J.D. Porter's Blog, page 10

Smelling the Roses

 

I always imagined the quote about stopping and smelling the roses had come from some famous poet—perhaps Tennyson, Byron, or even Shakespeare. But I was wrong. It was golfer Walter Hagen who said it in his 1956 book The Walter Hagen Story. But to be clear, he didn’t mention roses. The quote is: “You’re only here for a short visit. Don’t hurry. Don’t worry. And be sure to smell the flowers along the way.”

[image error]

It was good advice. Smelling the flowers is one of life’s great joys and being married to a gardener has been a massive pleasure for me during these days of self-isolation. My wife spends an enormous amount of time in her garden. My job is to keep the grass mowed, tote the odd bale of pine straw, and stay out of the way. Karen does the rest.

Much of the garden I am enjoying during these difficult days came out of another difficult time. When Hurricane Michael roared through South Georgia in October 2018, our neighborhood was hit hard. We had a pine tree fall on our house, as did our neighbors on both sides. The tree broke off about eight feet from the ground, which allowed it to hinge down like a meat-cleaver and slice our garage roof from wall to wall. You know it is bad when people are stopping their cars and getting out to take a picture. It took nearly a year of construction, but the house has been restored.

The tree damage in the back yard was a different story. Two massive pine trees were uprooted, and one fell across our in-ground swimming pool, smashing the ladder, diving board, and a section of the concrete pool deck. A huge crane had to be called in to lift the tree off the pool. We spent weeks pulling branches and pine needles out of the water, only to discover the pool was leaking from somewhere. Very little of the damage was covered by insurance. It would cost more to repair than to remove. So, we made the painful decision to take the pool out.

Selfishly not wanting to increase the amount of lawn I would need to mow, I suggested to my wife that we replace the pool with a formal garden. She went for it.

[image error]Once the pool was filled in, we staked out a perfect rectangle in its place and installed planted areas where the pool deck once was. In place of water, we had a couple of smaller planters, and a bed of gravel with steppingstones. In the middle of the garden—an homage to the pool that once occupied the space—we placed a large, blue urn with water bubbling down its side into a basin. Three ceramic goldfish bob in its bowl.

One of the things I have come to appreciate is that a garden, to a true gardener, is much more than just a collection of plants. It is filled with old friends. It contains memories. It tells a story.

The pass-along plants, for example, came from somewhere or someone. We have a rose bush she calls Mrs. Meyers’ Rose. She got a start of it from her mother’s yard in Louisville, but her mother’s bush came from her grandmother’s house. And grandma got it from someone named, you guessed it, Mrs. Meyers. She has another rose that we transplanted from a rental property we once owned—a rescue rose. Friends gave her the purple coneflowers and the white iris. Her yellow flag iris came from the Albany Garden Club’s plant exchange.

[image error]She nurtures her garden and protects her plants when necessary. Her grancy greybeard tree is currently covered in white, feathery flowers. But since it grows next to the garage that had to be rebuilt after the hurricane, she placed a fence around it and put the workmen on notice.

And when the deer in our neighborhood decided that the lilies and hydrangeas in the front yard were good eating, she began spreading animal repellent granules by the gallon and had me build wire cages over the hydrangeas.

Karen is not much into growing vegetables, but we are well stocked with basil for her pesto sauce and mint for the mint juleps we serve at our Kentucky Derby party. She has small Meyer lemon and satsuma orange trees, and she is proud of her huge loquat tree. She grew it from a seed I brought home from a tree in Chehaw Park. It is now covered with fruit—and squirrels.

[image error]For years, we have drawn pleasure from our garden. We never imagined that one day we would be confined to our yard and that simple enjoyment would become a refuge. I realize that not everyone is as fortunate as I am, but as I walk the neighborhood, I see evidence that everyone can enjoy. Azaleas, dogwoods, and other flowers are blooming everywhere.

We are trying to be good citizens by remaining isolated and avoiding contamination. We don’t do it out of an obsessive fear, but rather a sense of community. I don’t want some doctor or nurse having to worry about me being critically ill when all I had to do was stay home and smell the flowers.

A wind chime hangs from our screen porch, tapping out its dissonant, luminous melody. It lifts my spirits and complements the sound of the birds, squirrels, and carpenter bees that surround me. The flowers and wind chimes help me appreciate the beauty of nature and, in these dark days, I’ll take all the help I can get.

A News Junkie Goes Dark

I am a news junkie. My daily fix begins with a walk to the end of the driveway in the pre-dawn darkness and a rush of adrenaline when I spot that glint of the plastic wrap protecting my newspaper. The ritual continues with a fresh cup of coffee and a careful read. After breakfast, I take a three-and-a-half mile walk every other day. That is when I listen to my news podcasts from the New York Times, the Washington Post, and a few others. I try to watch the noon news and the six o’clock local news, followed by the national news.

I never saw any harm in staying up on the news. I am interested in politics, national & world affairs, crime & punishment, and human interest. Throw in some sports and weather and it’s all good—until now, that is.

I began following the COVID-19 coronavirus when it broke out in Wuhan, China last year, and watched the grim tidal wave as it bore down on America. But now that it is here, I think I am done with the news. I am declaring a personal blackout of the national news.

