TRANSCRIPT
INTERVIEWEE: Terry Hershey (TH)
INTERVIEWER: David Todd (DT)
DATE: April 13, 2002
LOCATION: Stonewall, Texas
TRANSCRIBERS: Chris Flores and Robin Johnson
REELS: 2188 and 2189

Please note that the video includes roughly 60 seconds of color bars and sound tone for technical settings at the outset of the recordings. Numbers correlate with the time codes on the VHS tape copy of the interview. “Misc.” refers to various off-camera conversation or background noise, unrelated to the interview.

DT: My name is David Todd. I’m here for the Conservation History Association of Texas and we are outside of Stonewall, Texas on the Hershey Ranch and it’s April 13, year 2002. And we are a guest of Terry Hershey and we also have the good fortune to be interviewing her about her many volunteer activities in governmental service on behalf of the environment in Texas and nationwide. And I wanted to thank you for taking the time to talk to us.
TH: (inaudible)
DT: We usually start these interviews with a question about your early days, your childhood perhaps, and if there were any people in your family, your relatives, your distant kith and kin, who might’ve influenced an interest in the outdoors and conservation and environment. Any thoughts there?
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TH: Oh, yes. Mother was a very strong intellectual person. Museums—we’d—summers she’d always—I was from Fort Worth, pre-air conditioning and we headed for cool climates, which was New Mexico, Colorado, the West. And we always went to museums, Museum of Natural Science, and a lot of that and she would always take a place in the summer, out on a ranch where I could ride. And—and we would be a part—it was always small places, and then we would end up in a big metropolis like Santa Fe for a week at the end, or Colorado Springs. Yes, and then, my father, who was a lawyer in Fort Worth,
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was a gardener and he worked in his garden two hours in the morning and afternoon and brought in big vegetables and flowers that he raised. He didn’t like vegetables much, but he raised them for everybody else. He was from Louisiana and he liked syrup and biscuits and ice cream and fats. All the terrible things you don’t eat, he lived to be 101. Got in bed and quit eating. Doctors tried to hitch him up to tubes and he said leave him alone or he’d sue them. So they did.
DT: Would he bring in bugs from the garden? Would he show you things from the garden?
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TH: No, he—he was organic, that I recall. He always said he planted one row of vegetables for him and one row for the bugs. He figured—these were pre-World War II days and people weren’t throwing poisons and pesticides around with such abandon. I like to read the garden club books that Mother had in—in those years, and they are very interesting. They were what we would call organic recipes to stop things.
DT: Can you give us some examples of ways people controlled pests back then?
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TH: You pinched off the bugs, you find them. I don’t remember, I wasn’t a gardener, I was an eater. There’s a difference.
DT: You also said that your mother was interested in museums and exhibits and so on that might have some sort of natural history. Can you recall any of the exhibits that really caught your eye?
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TH: Oh, the Denver Museum had—had a really wonderful one, of all the dinosaurs, and it was a great museum. Books were—Earnest Thompson Seaton and all the famous nature writers of those days and I was always a great reader, and read early and long and hard and read things like Gone With the Wind by flashlight in my grandmother’s closet because Mother thought it was a naughty book, so. So, a reader finds places to read.
DT: Were there any other writers who had a real natural history bent? I don’t know, Leopold or Stegner?
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TH: Yes, all—Stegner, Leopold, all of them. All of them. The ones that—particularly now are Dr. Jared Diamond, and E.O. Wilson are—are very cogent and to the point of the problems that we have today. You asked earlier about volunteerism, uh, mother—my mother and my grandmother were both very active in the Women’s Movements of—of—of starting the—the Women’s Clubs and things like that, and Mother lectured on all sorts of topics. I never knew exactly what she was lecturing on but she was always off to go to a meeting or a lecture. And, she had a very strong philosophy that if you were lucky enough to have free time in life, you owed it back. And my Papa was from Louisiana, Creole, not Parisian-French ancestry, and there it was nobelesse oblige, if you have—you were noble, you were obliged. And it was very much the same thing.
