrible trouble, most of them within 60 to 70 years. Now, that same technique has been done dozens of times, and it’s still being done to predict the, you know, the glaciation, the retreat of the glaciers. Or the big one, the sea level. Those are problems that are facing us, and they’re far more important, I think, than whether the, whether the…

We’re gonna solve this problem or that problem of a zoo. There won’t be any wild animals out there to speak of. And so I think what we need to do, we need to do this on a national level, and I’m very interested in your response. I think we need to sell the National Zoo Association, the American Association of Museums, and some other agencies that here is what needs to be done. The public needs to be educated on those five problems. The way to educate them is what we’re doing in the zoos, an exhibit. I think we need to have in every zoo, five exhibits. The American Zoo Association could make…

How many zoos are there in the United States today that are reasonably valid zoos, 50, 100?

A little more. A little more, 150 maybe, okay. They need to make 150 of each of these exhibits. It’s one exhibit, but they’re gonna explain about those five factors. And they’re gonna do it in such a way with push button, with video, that kids and adults will not pass up. And we need to pay for those with some sort of a subsidy, and we need to get the museums involved. And we need to get the other institutions where, like an airport and put those exhibits in, and make sure they’re kept current, they’re kept clean. And then periodically, maybe every six months, change one of those things.

And they would do it at the national, wherever the exhibits are put together. They’d have to be a committee working to, this is what we’ll put on it. There’ll be a lot of, there’s a lot of opposition. The senator, the worst senator in the country right now, we have the honor of having him in our state. Senator, whatever his name. I mean, I dislike him so much, I’ve forgotten his name. He says that global warming is just a hoax. Okay. Some of us, thousands of scientists disagree with that.

That’s Senator Inhofe, by the way, from Oklahoma. We need to have, just an excellent exhibit of those, which maybe a, maybe a pentagon shaped thing or something. Anyway, get a designer to really come up with a good design. Then these are placed in every zoo, every museum in the country. When the public has gone through for two or three years now and they’ve seen those exhibits and they’re kept, there’s little difference every few months with changes, new things going on. I read an article the other day about pollution in the oceans. A mass miles deep, miles around of plastic floating in the ocean. And it’s beached somewhere, I think in Hawaii.

And there are those masses all over the place. They didn’t just happen. They’ve been building. That’s terrible.

I don’t know how many, did you know about it?

I didn’t know about it until I read this article. And we need to keep, these exhibits need to be current, but they need to be very carefully done. The Bronx Zoo did a fantastic job with their gorilla deal. And they had a computer thing where people could donate money, and where people could ask questions, and they could give opinions. This would be on that order, but it would be on the critically important problems that are facing this world.

In the zoos that you’ve run, are there programs or exhibits that you would’ve liked to have implemented during your tenure, that did not happen?

Yes.

Can you give me a couple of examples?

There are two exhibits I would love to build. Well, more than two. But one of them is what I would call the Animal Kingdom House.

And you know, taxonomy can be boring, but if you’ve got a reptile, you know, what are the reptiles, and how do we distinguish them?

Well, we got snakes, and we got lizards, and crocodilians and turtles and tuataras, okay.

What’s their commonality?

What’s the common biological characteristics, plural, that they have in common?

I envision now, that’s just one class of animals. So taxonomically, we’ve got X number of fila that we, you know, without just a few species in it, but significant conspicuous fila, with conspicuous classes. Each would be an exhibit, so that a person could go in that building, and after an hour or two go through and see live exhibits of the fila of animal life. Some would not be live, I mean obviously, but they could be very good.

You know, like a tape worm. How do you show a tape?

Well, you could probably stick one of those things up somebody’s button, and take movies of it and then show the push button thing. A lot of ways of doing these things. Now, this would be different. I’ve never seen that. It may exist.

Have you seen such an exhibit?

What’s the second one?

The second one, the second one is an exhibit. Actually, the same thing, I would envision, the same thing should be done in plants, the plant kingdom. Plants are, you know, just as important as animal life. And although the zoo is zoological, we all know that horticulture is what makes a zoo, what really sends it off. Okay, the other exhibit that I would envision is animal adaptations. Some animals defend themselves by camouflage. They blend in with the environment. I used to, the favorite exhibit in my zoo was a tank with dead leaf fish.