It’s not that I don’t care. I care deeply. I care about the people who are ill and the people who are struggling to heal them. I care about the people who are losing jobs and businesses. But there is not much I can do for them. I have a pretty good idea of how the disease is spread, how bad the symptoms can be, and what I need to do to protect myself and others. But knowing how many people died today is not useful information for me right now. As a seventy-year-old retiree, the best thing for me to do is stay home and avoid taxing a health care system that is already under stress.

I like to write, so I could write about the heroes in our community who are dealing with this terrible epidemic, but I can’t see them—and I hope I don’t need to. But there is one group of heroes I do see. I see firsthand the struggles of my wife, a media specialist (school librarian) in the Dougherty County School System, and her colleagues who are trying to serve the needs of their students.

[image error]As I write this on a Sunday afternoon—a week into the crisis—she is attending the latest of many virtual school staff meetings from our kitchen table. She and her colleagues are trying to figure out how to serve the needs of their students in a system that is not designed for distance learning. They use the computers in the classroom, but the devices are not intended to be taken home.

Teachers are worried about their kids, but they need to contend with privacy issues. I overhear them talk about posting assignments on something called Google Classroom, about how to assign passwords to the system when the students are not on the school network, and especially about the fact that many students live in homes that do not have computers or even a connection to the internet.

[image error]My wife alternates her time between hours in front of the computer and moments of sanity-preserving time in her garden. As for me, I’ll try to take my mind off the news by observing the beauty of nature around my house. I’ll write about that. I’ll document the status of the wrens that are trying to nest in my garage. I’ll enjoy the flowers that are blooming in my wife’s garden. And I’ll look forward to the sights and sounds of our new evening ritual—a walk around our neighborhood.

Today, I spotted some chalk art at the end of somebody’s driveway that lifted my spirits. It was a scripture quote from 2nd Corinthians 12: 9 that says, My Grace is all you need. My power works best in weakness.

I suppose this is part of a Facebook community project called Albany Chalk Your Walk. It is a great way for us to stay connected in a time of Social Distancing—an Albany version of the Italians singing from their balconies.

[image error]

An Arctic Encounter

 

[image error]That is why humane captive environments are a necessity today, more than ever. By the time Toledo’s Arctic Encounter opened in early 2000, I believe we achieved our goals. The polar bears had nearly four thousand square feet of quality land space and a ninety-thousand-gallon chilled salt-water pool. They had an air-conditioned cave in which to retreat in hot weather and a “blow-hole” area that had small holes in the floor of their exhibit allowing them to smell the seals from next door that swam underneath. By now, other zoos may have exceeded what we accomplished in Toledo, but there can be little doubt that the team of professionals at The Toledo Zoo achieved their goal of setting a new standard in the captive management of Polar Bears.

The Carnivore Cafe

Toledo is a community that truly values its zoo, and that value is never better displayed than when the zoo’s tax levies come up for a vote every five years. When I worked there, the zoo had two tax levies, one for operational support and one for capital development. Tax support of zoos is quite common throughout the country, but the Ohio method of providing that support is a bit unusual, because the decision on whether to provide support is decided by the voters, not politicians. In Toledo, for example, the 1995 capital levy was for ten years and was projected to raise fifty-three million dollars. The tax levies were, in effect, referendums on the quality of life for the community’s zoo animals.

One of my first projects as Deputy Director of the Toledo zoo was a renovation project—the three-million-dollar Kingdom of the Apes area that opened in 1993. Toledo had an impressive collection of great apes that included chimpanzees, orangutans, and two families of gorillas. They lived in a symmetrical, rectangular, 1970s-era facility, with each of the four groups housed in a section that consisted of off-exhibit holding cages, a small indoor glass-fronted dayroom, and a slightly larger open-air, outdoor space with a concrete floor. No animals had access to grass. The renovation added an eighteen-thousand-square-foot outdoor gorilla meadow and a three-story indoor dayroom. The old outdoor spaces would have a tall, cage-structure added to increase the vertical space, and grass would be planted to replace the concrete floor. It was a remarkable transformation, both visually and from the standpoint of the animals’ quality of life.

Updating a twenty-year-old ape exhibit was satisfying, but what about the animal facilities that were more than half a century old? Some old buildings could simply be renovated because of the animals they contained. The 1934 era Reptile house, for example, underwent extensive updating and remodeling in the 1990s and reopened under the same name—the Reptile House. Standards for housing snakes and lizards had not changed much over the years.

The historic Aviary required more extensive modification to properly house a modern bird collection. The building, which originally opened in May 1937, was closed, gutted, and reopened as a “new” bird house in 1998. This project received a national award for excellence in live-animal display and exhibit design. But simple renovation of some animal buildings was not possible because they could not meet the modern standards for animal welfare. For these buildings, the Toledo Zoo took a more creative approach.

When the Kingdom of the Apes renovation was complete and the last animals were transferred to it from the old Carnivore building, we were faced with an enormous problem—what to do with this massive, historic landmark. Some zoos that were faced with a similar problem developed large outdoor yards adjacent to their old buildings and turned the outdated indoor exhibits into holding facilities. Other zoos converted the buildings to small animal facilities—which would lend an incongruous look to the word Carnivora etched above the entrance.