DT: Well, then maybe we can jump ahead some years and could you tell us how this sort of instinct to volunteer your time and give back to the community might have played itself out in your environmental work?
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TH: Well, it was important. I was told that that was what I was supposed to do, and I was not a rebellious child, that’s what Mother said I ought to do and I’m still doing it. She told me so. Ought is a big thing with some people, I think. Sense of ought.
DT: Shoulds and oughts.
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TH: Sense of ought.
DT: And what does a sense of ought mean to you?
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TH: You ought to do things because they ought to be done. And, if possible, by you.
DT: It’s not the “royal we”. If you would take responsibility yourself.
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TH: Yeah, yeah.
DT: I understand that one of the first groups that you got involved with, in fact, I think helped organize, is the Buffalo Bayou Preservation Association.
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TH: Yeah, the Bu—that was in—in Houston after I came there. The first few years I was in Houston, I was very involved with Jake’s hobbies, which were ocean racing and sailing, and we were spending a lot of time on—on sailboats and I was a good sea cook. It was ’66 when I came back—and I was in Houston and Ernie Fay was picking me up, Jake was out of town that weekend, and he said, well, they’ve started. And I said, who’s started what. And he said, they’ve started clearing Buffalo Bayou. And I said, why? I didn’t live on it, but I knew it. He said, I don’t know, they’re just clearing it. And so the next day, Mary Kelsey and Isabelle Steenland and I got in the car to go up and see what was going on and found nine acres being cleared and they were layering the trees with rubber tires and burning them. Very stinky, you know, residential area. And so, I
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went back and called my County Commissioner the next day, who was Squatty Lyons, I didn’t know about County Commissioners. And he said, Oh, Miss Hershey, some big government people coming in and telling us little folks what to do and I said, what big government people? And she–he said, oh, that Corps of Engineers. And, I said, well, why does it say Harris County Flood Control all over the trucks? And he said, I’m busy, I don’t have time to talk to you and hung up. And it made me mad and I stayed mad for thirty years. Checked into it and found out, yes, that they had concreted Bray’s Bayou and they were working on White Oaks and this was to Corps’ plans, but as my friends in the Corps said later on, Terry, we do not go uninvited. We presume that your elected officials who ask us to come do these things have the will of the people, and I said, wrong, but that’s—we’ll take that up at a later date. And they were starting on—on Buffalo Bayou, they had the plans, so. There was a group of men who had loosely formed themselves into—and you’d know them all, into—into a group that planned to do
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something about it. But they just hadn’t really gotten themselves totally organized and most of those did live along — close along the Bayou. And so we got them sort of organized and—and George Mitchell was the first, but one, President, we did have one President that was there for a year, but I’ve—I’ve actually forgotten his name—Tom Shartle. And he may—I think he moved away and so George took over. And we did everything, I thought it well—was very simple, you write the Corps and say this is not a good thing to do, this is not ecological and—and they would say, oh, my, and go away. But that’s not the way it worked. And so, then we tried with pictures and—the garden club was very helpful. We took pictures and I had volunteer photographers that took pictures all up and down the Bayou and we showed the concrete bayous.
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And from there, we kind of mobilized a set of folks and finally, we ended up with George Bush—he was our Congressman and he looked at the pictures and said, oh, what a terrible thing to do to a river. And I said, yeah, I think so.
DT: What were they planning on doing to the river?