They look just like a dead leaf fish. They move like a dead leaf floating in the water. And the exhibit I had said, there are, and we’d change it frequently when one died, there are so many dead leaf fish in this exhibit.

Can you find them?

Well my friend, Dolan, who you were talking about a while ago, couldn’t find, but was one short. And he insisted that it was wrong. And when he went back and talked to the aquarius, the aquarius said, “Oh yeah, we took a dead one out about a week ago. I guess we’ve got to change that number.” He had told me, “You know, it’s wrong and all that.” And I said, “No, you just can’t count dead leaf fish.” Well, he wrote a little funny article about it. He had people, you know, just waiting there for hours counting fish, and trying to find those 12 or whatever. Camouflage, it’s the walking stick, stick insects. A copperhead is a wonderful, a Gaboon viper. With the right substrate, you can’t see them there.

Anyway, that would just be a one form of adaptation. Another one might be reproduction. They just lay zillions of eggs. Go on down the line. feeding, adaptations. Behavioral adaptations, you could select maybe 15 or 20 different adaptation, adaptive modes, and set up a living exhibit showing those.

Does that grab you?

Well, when you talk about that, and we’re speaking about zoos in the United States, and you’ve had experience around the world.

Are there any zoos in the world that you particularly admire?

And why do you admire them? And where are they?

It’s easy one for me to answer. You know, you’re gonna, you ask 10 people, 10 zoo people that you’ll probably get 10 answers. And one of them will be the zoo that they run. I think that the Bronx Zoo leads the world in all of the qualities that a zoo should be. Exhibits, attendance, and attendance, I think I’ve mentioned attendance. If people don’t use the zoo, it’s worthless. You might as well close it down. The Bronx Zoo is, it’s a leader in many things.

Conway initiated it, this during his reign.

What was he there about 35 years, something like that?

You were at Lincoln Park 35 years. You’ve seen the same thing. So I think that, I’m very impressed with that zoo. The second zoo I am most impressed with is not a zoo, but it’s the Arizona Sonora Desert Museum. I think that place is, it’s in a way unique. Things are either unique or they’re not. It’s just like you’re either pregnant, or you’re not pregnant. And the word unique is you know, misused a lot.

But Arizona Sonora Desert Museum and, even with some fish life, Baja, California, it is in my opinion, still a classic. A lot of it has been copied, which is great. But I still think they are the classic. Maybe other people have done it a lot better. I haven’t seen it. Now, the aquarium in California, that is all about, their whole exhibit menu is the fishes and all of the bay there, of- Monterey. Monterey. I think that’s one of the best aquariums in the world.

I mean, you have to look at all the deals. Public service, I hear on the radio all the time. The Monterey Bay Aquarium has put out a list now, new list of marine life organisms that are commonly sold over the counter as food, and which ones are in trouble, and which ones are not. They publish that thing. They must revise it every six months, or so. I’ve sent off for it. It’s a service.

Now, what’s that got to do with the fish there or that aquarium?

Well, they’re leading the way in educating the public on use of their marine sources. You’ve had experience with elephants.

Should zoos continue to keep elephants in captivity?

Well, that’s a good question. I’d have to say yes. And then I would qualify it by saying that we really need to study our modes of care of feeding, I don’t think is a big problem, but behavior. I remember an exhibit I saw in, I’ve forgotten where it was. But they had two elephants, and those elephants were busy all day long, just moving logs from stack A to stack B. I called it the army elephant exhibit. You know, in the army you dig a hole, then you fill it up. And those elephants kept busy, and they were in excellent condition.

I bet they were healthier than any other. Well, circus elephants, I think are in good shape. But sometimes they may be a little abused and all that. But I think we should have elephants if at all possible. I think they’re becoming semi domesticated now. They give them another 30 or 40 years and we should be breeding a lot more of them. I think we need to figure out ways to solve some of the inherent problems that they pose. You mentioned movies and other things that are going on that are much better today than we were years ago.