Toledo zoo designers took a more innovative approach and turned the liability of small, iron-barred cages into a spectacular asset. The Carnivora building was repurposed and opened in May 1993 as the Carnivore Café—the zoo’s signature restaurant. Bright colors and lush vegetation turned the oppressive atmosphere into a festive public space where people dined inside the old animal cages. Similarly, the old Elephant house next door was extensively remodeled and redecorated and turned into a striking meeting and rental facility called The Lodge.

Improvements were made in the museum, the aquarium, and the conservatory, but it soon became apparent that the Toledo zoo had run out of room to expand. If the zoo wanted to continue its legacy of creative animal exhibitry, it would have to adapt one again. But where would it find the space?

The Toledo zoo was land-locked—bordered on all sides by neighborhoods, a river, and a divided highway. Across the highway, the zoo had long-ago developed parking lots that were accessed under the highway through a pedestrian tunnel. The tunnel had no handicapped access, so strollers had to be carried down concrete steps and back up. The ceiling was so low that a tall person had to stoop over for the entire length of the walk. The only “redeeming” feature was a metal plate that covered a sump pit in the floor. Children took great delight in jumping on the metal plate and listening to the clanging echo in the tunnel.

The need to improve the tunnel had long been a desire, but when property became available on the other side of the highway for expanded parking, and the possibility of new zoo exhibits in the old parking lot became a reality, that desire became a priority. Instead of trying to improve the tunnel by boring under the highway, a plan was developed to take visitors over it. Instead of being invisible, the zoo access would be celebrated in dramatic fashion—a spectacular, iconic, handicapped accessible bridge was designed. This was accompanied by a new parking lot, a new entrance, and a gift shop.

We also had space to develop some new animal exhibits. For the first time in my tenure at the Toledo Zoo, we would not be renovating some aging, historic facility. We would have an empty canvas with which to begin. When we considered which animals were in the most desperate need of a new home, we settled on the polar bears and seals. Recreating an Arctic environment in the City of Toledo would prove to be our most challenging—and satisfying—task yet.

Next Week:      An Arctic Encounter

A Home for Hippos

My first day on the job at the Toledo Zoo was August 9, 1991. The day before I began, a female white rhinoceros named Bernadine fell from a ledge in her exhibit. We speculated that she had been lying next to a rock ledge and simply rolled off—like a person who rolls out of bed in the middle of the night. The white rhino has a hump on the back of its neck. When she landed on that hump, I suspect the impact fractured a vertebra in her neck. Her exhibit had opened a few years earlier and was the result of new concepts in zoo design. Was that complex design a contributing factor?

[image error]In the 1980s, while I was helping design and construct a modern zoo with naturalistic exhibits for the City of Tampa, other zoos were taking modern exhibits a step further. A new concept called landscape immersion was emerging. For several years, zoos had been creating environments in which the animals were provided a space that simulated their natural habitat in the wild. Landscape immersion took that idea a step further. Buildings and barriers were hidden, and the visitor was immersed in the landscape and substrates of the animal areas. Seattle’s Woodland Park Zoo won an exhibit award in 1981 for its African Savanna and New Orleans’ Audubon Zoo won in 1985 for its Louisiana Swamp. As immersion exhibits began to win accolades and awards, many zoos were forced to recognize their deficiencies.

In 1984, an article in Parade magazine labeled the Atlanta zoo as one of the top ten worst in the nation. The zoo lost its accreditation and outraged residents demanded that the facility be fixed up or closed down. Mayor Andrew Young assembled a new management team and privatized the governance of the zoo.

By 1986, the zoo was being redeveloped as Zoo Atlanta and its most ambitious project, the Ford African Rain Forest, opened in 1988. This great ape complex created a lush immersive environment in four naturalistic habitats that were separated by hidden moats. This allowed up to four separate troops of gorillas to interact with each other while visitors could see more than a dozen animals at one time. Specially designed holding areas allowed troops to rotated among the habitats daily.

As Zoo Atlanta was being re-born, New York’s Bronx Zoo was winning an exhibit award for its new Jungle World. This extraordinary facility was one of the largest and most complex zoo buildings in the world. It captured an acre of land under a roof that rose more than fifty feet into the air. An elevated boardwalk meandered through a space that immersed visitors in the jungle—a space where they were surrounded by hundreds of tropical animals, separated from the public and each other by a series of ravines, streams, and simulated rock outcroppings.

I suppose the size and scope of Jungle World is the reason the Toledo Zoo’s groundbreaking exhibit that opened on September 6th, 1986 was passed over for an award. Known as the Hippoquarium, the exhibit would allow the Toledo Zoo to boast for decades that it had the world’s only 360,000-gallon, filtered pool with underwater viewing for the hippopotamus.

Hippos have been kept in captivity for hundreds of years. There are even accounts of circuses carting hippos around the country in specially designed, water-filled wagons. The problem with exhibiting hippos, however, is that these two-ton animals eat prodigious amounts of vegetation and produce about fifty pounds of waste per day—primarily in the water.