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TH: Straightening, stripping it, improving it, they called it. Concreting it. Like Bray’s Bayou. Like White Oaks Bayou. Changing a river into a concrete ditch. The philosophy was that the water would run faster. We said, but, isn’t that flood transference? Isn’t that just moving it downstream faster onto somebody else? They said, well, you’re not an engineer. And I said, no, but I played with a hose and a sand pile and I kind of know what water does. But we had no credentials except common sense, which sometimes is fairly important. So, anyway, George looked at it and he had common sense, too, and he said, that’s a terrible thing to do. So the next thing, he went up and set up a meeting with the
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Subcommittee on Appropriations. And all these guys, they were all busy. Strauss, Steenland, Fay, Mitchell, so they put me on a plane, sent me up there. So George [Bush] met me, we went over and this was sort of a somnambulant group, they didn’t look very interested in anything. And so I started talking and he was running up and down showing them the pictures, running up and down in front of them, you know, showing the pictures. He was great. So, they finally said, Congressman, do we understand you’re asking us not to spend money in your district. And he gulped, and he said, yes, sir, he said, I think there’s a better way to deal with storm water and I would like a re-study. And they said, OK, and walked out. And I said, what happened? And he said, I think we won. So he took me back and put me on a plane and I went home and I said, it wasn’t hard, Jake. You know, why
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is—you know, why is governing so hard? But anyway, he did get the re-study, but a funny sidebar on that was he asked for Buffalo Bayou. Well now, Buffalo Bayou is the whole thing. It’s the Ship Channel, you know, Turning Basin on down. And we were actually talking about Upper Buffalo Bayou, from the city of Houston up. And they cut off the funding for the whole Buffalo Bayou. Well, the Corps Colonel, he was the maddest man I ever saw, he had steam coming out of his ears. He said, what have you done? I said, we’ve finally caught your attention, that’s what we’ve done. But George changed it and said, I meant Upper Buffalo Bayou, so they could go back to dredging the Ship Channel, which may or may not be a good idea but anyway, that’s another story.
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DT: George Bush said that there was no need to do this because there were alternatives. What were some of the alternatives that he was thinking of and that you were proposing?
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TH: He didn’t know alternatives and he didn’t suggest alternatives. And we didn’t know alternatives ourselves except leaving it alone. There’s—now I know that the best alternative is leaving it alone, the sine curve of a river is based on physics and there are about six—I learned all this from taking Dave Rosgen’s courses about hydrology. Didn’t know it then, but common sense. Now I know that the sine curve of a river is the same on any river anywhere, anytime. And if one of the physics gets out of whack, the river gets out of whack. But if it is allowed to do its circular thing, it is stable. They were upsetting the stability of the rivers. Now Buffalo Bayou has bad erosion now, and
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because they haven’t continued, there have been at least six bends cut off, and anytime you cut off a bend, you’re ch—you’re altering the hydrology of the river. But it’s enjoyable. Sections of it are OK. You can still canoe down it in the middle of a beautiful—wonderful experience and not realize you’re in the mi—second biggest town in America. Have you ever done it? No. OK. So we saved a piece of it. Flood Control District at that time was—was very upset about all this because they felt this was a great thing to do. And mind you, some of these engineers thought it was a great thing to do. They were terribly wrong, but they didn’t know they were wrong. They thought they
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were right, and they thought we were wrong. I thought they were stupid. Because it was—it was flood transference. It was dumping it downstream. The city of Houston was downstream, nobody ever sort of looked. And, our big—we haven’t had—we have twenty-two watersheds in Harris County, and we haven’t had the big rain on the Buffalo Bayou watershed since ’36, ’35. And the water was up to the second floor downtown in
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Houston, you—we can see the pictures. I mean—and that’s before, Katy prairie was developed; it was before Memorial was developed, I mean there’s plenty of absorbency around. It just rained. And, so that’s when they went to the Corps, the city fathers at that time, and said, save us, thinking the Corps was the preeminent engineering group, which in a sense it was. Have any of you ever read that wonderful book about the ’26 flood on the Mississippi and how the Corps really—the big fight about whether they were going to build levies or let the river flow? It’s a fascinating book. You should read it sometime. The Corps, in its wisdom, thought that they could alter the watersheds. The community asked them to after the ’35 flood. The Corps came in with a plan to build the two—what we now call retentions, the Addicks and Barker Dams, and straightening and stripping all the
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rivers that went from that down to the Bay. And there was one plan to take the Buffalo Bayou watershed across Bray’s and create an alternate channel that went down to the Bay. And that was a serious discussion but they didn’t do it because there was already too much development over there that would’ve had to have been bought out. So they were going to—they built Addicks and Barker. And, at that time, coming out of—of Barker into Buffalo, they saved 600 feet, 300 on each side, when they jumped on down to what’s now under—under the beltway, they only saved 300 and you don’t have much running room with 300. You can do a lot more with 600 to save the flood plain. It rained over on the Bray’s Bayou watershed, so they jumped over there and they concreted
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Bray’s. And then it rained over the White Oaks watershed, so they jumped over there and were concreting White Oaks and that’s when we came in and that’s why Buffalo was spared. It would have been—it was first on the list. And we really haven’t had the big flood since. Now where it’s flooded downstream, downtown at the confluence of Buffalo and White Oak is—well, because White Oak is channelized and it just dashes down. In fact in the ’72 flood, it was pouring water into downtown so fast that it pushed—it pushed Buffalo in reverse. Buffalo was actually flowing the other way because of the—the force of the White Oak. So, when we’ve had a big rains, the confluence of all those bayous causes it to flood in that area downtown. But, any idiot brain, when you’re living at the confluence of two rivers, shouldn’t be putting stuff in the basement.
