Oh, wow. Tripping down memory lane...

The park I worked in was very small, SRS. It was a municipal park, and there wasn't even an interpretive center built yet. In fact, it was the first Nature Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma (Mary K. Oxley Nature Center), and probably one of only a small handful (if that many) in the whole state. We used one of the rooms in the maintenance building as our office, and one of the park pavilions as our place to teach classes when we weren't out in the woods with the kids. Because it was a new center, most of my job responsibilities involved going out into the woods and find out what was there. The founder and director of the center was from Missouri, so he knew almost nothing about what lived in that park. It was our job to find out for him. Bob was the one who taught me about the Newcombs Wildflower Guide, and I am forever grateful.

I did some of the first artwork for the nature center newsletter, and helped develop teaching tools for some of the nature classes. And I collected and identified the first swamp rose mallow ever officially collected in the state of Oklahoma. Bob got credit for it though, but I don't mind. But I was a bit pissed off when the grounds crews for the golf course next to the nature center mowed my swamp rose mallow down the week after I found it).

When the other seasonal naturalist and I weren't out collecting and identifying plant specimens and observing the local fauna, we were guiding nature hikes for kids whose main exposure to nature was at the zoo (Naturalist: "so, guys, why do you think that squirrel is living in that tree?" Kids: the ZOO put him there!"), and teaching ecology and orienteering to girl scouts and summer bible school kids.

I loved doing that job. But I needed something more permanent and with better pay. So I became a zookeeper.

:-/

There's irony for you.

P.S. As a result of this thread, I did a Google search for the Oxley Nature Center and discovered in Oxley's site that Bob Jennings, my old boss, passed away not too long ago. I took the invitation in the site to send an e-mail with some of my reminiscences of working with Bob, and was also intrigued to discover that Bob had been a member of an acoustic guitar forum in his final years. Birds of a feather and all that.