[image error]As tempting as it was for zoos to exhibit hippos in their underwater world, the view for the public would resemble a murky mudhole. The Toledo Zoo was first to overcome that obstacle with a state-of-the-art filtration system that pulled water and waste from the pool, screened it to remove the large pieces, and ran the water through sand filters that were similar to but much larger than a residential swimming pool. The final treatment was with ozone, which was a safer and more effective disinfectant for animals than chlorine. The result was a stunning, crystal-clear underwater view of hippos.

As visitors left the hippo viewing area, they became immersed in a simulated African experience called the African Savanna. The Toledo Zoo’s African Savanna, which opened in phases from 1987 until 1989, was featured in national publications and hailed as one of the finest zoo experiences in the country. People meandered down winding pathways through a variety of habitats including a Riverine area (with hippos and otters) and the Grassland (with the giraffe, elephant, lion, and meerkat). The white rhinos, Phil and Bernadine, had lived in the grasslands area for several years before Bernadine had her accident.

Bernadine was too massive to x-ray and too heavy to manipulate for therapy. Staff and volunteers signed up for a round-the-clock vigil. A weeklong effort to save her, including the use of tractors to move her and cranes to lift her, was unsuccessful. As she lay helplessly on her side where she fell, the community response was phenomenal. Construction companies donated equipment, and their operators worked through the night. Concerned citizens flooded us with calls and cards while veterinarians worked feverishly to save her. Unfortunately, Bernadine died at twelve-thirty on Tuesday, August 13.

Next week: The Carnivore Cafe

Toledo – Home of America’s Most Complete Zoo

When I first visited the Toledo Zoo in the summer of 1991, it struck me as a unique blend of historic old structures and cutting-edge new animal exhibits. The thirty-acre site was compact and filled with interest. Intense colorful plantings accentuated the architecture of ornate brick and stone buildings. It billed itself as America’s most complete zoo because of its museum, aquarium, and plant conservatory. It had a reputation for developing the latest in immersive zoo exhibits like the African Savanna with its one-of-a-kind Hippoquarium, but the building that really caught my eye had the word [image error]CARNIVORA etched in the stone lintel above the door. Its stucco walls and red clay-tiled roof were in the Spanish colonial style. The building was more like a cathedral than an animal house with its soaring facade, arched glass windows, and ornate stone carvings.

Officials broke ground on the Carnivore building in 1924, with Theodore Roosevelt’s son Kermit turning the first shovel of dirt. The building would complement the nearby PROBOSCIDEA building, which opened that same year and would house elephants, rhinos, and hippos. By the time Carnivora opened to the public on Christmas Day, 1927, the Toledo Zoo already had a colorful, quarter-of-a-century history behind it.

[image error]

The zoo was founded in 1900 when a local businessman donated an unlikely animal—a woodchuck. And like so many other zoos of this era, the Toledo Zoo had circus connections. The first came in December 1905 when the difference between zoos and circus menageries became blurred. The Ferarie Brothers Circus came to town and began advertising themselves as the operators and managers of the Toledo Zoo. They were coopting the zoo’s five-year-old name and referring to their own menagerie which, at the time, happened to be in Toledo.

By the 1920s, when the Proboscidea and Carnivora buildings were constructed, the zoo The early circus once again connected with the Toledo zoo when an elephant with the MacKay Circus named York trampled a keeper to death somewhere in the Midwest. York was sold to an animal dealer, renamed Babe, and purchased by the zoo in Toledo. Babe arrived sometime in 1912 and despite killing zookeeper Michael Raddatz in 1915, went on to live at the zoo for another three decades.

business—like much of American society—was booming. Cities that had zoos were expanding while those that did not, were wishing they did. Communities planned and constructed parks, museums, golf courses, and libraries. Motorcars clogged the roadways, prohibition fueled the rise of speakeasies and the gangsters who ran them, and the jazz age echoed a time of great economic prosperity.

In the 1920s, animal dealers like Frank Buck prowled the forests and jungles of the world in search of exotic animals for burgeoning zoo collections. Buck kept up a regular correspondence with the directors of zoos in New York, Philadelphia, and St. Louis and had no trouble finding eager buyers for his specimens. At one point, he claimed to be supplying a whole zoo full of animals for the City of Dallas, Texas.

For Toledo, the “Roaring Twenties” is said to have begun in 1919 with the world’s first million-dollar sporting event. On July 4th of that year, boxers Jack Dempsey and Jess Willard squared off in Toledo. For the next decade, Toledo prospered as a major hub in the region’s transportation system. The City boasted fifteen miles of riverfront that serviced thousands of Lake Erie freighters and produced more motorcars at its Willys Overland plant than any other American manufacturer except Ford. Toledo became known as “the Glass City” because of its many glass production companies.

The Toledo Zoo reflected the vitality of the community. In addition to the Proboscidea and Carnivora buildings, a Buffalo Barn for hay-eating animals opened in 1926, a Giraffe House (Herbivora Building) was completed in 1928, and work began on a Primate House in 1929. All these structures were built with the signature look—stucco facade and red-tile roof—and must have reflected one of the most stylish and handsome zoos in the country. And the Toledo Zoo was not finished. By late 1929, plans were afoot for a Monkey Mountain adjacent to the Primate House and a Reptile (Reptilia) House.