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And the—the Corps did a—a series of eight examinations for us of eight—eight streams in ’72 and that—that’s a long story, but they did it. And they pulled out the maps of the watershed. The light blue was a hundred year, the dark blue was the five hundred year, and did them on all these and you can sit there a—and look at those, oh; they had the streets, you know, where they were in the wa-flood plain already. The whole medical center was in the hundred-year flood plain, the whole thing. All right. You’d think maybe the city fathers would think somebody has now taken us off the hook, we can say beware, you know, you’re in danger. They hired Turner, Colley, and Braden, and drew it out with a pencil.
DT: How was that done?
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TH: Took a map. Changed the flood plain. The Corps, those—those delineations, they made about a hundred books on—on where we had the bigger maps that you could see and then they made 10,000 folders, you know, the inserts. And you could see in the insert where they consider the flood plain to be. They delivered all of these to my living room, because neither the city, nor the county, nor Flood Control, nor anybody would receive them. And we, in the BPA, mailed them out, broke the back of silence on where somebody felt the flood plain was. Well, of course, the development community didn’t want anybody to know where the flood plain was; they want unfettered room to roam. And, but we mailed them out and I can’t find the Bray’s—I still have copies of the
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Buffalo and I have the others where they showed it, where it was. And it’s flooded. Medical Center’s flooded at least five times since then. This last one is just unconscionable when you think of over five thousand animals were drowned in the basement. They talk about it setting back their research program, I think of the animal, you’re swimming higher and higher and the water’s rising and you can’t get out. Four thousand of them in the Medical Center basement. Plus, a lot of costumes and—and stuff over in the—in the flood—in the—wore them in, you know, in the Opera. And they all had all that stuff down there, but that stuff isn’t swimming and suffering like the animals were.
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DT: I understood that you also tried to work with these flood control problems, or flood mitigation problems, flood management problems by forming partnerships with the county and other groups that were responsible for trying to manage them, like the Flood Control Task Force that you set up in Harris County or helped join…
TH: In ’73,
DT: Um.
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TH: Several of the groups, to back up a little on that, this was ’66 and ’67 that we were fighting the battle of Buffalo Bayou. But that opened our eyes to a lot of things that were going on in the community. It also opened our eyes that it was very hard for citizens to reach each other if they had concerns. And at that time, the late ‘60s, you see, Audubon wasn’t there, Sierra wasn’t there. I found a little group called the Outdoor Nature Club. The League of Women Voters was there. They started—they were—they—they started—an environmental committee to work with us. The Junior Bar was helpful. It was—we were reaching out and we realized there was not communication and so there was a group
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of women called The Citizens Who Care. Your grandparents, your—your aunt, your grandmother, your grandaunts, were three of them—three of them, and some of their friends. And they started this group to try to figure out some way that citizens can communicate with each other, other than a piece in the Post or the Chronicle, you know, like that. And that’s—so we started the CEC was the outgrowth of that.
DT: The Citizens Environmental Coalition?