Do we still need zoos?

Absolutely. We need zoos. If we see the movies that’s two dimensional. I did an experiment.

Have you ever heard of EO Wilson, Ed Wilson?

I attended a lecture of his one time. He had what he called biophilia was a theme of his. And it was simply worship, I mean a praise or a celebration of life, love of life. I wondered about that and in a way this is a little stupid.

Why do people like live animals?

Now. that’s, I guess a stupid, in many ways it’s a stupid question, but maybe it isn’t. And then I started asking myself, maybe they don’t really like live animals. Maybe a mannequin, maybe a mechanical animal will get just as much attention. This was in Riyadh. After the zoo was open and all, I kind of had time to think about things. Okay, so I set up in the science museum. We had one big unused hall. And if you can imagine a T.

We had an entrance where you could see all around to that room, and you’d walk down that path. And at the end was a T. And on one side we had a live deer. Actually, it wasn’t a deer, it was gazelle. But it was very tame, very gentle, and very active. I mean, not trying to climb out, but just sniffing and flipping its ear, and flipping its tail, its ears, and flipping its tail and all that. On the other side we had a very good dioramic exhibit of a deer, a doe, a kid deer. We brought school kids in there and adults.

And we would time them. Where did they go first? To the live exhibit. And the live exhibit was just plain vanilla. We didn’t even have a plant in there. I mean, on purpose, all we wanted to show was a live deer. Statistically, after about a month of that in a lot of different, in different nationalities. We had all kinds of, we had Bangladeshis that came and all. So from a nationalistic standpoint, there were all kinds of little differences, but I’m not gonna bore you with that.

The main thing is there was about a 90% attendance at the live deer. They could see each one very well, they were together. Then there was a pretty high attendance of going crossover from the live deer to the taxidermy deer. And some people went to the taxidermy deer first. And we would interview those people. And they said, well, there were some people over there and they didn’t want to clutter up, you know, get too close to the people and all. But we never really got the answer. At about that time, I had do some other thing.

But I talked to EO Wilson, Ed Wilson about that, and he was fascinated by it. And I said, “You know, in many ways it supports biophilia, everything you’ve written on that.’ He said, “I wish you would write that up, and I want to see it, and I’ll edit it for you. And I’ll get it published if you don’t have somebody to publish it, I guarantee you.” And that was about a year ago. And now, pretty soon I’m gonna find another place probably in Oklahoma and run that same experiment. But I want to get ssome statisticians. I want to get some psychologists involved to interpret this stuff.

What do you think about it?

Is it a stupid question?

What’s your proudest accomplishment?

What is, what?

Your proudest accomplishment. Accomplishment? I guess survival. (laughs) I love zoos. I love being in them, I loved directing them. Even the Riyadh Zoo. They were all challenges. And I’ve just thoroughly enjoyed it. And I would have to say just the very process, very active running a zoo was delightful to me.

What do you know about the profession that you devoted so many years of your life to?

What do I know about it?

I don’t understand the question.

What do you think about this profession you’ve- Zoo directing?

Yeah. It’s necessary, if it’s done right. I think it fills several niches, as I’ve already explained several things. And I think that it is one of the best forms of natural history education that we can provide to children and adults, the live animals.

How would you like to be remembered?

Well, I’d like to be remembered, period. (chuckles) I don’t know how, how would I like to be remembered?

I can’t, that’s too difficult a question. Okay. I’d like to be remembered as somebody who did his best to help bring zoos forward, and with some new embellishments and all. I think, since your deal, I believe it, in my life, professional lifetime, I’ve helped, I’ve hired about 40 people, 40 or 50 people. In keeper slots, curatorial and so forth, mostly keeper slots. Then they’ve gotten the treatment, and you might say the training and all that. And they were exposed to what I, at least the best I could do in showing this is the way you run a zoo. But we made mistakes and we had all kinds of, you know, problems, but that’s probably intrinsic to every operation.