Everyone knows how this story ends. In October 1929, the “Roaring Twenties” went out with a whimper and the Toledo Zoo should have fallen on hard times like the rest of America. But what happened next is the most improbable story in the zoo’s history. In a few years, the Phoenix would rise from the ashes thanks to one man’s love of snakes and lizards.

I first met Roger Conant when the 86-year-old retired Philadelphia Zoo director came to Toledo to film a segment for our centennial video project. He recalled that in the spring of 1929, the Toledo Zoo had offered him his first “big zoo” job. Though the twenty-year-old herpetologist worked as a general zookeeper, reptiles were his passion and his idea for an elaborate reptile house came along at the perfect time.

As the Great Depression ground into the 1930s and federal officials scoured the land for projects that could immediately put people to work, zoo officials seized the opportunity. Conant’s vision was drawn-up by an out-of-work architect. Construction materials were scavenged from demolition projects all over town and dozens of tradesmen and laborers were put to work. Artists painted murals, sculptors carved stonework, and photographers documented the whole project. Finally, on September 15th, 1934, the REPTILIA building was dedicated.  But that was just the beginning.

That same day, the five-year-old Primate house was finally opened, and ground was broken on the next project—a massive building that would house a museum, an indoor theater, and an outdoor amphitheater. For the rest of the decade, the Great Depression would appear to pass over the Toledo Zoo.

Grand openings occurred in rapid succession for the Amphitheater (1936), the Aviary (AVES) building (1937), the Museum building (1938), the Aquarium (1939), and the Greenhouse / Conservatory (1939). All these buildings are still in service and represent one of the finest collections of historic, WPA architecture of any zoo in the country.

 Next week: A Home for Hippos

 

Sioux Falls, South Dakota—the zoo as a museum

[image error]When I arrived at the Great Plains Zoo in the summer of 1988, the first animal I encountered was the most impressive bull elephant I had ever seen. He had long curved tusks, his ears were fanned out in alarm, and his trunk reached out to smell whatever came his way. He was almost lifelike—but just, almost. He was actually a mounted specimen in the zoo’s Delbridge Museum of Natural History—a facet of the zoo that I initially found distasteful. The museum had over a hundred animals that had been shot by a local big game hunter and placed in his hardware store in the 1960s and ‘70s. Upon his death, the collection was purchased by philanthropist C. J. Delbridge and donated to the citizens of Sioux Falls on the condition that a museum be built to house them. The city decided to build the museum at the zoo. Fortunately, the specimens had been mounted by some of the best taxidermists in the nation and were in lifelike poses of museum quality.

Managing the museum was the most memorable aspect of my time in Sioux Falls. When I arrived there, the specimens were randomly arranged as individual artifacts in a large open indoor space. There was great potential to turn it into an educational facility if we could group them in naturalistic dioramas. I enlisted the aid of a local exhibit specialist, and we traveled to Los Angeles in October 1990 to consult with the Los Angeles Museum of Natural History. There we learned how to make molds out of silicon, latex, and plaster. We found out where to purchase artificial rocks and plants, and we observed the latest advances in robotics and animatronic exhibits. The first exhibit we developed in our own museum was an African waterhole, complete with artificial water, simulated animal footprints, and of course, our own mounted animals.

[image error]We had many rare animals that our local citizens would otherwise never have an opportunity to see. It is difficult to appreciate the height of a giraffe or the mass of an elephant until you are directly underneath one. The collection even had a giant panda. It was not part of the original “hunted” collection. It had been donated later. As time went by and I grew to appreciate the educational value of our museum, I learned that natural history museums had a colorful history that predated most American zoos.

As circuses and their menageries of exotic animals were crisscrossing North America in the 1800s, some people were taking a more scientific interest in animals. One of the first organized efforts in North America was the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, which was founded in 1812 and opened its doors to the public in 1828. The Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., was founded in 1846, New York’s American Museum of Natural History, in 1869, and the Field Museum in Chicago, in 1893–all with similar missions that involved increasing knowledge and inspiring an interest in nature and culture.

By the late 1800s, natural history museums were beginning to crop up all over the country. This phenomenon grew out of the industrial revolution’s gift of leisure time to the American people and the desire for “nature” amidst the nation’s growing urbanization. The first expeditions sent out by museums explored the western wilderness of America and brought back new species of plants and animals to identify, study, and catalog. The wealthiest of these museums soon began to widen their scope, sending explorers around the world to recover everything they could, from the antiquities of Egypt, to the fossil beds of Mongolia, to the rich wildlife of Africa.

Unfortunately for the wild animals destined for these museums, “collecting” was a scientific euphemism for killing, and one of the most well-known of the early collectors of wildlife was none other than former President Theodore Roosevelt.

When Roosevelt retired from the presidency in 1909, he was only fifty years old. The youngest former president in American history, he was looking for adventure and for a project that would take him away from Washington, D.C., and politics. A naturalist at heart, he turned, not surprisingly, to his boyhood fascination with natural history. Three weeks after the inauguration of his successor, William Howard Taft, Roosevelt set out for British East Africa to collect big game for the Smithsonian Institution. Many of the specimens were destined for the new U.S. National Museum building, then under construction on the National Mall, and today known as the National Museum of Natural History.