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TH: Hmm-mmm. That’s what that group did, was start the CEC. And they’re only…
DT: Who did work to link together groups?
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TH: Well, in the 70’s they started showing up, see, Audubon came, Sierra came. Some of the national groups were moving in and they—they had more expertise about how to get things done. And, what working with Flood Control, you couldn’t talk to Flood Control. It—the only way you could talk to Flood Control, it’s a special district, was go down and sit through a county commission meeting and get five minutes at the end. And that was not a very effective way. So we started pushing for some sort of citizens advisory group. And by that time, there were, oh, twelve, thirteen, fourteen groups identified that cared about these things. And retiring Judge Elliott, not—not number two; there was a
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Commissioner Elliott and a Judge Elliott. And, the last thing that Judge Elliott did in ’73, he was retiring from the bench, he’d had a vision problem and something else, was appoint this committee [the Harris County Citizens Flood Control Subcommittee]. And there were about twenty-four groups or twenty—twenty-three, and the development group had two more than everybody else. I understand you interviewed Keith Osborn at one point. He was on that task force and he would round up those of us who were not members of the development community and we would have little—little private meetings first, because it was a dog eat dog fight. Because the first big fight that we had was to get the community into the Federal Flood Insurance Program. And the development, the real estate, and the builders, all of those people, violently opposed that. Violently. And the BPA was called a communist group to tell you what to do with your land. We were, you know, really suspicious people. And, he’s—he
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formed—he formed it though. And so, all these groups, the groups that were then involved with the CEC were the—were that batch of groups. And then the groups that were the—the lawyers, the each—the county judge had two, each commissioner had an appointment. I was the appointment—his—of the county judge and the county judges ever since have continued to appoint me. There are only, I think, four of us that were still on that original ’73 committee. But, it h—it had an impact over the years and the fact that we could then sit down and talk to Flood Control at Flood Control and express opinions was vastly different. Because the head of the Flood Control district, at that time, was a very hard-line engineer, and he once looked at me and said, Terry, you don’t understand,
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I think a beautiful, white concrete river is beautiful. He did. You see. But, anyway, and—the Flood Control district—well the next one was pretty smart and that was bad because he could do bad things quicker. And then we got one that understood what we were talking about, Jim Green, and—but he didn’t have the—the clout. He—he knew—he—he moved it along pretty well and then in ’89, they appointed Art Story, and he really changed it around.
DT: What sort of changes did he and Mr. Green make?
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TH: Opened it up more to the public, let us have meetings and bring in people to talk. They understood that maybe there was some reason that Mother Nature had put trees and things along rivers. And that just maybe it was going to flood anyway, and that maybe it would be smarter to stay out of the way of the flood instead of trying to change the rivers and trying to change nature to suit us. To maybe look—think Nature had a reason for doing some of the things she did. They also could look at Bray’s Bayou, which was out of its banks frequently already. White Oaks, flooding. But they were still—they were still ruining the tributaries that ran into them, they were straightening and stripping them.
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They didn’t have the money to concrete them. There’s not a lot of knowledge around, really, about hydrology and about erosion control. And that No Adverse Impact, new push by the Association of Flood Plain Managers, I’m on that foundation, is what I’m going to devote any last gasps I have toward sanity towards the No Adverse Impact. Because you can still do anything you want to along the bank of a river, at least in Houston, and I don’t, I don’t even think Austin has many strictures on this.
DT: Explain what you mean by No Adverse Impact. (misc)
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TH: No, Adverse Impact. You can come in and rip rap your property and force the water over on mine and you’re adversely impacting me. And there’s nothing to stop you; there’s no regulation that said Thou Shall Not Hurt Thy Neighbor. No Adverse Impact. And so I’m—I’m pushing that concept now, that’s—that’s what I’m going to be working on because it’s a—it’s a big gap.
(misc)
DT: Could you talk about some of the other ideas that you’ve been promoting and studying, some of the bio remediation ideas?
