The Foot Roller


There were three of us who worked in the Zoo Graphics Room at Busch Gardens. Two hauntingly beautiful women, whose animal knowledge was astounding. My friend, Margo, was one. She and I were the two zoo graphic artists and ended up being partners for seventeen years. Her work was always professional and the quality was superior. Even today her property and mine back up to each other, down in the Florida swamps, near Thonotosassa.

Then there was Chris, another fountain of knowledge. Chris is an award-winning writer. I wanted to take in every word of wisdom I could from her. We were lunch buddies, and both remembered the "love and peace" movement of the sixties very well. Chris was the instigator of, and some of you may still remember, the Free Store on Nebraska Avenue. You would bring in and donate items you no longer wanted and take home something that you did, for free!

Chris was the Assistant Curator of Conservation Education. She wrote all the informational copy for Margo's zoo brochures and tee shirts. She also wrote the copy for my large animal identification signs throughout the park, located along the guest sidewalks. She was amazing at providing the most information with the fewest words possible, whereas sometimes it seems like I ramble on trying to get as many words into a single sentence as I possibly can and make it go on forever and you don't know when it's going to end.

The three of us really loved working together. We had our desks pushed together so we all faced each other. We produced work that won many national awards and we had a great deal of fun doing it.

The reason we loved this unconventional office was because it had previously been the reptile house. We had two big sinks. One of Margo's duties, which she loved, was cleaning and re-articulating large antelope skeletons. The final step of cleaning the bones was to place them in a big terrarium of some kind of African dead flesh-eating beetles that left spotless snow-white bones. The re-articulated skeletal animals were magnificent!

Chris loved that the wall behind her chair had once been a wall of viewing windows with a long guest sidewalk outside running parallel with it. The windows had been covered. Then a facial wall of side by side vertical pee-wee poles was placed over it to appear "hut-like". Many times throughout the day guests would have an uncontrollable urge to drag their hand or an object over these poles, like we've all done as children dragging a stick along a picket fence. Chris would always say "It feels like someone's playing a xylophone on my spine."

Something I did was take a twenty ft. long paper dragon I had brought back from China and attach it to the ceiling. It ran almost the entire length of the ceiling and it was pretty cool.

Our office door had a 10"X 12" glass window in it. All day long, other employees could not pass by our door without stopping and looking through that window in all directions.

We put a piece of frosted paper over the window with an eyehole cut in it, with a flap to peep out of like a speakeasy.

I could never find the paint can opening key, so I bought one of those devices that you attach to your car keys in case you lose them. You clap your hands and it activates a shrill beeping sound that leads you to them. It worked great...except, it was also activated by the frequency of Margo's laugh, which was often. Her laugh would set it off about five or six times a day. If that ever happened when a visitor stopped by, I'd tell them "Our boss, Judi, had that installed and it also goes off in her office and let's her know that we're laughing and not working."

All these years laters, the three of us are now retired from Busch Gardens and we're still close friends and go out to dinner and to the movies regularly.

We never ran out of things to talk about in our Graphics Room. I learned more, working with those two women than I did in all my previous years of doing zoo work. I told Margo one day that I couldn't understand why a small lake near our houses had suddenly lost all of its egrets and herons. For years the trees that lined the edge of the lake were filled with the birds every night. And then they were gone. She quickly responded, "There was probably an alligator removed from the lake."

"An alligator?" I said, "What would an alligator have to do with the egrets roosting and nesting up in the trees?"

She said, "An alligator would keep the raccoons away, which would climb the trees and eat the birds and eggs."

Wise and uncanny knowledge like this is how I benefited daily from both Chris and Margo.

During one of these thought-provoking conversations with them, in the Graphics Room, I was sitting and soaking in what was being discussed. As I listened, I was mindlessly rolling a pencil with my foot, back and forth, on the floor under my desk. I noticed it wasn't rolling right but reasoned it was because of the rough concrete floor of the former reptile house that was now our office. Finally, I interrupted, saying, as I looked under my desk, "Why isn't this thing rolling like it's supposed to?" Then I said ...."Oh, no!" "It's my glasses!"

Lash Out Loud