Roosevelt and his expedition team arrived in Mombasa in present-day Kenya on April 21, 1909. By the time they were finished nearly a year later, they had amassed thousands of specimens for the museum and also obtained live animals for the National Zoological Park, including a leopard, lions, cheetahs, gazelles, and some birds. Though it is tempting to be appalled at the loss of life, Roosevelt was a lover of nature who dedicated himself to protecting both wildlife and natural resources. He recognized that without dramatic action, the rich natural resources and incomparable landscapes of our country would disappear as quickly as the American bison had in his lifetime.

One of Roosevelt’s contemporaries, and someone who spent time in Africa with him, was taxidermist Carl Akeley. Akeley had been part of a zoological collecting expedition to British Somaliland (now Somalia) in 1896 for the Field Museum in Chicago, the first expedition into Africa by any American institution. It was there that he became somewhat of a legend in Africa when he killed a leopard—with his bare hands. According to his account, he was walking through the bush when he wheeled to face the leopard as it was in midair. His rifle was knocked flying and in its place was eighty pounds of frantic cat. Fortunately for Akeley, she missed his throat and struck him high in the chest, catching his upper arm in her mouth. He managed to grab her by the neck, stuff his other hand in her mouth, and fall on top of her. After an epic struggle, Akeley strangled the leopard.

Akeley’s real claim to fame, however, was in the world of taxidermy. His museum dioramas, which can still be seen today, were astonishingly realistic. When he entered the profession and observed the techniques of the time, he saw a better way to mount animals than those commonly in use. He was put off by the upholsterer’s method, in which a skin was sewn up like a pillow and stuffed with straw or excelsior until it would hold no more, then artistically pulled in with thread here and there to create contours. These mounts appalled Akeley’s aesthetic sensibility. He was an artist and wanted to be a sculptor in the world of taxidermy. He developed a technique for removing the skin of an animal by making only a few incisions and re-sewing the skin over a carefully sculpted mold to make a mounted animal (not a “stuffed” animal) that was incredibly lifelike.

Akeley’s mounts revolutionized not only the world of taxidermy but also the world of museum exhibits. His artistic eye extended to the rest of the diorama as well. He took black-and-white photographs of scenes in nature and gathered samples of bushes, plants, and other natural materials. He used these back in the studio where he made plaster casts and reproduced some of the artifacts in wax.

Later in his career, as he developed more elaborate dioramas, he added professional artists to his team. Before the development of color photographs, it was the only way to portray a landscape accurately. Akeley demanded a specific setting for the individual animals, and he would not accept a generalized background for any of his dioramas.

It was this tradition of museum exhibits that we hoped to tap in Sioux Falls. If we could link the zoo collection with the museum collection, there was, I felt, a unique opportunity to provide a complete animal experience. This is one of the reasons that when the Toledo Zoo came calling with a job opportunity, I had to take it. They also had a museum, although one with no mounted animals, and on August 8, 1991, I departed Sioux Falls for the next big chapter of my life in Toledo, Ohio.

Tampa’s Lowry Park Chimps Walk on Grass

In the fall of 1966, somewhere in Liberia, West Africa, an infant chimpanzee was taken by poachers after his mother and the rest of the family was killed for meat.  The baby almost certainly saw his mother die trying to protect him. In December of the same year, an American named Ed Schultz, working for an iron-ore mining company in the west African port of Buchanan, heard that someone at the mess hall was selling that baby chimp. Schultz found the man, paid $25 in cash, and took Herman home to meet his wife and children.

The Schultzes fed Herman from a baby bottle, put him in diapers, and taught him to eat his fruit and drink from a cup at the dinner table. A few months later, they started caring for another young chimp, a female they named Gitta.

Soon, Ed took a job as a manager at a phosphate company in Tampa, Florida and moved there with his family, including Herman and Gitta.  The chimps were five years old and on the verge of chimp adolescence. They were getting larger and stronger, and Ed was no longer comfortable keeping them at home with his wife and children.

[image error]In 1971, after looking for a new home for Herman and Gitta, Ed decided to donate them to Lowry Park Zoo, which at the time was run by the city of Tampa.  In those days, Lowry Park had a reputation as a stark and sometimes even grim place but, to Ed, Lowry Park seemed like the best choice for his chimps. The zoo was ready to give Herman and Gitta a cage of their own, larger than the one they were kept in with the Schultzes.

On the day of the big move, the Schultz family drove the chimps to downtown Tampa for a ceremonial visit to City Hall. A Tampa Tribune photographer took pictures of Mayor Dick Greco with the chimps pondering the city budget.

[image error]Twelve years before I arrived at the Lowry Park zoo, in June 1972, Herman and I were featured in a newspaper article. He was just a little guy—about six years old—and he did not deserve to be behind bars. A photo of him in the article evokes a sense of despair even though he appears relaxed with one foot propped up on the bars as he picks intently at a piece of fruit. He had only been in those cramped, dank quarters for about a year, but the real tragedy was that he would live there for another dozen years before our paths would cross again and I would be privileged to do something about his condition.