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TH: Well, I found some years ago—well to back up. The BPA became a functional group, and we’ve had five Presidents and—George Mitchell. I—I say that the two George’s saved Buffalo Bayou, George Mitchell and George Bush. And George, you know, had an office and buys stamps and stuff, because volunteers never have any money, and we didn’t fundraise. And I—I’d figured it up about five or six years into it, I think we’d only—only a hundred people in Houston had ever given us ten dollars to do anything. We used—we used those poor six men’s offices. I lost my train of thought.
DT: You talked about some of the more sustainable alternatives to straightening and stripping and concrete lining.
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TH: Five of us from the BPA. Thank you. Five of us went to an Erosion Control Conference in Denver. Don Green, and some of the ones you’d know, we all went up there and we listened for three days to various people with erosion co—control devices and there was one that we felt was more applicable to us, Robin Sotir and her bioengineering work. She was from Georgia. She’s a Canadian. She had studied bi—studied erosion control methods in Europe for five or six years. It’s not just a going out there and throwing rip rap around, there’s really—you have to know something about patching rivers. Now she patches erosion. Dave Rosgen corrects rivers. There’s a big difference in his hydrology courses that he teaches. We came back thinking that she had
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more to offer, because see, we don’t have a lot of stone down there and we have to kind of work with what we have to go with and what she works with is native plant materials, roots. And she comes in and puts a toe in of some significance, depending on the problem, and then she works up the bank, you know, tiers it up. And, plants—in our area, if you had any sun, willows are wonderful. Their—their root systems are twenty feet. And they’re holding. If you look at a native stream somewhere, you see a lot of stuff
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along the—on the banks. Look at Clear Creek even, right there. It’s still a fairly well unmolested stream. And, to strip away the holding material and place it with concrete and rip rap is stupid. It’s expensive, it doesn’t work, doesn’t solve anything, it’s stupid. But that’s what they were doing. And we were saying let nature do what nature wants to do. And, but you have to help her along when you’ve stripped everything away, or No—es—No Adverse Impact. When you’re neighbor’s done something stupid and your bank falls in. His is going to if he’s put in a bunch of rip rap; it doesn’t work; it’s stupid. But, we came back and—and the Garden Club had her over, and she got five—five, I think, contracts in Houston. They were all from women that had heard her at garden clubs. We brought her over to BPA, you know, brought her—we had several—many erosion
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control meetings and invited people. We did a lot. And through the CEC, after it got going, we had one huge land use planning conference. We had over four thousand volunteer man-hours putting that thing on. This was way back; this was in the 70’s. We were saying, stay out of the flood plain. Let nature alone. Plant more material; don’t rip out the material. And that was before we were having all the big to-do about trees and—and air pollution control. We didn’t have the figures on how much they absorb. We didn’t even have the figures on how much trees absorb water; fifty percent of the—a rainfall is taken up by forest, by leaves. People don’t realize that either. It’s still hard for me to believe, I see it running off the leaves, but they’re absorbing it. And that’s—that’s a figure that’s somewhat credible. So anyway we’re doing a lot of things wrong. We didn’t
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stay out of the way of the flood plain; we were trying to manage nature. And the real estate company wanted to be able to build in the flood plain, heck, they wanted to build in the flood way. They were cantilevering stuff over there. You’ve seen some of them. If you stop to think about it, if you go across Voss and look over to the left when you’re heading west on Voss. Think—that church has got old folk’s homes cantilevered out over the bayou on big pilings. Stupid.
DT: Do you have any thoughts about why people who work in, for all purposes, with nature? Why a well-developing hydraulic engineer would want to correct a stream, or why developers would build in the flood way when they knew that eventually these solutions weren’t going to work?