I believe that those… That work was worthwhile. I think I’d be happy to be remembered as one who did a little bit moved that torch up a little bit higher.

Who do you think are the most outstanding zoo directors?

Well, that’s a good question.

Who’s the most outstanding zoo directors? During what time?

Well, arbitrarily, I got into the field around 1950, and today it’s 2012. I know very little about the zoo directors today, and therefore I can’t comment on them. But during my time, I was around an awful lot of zoo directors. They came from, during my times, in the zoo, especially at the beginning, they came from all kinds of origins of disciplines, business. Jack Hauser ran the Cinncinatti Zoo. Philadelphia was Freeman Shelly, he was a bean counter. Dr. Schroeder was a veterinarian, but he was running the whole zoo, not just the veterinarian aspect of it. Belle Benchley was a bookkeeper, but she kept that, she made that zoo, she made Dr. Wegeforth’s dream functional.

She was practical.

You ever meet Dr. Wegeforth?

I met him one time and he was just like a kid. Now, he was not that old. I mean, he wasn’t senile. But he was just like, he was going through the zoo, and he was just like a kid at Christmas time with his toys.

Did he have any sophisticated ideas for that zoo?

Oh yeah, he paid, you know, voice mail to the, you know, research and conservation and all that. But he was just having a good time. That was, to me, was delightful. And I’ve seen others that way. They’ve come from circuses. They’ve come from animal dealers. The director of the Cleveland Zoo was an ex animal dealer. Frank Thompson was in a sense an animal dealer.

What’s his name? Roland Lindeman. He was an animal dealer. The Catskill Zoo was really a place that he sold animals out of, and the exhibits were really, in all due respect, secondary. But they were great. They were good. And he sold a lot of animals in Europe that he raised here. So you have these different places where these zoo directors come from.

Where’d you come from?

I’m not talking. You’re not in it, okay. A lot of them just moved up the chain of command, moved up the ranks. And I guess I’m that one, ’cause I started out as a kid counting people. And then I got more responsibility. But my origin was zoology. And I just, boy, I would recommend that to anybody. Except today I would make a completely different recommendation to somebody wanting to enter the zoo today.

If you want to know about that, you can ask me. Now, let me just finish the answer though. In looking at 50 years of zoo directors, some have, well, we had George Vierheller.

Did you ever meet him?

He was at the St. Louis zoo. He had a three ring circus surrounded by some zoo cages and all. He had performing chimps, performing cats. It was a big deal, and the public ate it up. Now, was it good? I don’t know. I have some reservations about it ’cause I’ve seen those cat acts, it’s just kind of a demonstration of, hedonism or… What is it that male’s, male… Anyway, my vocabulary is getting a little rusty here.

That was something completely different. I would call that noteworthy, but I don’t think it was outstanding. Roger Conant, he was a great herpetologist. I don’t think he was that good a zoo person. His mind was always on herpetology, really. And he was not trained. Roger Conant never took a course in herpetology. So you have all these origins.

So out of all those possibilities, personal opinion, now, which ones I can’t say was the best, but I would say the ones I’m gonna tell you were most noteworthy. Excellent, excellent. Now, at the top of my list really would be Bill Conway. He and I have had a few differences and all that, and he sometimes can be a pain in the ass, to talk to argue with. But he’s brilliant, and he’s creative, and he’s an excellent politician. He can convince somebody. I mean, but he’s got a good product that he was selling. So I put him at the very top of the list.

Ed Maruska, you were talking about him. I think the Cincinnati Zoo was an excellent zoo. And in many ways I thought it fulfilled the needs of a zoo, perhaps better than most of them. And I thought Maruska was very well organized. He kept his mind on the goal. And he kept at it, he was a hard worker. And I think I would put him high on the list.

And who would be your third?

Well, I’m not, I listed… Conway. I would put him number one. I haven’t arranged these others. Belle Benchley, I would have to put there, ’cause she spent years keeping that place together. And every, you know, it is a major zoo, San Diego Zoo. The architect that we were talking about a while ago. I think he’s an outstanding person, and has made excellent contribution in naturalistic habitats for animals.