I met Ed Schultz soon after I arrived as director of the zoo in 1984 and he was pleased that our master plan would provide Herman and Gitta a spacious grassy area in the World of Primates. But first they would need to move out of the way of construction. A new, temporary cage was assembled a few hundred yards from their old home and in the summer of 1985, we tranquilized the chimps and moved them. Their new space was a big improvement over the old, oppressive cage. The old exhibit was a block building with a 15-foot by 20-foot exhibit space. Visitors viewed the chimps through a double layer of chain-link attached inside and outside of the structure’s iron bars, making it nearly impossible to see the animals. The new cage, though only temporary, was more spacious, and it was open on all sides, instead of being backed-up to a building. It wasn’t an ideal situation, but it was a slight improvement, and in a few years, things would get even better.

[image error]By late 1985, all of the zoo cages had been moved and all of the animals transferred. It was time for the serious construction to begin. An army of workers dug cavernous holes, poured massive concrete footings, and the outline of a new zoo began to take shape. The first phase would be built around three themes—an Asian Domain, a World of Primates, and a walk-through aviary. The public areas would consist of new ticketing, entry, and gift shop. An impressive central plaza would feature a fountain around a pair of bronze manatees. For nearly three years, workers poured concrete, sculpted artificial rocks, and installed caging. Primatologist, Jane Goodall paid the chimps a visit in 1987 and by the end of that year, we were planting grass, testing waterfalls, and moving animals into their new homes.

[image error]The new chimpanzee area was not especially large, but it was an interesting and varied space for animals that had only known concrete and chain-link. Large logs and an artificial termite mound broke up a long, grassy yard. A deep dry moat afforded the chimps an unobstructed view of their human visitors and the landscape beyond. One of the highlights of my zoo career came in the winter of 1988 when I witnessed Herman and Gitta step out of their new night-house and walk on grass for the first time in many years. Herman climbed atop what would become his favorite perch—the termite mound—to gaze back at me. I am not suggesting that he was actually “happy”, but I do know that I did everything in my power to make him so.

[image error]As the first phase of the Lowry Park Zoo neared completion in February 1988, the Zoo Association became the Lowry Park Zoological Society, a private nonprofit organization dedicated to the management and ongoing development of a superior zoological garden. Tampa’s rejuvenated Lowry Park Zoo formally opened to the public on March 5, 1988. Two months later, I left Tampa to begin my next adventure.

 

 Next week: Sioux Falls, South Dakota – the zoo as a museum

An Elephant moves to Canada

[image error]A few days after Christmas 1960, Sumter Lowry, Jr, the son of the park’s namesake, presented a special Christmas gift to the city of Tampa. Lowry had purchased a baby elephant from Thailand. Her arrival was front-page news. In February 1961, she was given the name Shena, complements of a public naming contest. She was just eighteen months old when she arrived at Tampa’s Lowry Park Zoo.

In the years that followed, a modest building was constructed to serve as a shelter. Her small yard was surrounded by railroad rails that were welded to concrete pillars. There she would live for the next two decades until our 1984 master plan called for the demolition of her exhibit and the construction of a new, larger space in the same location. In order to build her new facilities, she would need to be moved to another zoo for a few years.

[image error]After searching far and wide, we found a good facility at African Lion Safari near Toronto, Canada, that would take her. They had proper facilities, other elephants, and a highly competent staff. A deal was struck that would send her to Canada and bring her back when her new home was completed. All we had to do was figure out how to get her there. I described the process in my article for the zoo’s newsletter in the fall of 1985:

Though highly trained, Shena had not been handled in over ten years. She had become quite unmanageable and even dangerous to those who worked around her. But after a few days with the experienced elephant handler, Charles Gray, she was performing all of her old tricks and even seemed to enjoy the change in routine and the companionship of her handler. The next problem was how to get her out of the enclosure. So complete was Shena’s incarceration, that there was not even a gate into her enclosure. Our friendly workmen moved in with their cutting torches and bulldozers, and after nearly an hour of cutting the heavy iron rails, an opening was made in the pen.

[image error]The next problem we faced was the uncertainty of Shena’s reactions to her newfound freedom. Would she respond to her handler’s commands, or would she run away at the first opportunity? The moment of truth arrived. As Shena walked out of her pen for the first time in nearly 15 years, it became obvious that she was happy to be outside and yet very responsive to her handler.  She quickly gained his confidence and was soon allowed to wander happily around and explore the zoo she had lived in for most of her life. The rest of her loading and transporting was so uneventful as to appear routine. But that was not the end of the story.

In order to make transportation less traumatic, another elephant was brought from Canada to keep her company. A large male Asian elephant named “Buke” became the first elephant ever to share Shena’s enclosure. Though she was coy to his advances at first and turned her back whenever he came close, she soon warmed up and remained close by his side as they explored the zoo grounds.