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TH: Well, I don’t think developers care. They want to develop and move on and sell the house to somebody. I don’t think they are particularly evil. I think it’s just kind of ignorant. I don’t think we had strong hydraulic engineers. I really think that looking at the natural form of rivers, this is a mistake we all make, we think because we have discovered something, it’s—it’s new. It may have been discovered over and over before us, but for us, it’s new and—and didn’t seem to have been discovered with enough, in America, with enough objectivity to be used. I don’t think we’re a real smart species in the first place. We’re busy, we don’t live very long, we don’t live in the same place very
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long to answer your question, to observe what’s going on. I remember, I’m from Fort Worth, and I remember there’s a low-lying area up there where it drops off down towards Trinity River. And I remember, I had a friend that lived kind of down there; it’s in the meadow—it’s in the section down towards town. And Papa happened to be with me and he looked down there and saw all these houses and he said, why are they building down there? The area floods all the time. And he was maybe in his 80’s or 90’s, and he knew that that whole area was flooding. And it did, and they eventually channelized the Trinity. And all they had to do was stay out of the blanking fields that are right next to the river and let the river absorb—you see, when—when water flows over vegetation, it helps cleanse it. Sediment drops out. I learned from taking Rosgen’s courses that—that the river moves its bed load faster if it’s narrower and turning than it does if it’s wide and flat. If it’s wide and flat, it doesn’t go very fast, it just kind of meanders around. But, narrow, whew, if you want to get rid of water, leave it alone. Let it—let the river remove its bed load.
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DT: You mentioned that up in Fort Worth, people were building in the flood way and ultimately, they had to channelize it. I guess one of the other options that people are starting to take, I understand they are doing it in Clear Creek’s watershed, is buying out the homes. Is that an option that you are interested in?
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TH: Oh, yeah. Oh, extremely. Buyout program. Art Story started that. That’s one of the things he innovated there, I don’t think they ever had any buyouts before that. They may have had something fall into their laps but they weren’t working on it. And, he changed—he changed the—the Flood Control District a lot. It’s hard to move a big agency, you know, to make an impact. But, he did, and he—he cut down tremendously on the amount of people that were working there and he got rid of—he said they had enough equipment to invade Mexico, most of it rusting in a field somewhere. That wasn’t working. That’s my impression, he didn’t say that. And he got rid of all that and privatized when he needed it, you know, got somebody in with
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good equipment that worked to do the job instead of trying to have all these people on the payroll. And streamlined it and he—he’s tough, he’s—he’s a former Corps person himself, and he has a—he has a degree from Rice in literature, English, which most people don’t realize. And then he said he had a moment of reality and went into engineering. And because of this he has—has a breadth of vision, I think a—a general degree gives you that to some extent. And he was able to use all of his skills, and he’s very eloquent, to change the direction, and also, he’s tough enough that commissioners respected him. And he does not speak with forked tongue, and he is—he’s very, very careful about accepting any benefits from anything. He leans over backwards; he pays his own way to lunch if he has to go to them, and all those—created a respect for
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his integrity and his sense; he’s smart. So, he was able to do a good job there with changing Flood Control, and of course, the county’s recognized this and moved him down to Infrastructure which is Public Works for the county. So that’s what he’s doing now. Back at the Corps level, I was fortunate enough, because Jake was a member of something called PIANC – Permanent International Navigation Congress, and it was the Corps of Engineers of the world. They had different titles and different companies—countries, but that’s who they were. They were people who were messing around with whoever was in navigation and ports and they met once a year, all over, everywhere. And our delegation was—had to support itself. It didn’t have government money, but the head of the—the head of our delegation was always the head of the Corps and because of this, and our delegation would only be ten or twelve people,
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and once a year, you’d bundle up with the head of the Corps, and they generally were head of the Corps for three or four years, and you got to be real buddy-buddy with these people. And they were smart, and I would think, oh, my God, we got the Galveston district and here you are—and particularly, one of them General Jack Morris, we just became good friends with these people. I admire brains, if anybody’s smart, I just try to hole up to them, I think maybe some of it will shed. I said, Jack, send us a young you, he came from the Omaha district, and somehow the Omaha district seems to be ahead of things pretty much. And so he called, one day I was up there at a meeting of some sort, and he said, Come on over, I want you to meet somebody. And there was this very correct young officer standing there, very proper, and he said, I want you to meet Colonel
