When I went looking for the
photo of me and Haley at elephants, I discovered the three-ring binder I’d put
together after I retired. It contains a variety of things, all of which are
refreshing my memory of my years at Woodland Park Zoo. I should have multiple
happy posts in the days to come.
To begin, I’m not sure just how many of you are aware of my
link to the zoo. I grew up in the Fremont neighborhood and the zoo was not
encircled by a fence at that time. The only things that cost money were food
from the concession stand and the rides in the lower east corner of the zoo.
Back then, if you had a quarter, you were rich enough for a couple of rides, or
just a snack. Boy, how things have changed since then.
In addition, back then there were no helicopter parents,
nor were we driven every single place we wanted to go. We had two good feet and
perhaps a bicycle. In my neighborhood, the kids often walked up Fremont Avenue
to the zoo, through the zoo to West Green Lake beach. If we were feeling really
ambitious, sometimes we’d hike to the East Green Lake beach. Even more fun was
wading out to Duck Island. Why didn’t all that muck and slime bother me back
then? Now, I’d require a wet suit over my entire body to venture toward Duck
Island.
I have many happy memories of those jaunts to the lake,
swimming the day away and the jaunt back home…at least going home it was all
downhill. It was such a relaxed time and summer seemed to last forever.
In 1961, I turned 16. I was excited to get a job that
wasn’t babysitting. My very first job was at the zoo selling hotdogs in the
concession stand. I don’t know of there was a public health department then
that looked after places like that. I don’t believe so. Whatever chili or
hotdogs were left at the end of the day were placed in the fridge and pulled
out the following morning to reheat. When the stock became low, you simply
added more chili or hotdogs to the pans. You didn’t wash them up first. It was
at this point I decided I would never ever buy a hotdog or chilidog that I had
not either personally prepared or watched being prepared.
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| Bear Exhibit 1960 |
I only worked the summer of 1962 because I graduated high
school the spring of 1963 with my Secretarial Certificate, so that meant I
could go out in the world and get a real 8-5 job for, as it turned out, two
different insurance companies, one after the other. I didn’t give the zoo
another thought and didn’t keep up with the various developments and changes,
i.e., fence, admission charge, etc.
In 1984, I took a permanent part-time job with the City of
Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation. It was only at that point I
realized the zoo belonged to the city. My job was to provided administrative
assistance to the Parks Department Planning, Projects and Development
department. My first big typing job was for what was to become the Asian
Elephant Exhibit at the zoo, funded by the 1985 county-wide Zoo Bond. When I
turned the finished copy into the planner, I said, “This sounds wonderful,
let’s get it built.”
From that position, I moved to the Word Processing
Department. I loved working there and it was then I met the Director of the
zoo, Dave Towne. He came in one day in a bit of a tizzy. He had a meeting with
some honchos downtown and the legislation he had was incorrect. Did any of us
in word processing know how to fix it. Well, I had prepared lots of legislation
for that first departments Capital Improvement Program guy. I indicated I could
take care of it.
Now, you have to understand this gentleman, and he was/is
one, was also a bit of a naughty guy. It was also a bit before everyone got so
up tight about sexual innuendo and all that stuff. Mr. Towne asked what I’d
charge and I told him I wanted peacock feathers. I had no idea what his job
entailed and just assumed he could go out and about before the zoo opened and
pick up stray peacock feathers. I fixed his legislation so it was correct, and
every time I saw him after that, we’d joke about the peacock feathers and why I
wanted them. He finally brought me one shortly before I actually ended up
working at the zoo for his second in command.
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| Typical Cages, 1960 |
You have no idea how unhappy I was when my boss told me in
September that come the end of 1991, I wouldn’t have a job. As head of her
department, she had moved the money that funded my position to another
location. It was so another person could have the assistant he’d needed for a
long time. It was approved by the Parks Finance Department, but when it got to
the City’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB), they said, nope, haven’t
funded that position before and we’re not funding it now. My boss tried to get
the money back into the position I held, but OMB told her she must not need it
since she’d given it up. That position was gone as would I be come the end of
the year.
The one nice thing working for a bureaucracy is some of the
rules they have in place. Since I’d been written out of the budget, the City
had to find me another comparable job. There was only one…at Woodland Park Zoo.
It was also permanent part-time in support of the Citizen’s Advisory Committee
for the 1985 Bond Issue. Fortunately for me, the man (Mike Waller) who
interviewed and hired me did like me. It didn’t matter that working at the zoo
shortened my commute by 15-20 minutes, that I had free parking and wouldn’t
have to rush about moving my car before the meter person returned to give me a
ticket, I DID NOT want to go there.
Zoo staff were welcoming, the citizens on the Advisory
Committee extremely nice and the work was rewarding and interesting. I soon
became comfortable with working at the zoo and eventually extremely grateful I
was given the opportunity and took it. Four days a week, I worked in one of the
trailers at what was affectionately called Camp David. The fifth day, I spent
at the exact opposite end of the zoo working for the Supervisor of Maintenance
and Horticulture.
I still
laugh about what staff in that location must have thought the first time I
turned up down there. I was clad in winter white…slacks and sweater and wearing
cute little flats. At that point in time, those departments hadn’t been
renovated and everything was muddy and filthy. The people in this department
were out on grounds eight hours a day making the zoo look great. Mud, dirt,
Zoodoo, they tracked it all in and about. And, it didn’t matter if it was sunny
and warm or raining and miserable, they were out there every single day. I
didn’t make the mistake of looking so out-of-place again and managed to bring a
certain amount of order to the place before I went to work for Mr. Towne
full-time in 1997.
When the 1985
Zoo Bond Issue, the first county-wide bond issue ever approved by the voters, included
was a Master Plan that included a number of bioclimatic zones. There was
Tropical Asia, Tropical Rain Forest, African Savanna, Northern Trail, Temperate
Forest with exciting changes included in the different zones, i.e., the Rain
Forest Café, Family Farm. It was up to the Citizen’s Advisory Committee to look
at and approve any changes to the Master Plan. In some cases, a particular
exhibit would require more money and changes would be proposed, discussed and sent
back for more work or approved. Some of these necessitated removing or changing
parts of the Master Plan. The Desert and Steppe Exhibits never came to
fruition.
The Zoo Bond
Issue was pretty much completed by 1997. The voter-approved bond issue provided
$32 million. The Zoo Society had to raise $10 million. In the end, donations,
interest earned and funds raised beyond that totaled more than $20 million for
a final budget of close to $55 million, if my memory serves. I was the primary
planner for the county-wide celebration at its completion. I thought I had kept
a copy of the brochure that was prepared citing all the accomplishments and
changes, but apparently, I did not. So, again, if memory serves, we held the
event in September 1998, immediately after the national zoo convention in Tulsa
Oklahoma.
I’m really pleased
I had the opportunity to work on the huge changes made possible by the Zoo Bond
issue at a more than 100-year-old institution. I’m especially proud of the fact
that at the time, it was the first bond issue to be completed on time and under
budget. In fact, it took a couple of additional years to completely exhaust the
funds in Zoo Bond Issue budget.
Hopefully,
you are enjoying my trip down memory lane. And, hopefully, I’m not getting too
many facts wrong. Stay tuned, there’s more to come.
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