[image error]At the time of Shena’s transfer, the zoo had been cleared for construction and most of the cages and sidewalks were gone. The elephants had space to wander, plenty of sand to throw on themselves, and few opportunities to get into trouble. Buke was an impressive beast with massive tusks. He seemed gentle enough, responding to his handlers like an anxious child as the two elephants wandered the property untethered. He was so gentle that I took a photo of my twelve-year-old son, Jason, riding on his back. The next time I saw Buke, he was in his home in Canada later that summer. He was in musth (a period when bull elephants are sexually active and very aggressive) and chained to a tree–ready to kill anyone who came too near.

Shena did well in Canada, and we were pleased later that summer when we learned that breeding was taking place. Our hopes were dashed, however, when we received word that she had died of heart failure on January 17, 1986. We should not have been surprised.

Elephants in the wild walk for miles every day. They thrive on exercise. Shena’s exercise for the past few decades in Tampa was limited to the small enclosure she inhabited. Though it was gratifying to see her roaming the zoo site with her new companion, I suspect the sudden burst of activity and interaction with other elephants that resulted from her move to Canada was probably more than her debilitated heart could handle. The only consolation was that the last few months of her life were probably some of her happiest.

Shena wasn’t the only longtime Lowry Park Zoo resident that had to undergo some life-changing experiences. But the next story has a much happier ending.

Next week: Herman and Gitta Walk on Grass

Bringing Down the Bars

The City of Tampa Parks Department hired me as superintendent of the Lowry Park zoo in the spring of 1984. Officially, I was selected by Mayor Bob Martinez, but it was upon the recommendation of the people who interviewed me—Parks Director Ross Ferlita and his boss, Joe Abrahams, the city’s parks and recreation administrator.

[image error]The cages I inherited were mostly chain-link boxes of various sizes that housed lions, tigers, pumas, jaguars, bears, and primates. Two chimpanzees lived behind iron bars covered with heavy chain-link fencing that rendered them almost invisible, while otters and alligators swam in water-filled pits. The lone elephant was confined to small pen with a shelter about the size of a two-car garage.

The Lowry Park Zoo was quite a letdown for me, after having worked at modern zoos in Toronto and Louisville. It was a free zoo which might explain why it was necessary to post crude wooden signs on most cages that warned: City Code: cruelty to or harassment of animals is prohibited & subject to imprisonment & fine. But, the good news was that all of that was about to change. The Lowry Park Zoo Association had been formed in 1982, at the suggestion of the Tampa Parks Department, to raise awareness of the zoo and to promote a public-private partnership that would fund its renaissance.

When we announced the rebirth of the zoo in the summer of 1984, we heard from plenty of naysayers. They questioned the need for another zoo when we already had Busch Gardens. They scoffed at the idea of paying admission to a city zoo. And they really took exception to the multimillion-dollar price tag attached to the venture—a price that seemed to be escalating. But as the plans were unveiled, minds began to change. Mayor Bob Martinez had a vision that was shared by the Lowry Park Zoo Association, a group that was led by Lowry family member Sally Lowry Baldwin.

 

We revealed the design plans for the new zoo a few weeks after my arrival and Mayor Bob Martinez committed $5 million of city money to get the project started in Phase one. A month after that, the Lowry Park Zoo Association announced it was moving ahead with its fundraising efforts in order to finance the first phase of the zoo renovation.

 

[image error]We held our first event in August 1984 when we unveiled a master plan. Our design would use water barriers and dry moats to create naturalistic habitats for the animals, while increasing the size of the zoo from eleven acres to twenty-four acres. The city offered $1 million to fund the initial site preparation and infrastructure improvements. This was in addition to its $5 million pledge for phase one of the zoo’s development. With the city firmly committed, the Zoo Association expanded its vision and embarked on a $20-million capital campaign. The project would include an Asian Domain (with elephants, tigers bears, tapirs, and camels), a World of Primates, and an Aviary. The plan was being developed by a New Orleans based firm, Design Consortium.

Momentum was building. We went from one of our first contributions of $207 in June 1984 from the Zonta Boys and Girls Club of Tampa, to regular six-figure donations. We raised millions of dollars in a few short years.

It was the perfect public/private partnership. We had a popular mayor and his enlightened administration working with the community’s “movers and shakers”. As the construction began to show impressive progress, the excitement grew—and donors lined up. In 1987 alone, we received $500,000 from the Jim Walter Corporation for the World of Primates, $500,000 from Barnett Bank of Tampa for the aviary, and $100,000 from CitiCorp for the sloth bear exhibit. By this time, nearly $10 million had been raised privately and the city of Tampa had increased its funding to $8 million.

This was not a simple renovation project or the construction of some new exhibits. The entire zoo was being demolished and a new zoo built in its place. But where could we put the animals? We decided to stockpile them in an unused area of the park and utilize existing cages to house them.

In March 1985, we closed the zoo to the public, and began relocating the animals. One advantage to having animals in such primitive conditions was that their new temporary facilities could hardly be worse, and in some cases, the temporary cages at the north end of the property were an improvement.

[image error]We installed concrete slabs with drainage, sidewalks, and other infrastructure. After shifting the animals into holding areas, we cut the cages from their floors, picked them up with a giant crane, swung them to the new location, and welded them to their floor in the new location. Animals were transferred into new cages in a new location, out of the way of construction. One animal, however, could not be transferred onsite. We would need to find a home for our elephant for a couple of years.

Next week: Shena moves to Canada