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Jon Vanden Bosch. And, he said, Jon, you’re going to meet a lot of weird people down there. You might as well meet this one and get it over with right now, you know, so. Anyway, he sat John down, and he said, you’re going to like him, Terry. He’s smart, he’s honest, and you’re going to like him. So people were always saying it was hard to get a hold of a Corps Colonel and I never had any trouble, I’d call down there, I’d talk to him. Jon—we became close friends over the years, too. And, later on in years, I said, you know, something about that and John just roared. He said, Terry, he said, you knew the general, anytime you called I took your call immediately. And I thought he was just open to the public. Anyway, he retired after he did—he was great at Corps, he was the only Corps colonel that the Citizens Who Care asked the court to give him another
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tour of duty. And the Corps wrote back and said, well, we don’t do that, but nobody ever asked before. And so he retired and stayed in Houston with a—with an engineering company and then Kathy Whitmire finally talked him into coming in to be Public Director—Public Works for Houston. And he, I think he promised four years and gave them five, or is it five years and gave them six. But he said he had to walk down the hall to the elevator after he retired, that they tore up everything he’d put together. And then he went on about his business and did a lot of good things, and Lee Brown has just talked him out of retirement, you see, to come back to take over Public Works, which you know, in Houston, is in pretty dismal state. So, I don’t know, I’m very fond of Jon, we’ve been friends over the years, and I said he’s either the bravest man, or strong degree of ought, that he ought to come back and try to fix it again.
DT: I understand that one of the reasons you thought you ought to get involved in (inaudible) management (inaudible) in a state like Texas that doesn’t have a lot of public land.
TH: Mmm-hmm.
DT: That with some of the little open space that we have, I was wondering could you talk about your work with Park People and the National Parks and Recreation Association on their efforts to try to get some open space set aside for habitat or recreation or whatever?
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TH: Well, I became aware, of course, with the bayous that the way we’re losing a—a lot of land with great potential for recreation and habitat and critters and canoeing and fishing and all these good things. Rivers can be an icebox running through the community, I mean, there are all sorts of things that can live in them that people can fish and eat, you know, its—to ignore all of that was pretty silly. I just—I mentioned that the—the BPA was accused of being communist because we wanted to tell people what to do with their land. We realized that we had an image problem then and that we needed to do something else so, indirectly that was one of the reason we started the Park People.
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The parks are nice, people like to talk about parks and they didn’t call parks communistic, except unless you’re a west Texas rancher, I think they think parks are communistic. But, that’s why that started. See the progression came along, first the BPA, and then the Citizens Who Care started the CEC, and then that gave a nucleus for groups that were forming, to be able to—well, if you were doing something, I didn’t have to do it. And if you were having Socrates over at your meeting, I didn’t have to have him the next night. This also took a burden off the elected officials because they were being asked to talk to everybody all the time, and so they could say, well, I’m speaking over here, go hear me over there. That helped, and we started—we had four missions. We wanted—we wanted a list of who was doing what, and where they were meeting and when. We wanted a monthly newsletter saying the same thing, what groups were having
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what on the agenda and where they were and what they could do. And—and the idea was to do a bio of each group each month, so to tell them. And three, we tried to find a common meeting site, which is kind of the Richmond area now, you know, there are four or five groups in there, but we never really got it big enough. And the fourth, which we’ve never obtained and it’s a shame, is a—a library and a place to store records and archival material of all these groups. See some of them now have been there forty years. And if you have a clean deck President, all the records go, you know. And especially if you don’t have an office, if you’re moving around and year-by-year the stuff gets bigger and the new volunteer President doesn’t have the room for it, and you know. We need that still and—and we haven’t achieved that at all. From that, we morphed into parks, we started the Park People for a couple of reasons. Chris Delaporte had poured a lot of
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money—he was the Undersecretary of Interior for—for Open Space, for parks. And he poured a lot of money into our area and with very little recognition that this was government money coming in, and he decided if he opened up a—a—a—a community office somewhere, he was going to experiment and he was thinking about either Houston or Newark. And I knew him because at that point I was on the NRPA board, and so I’d got to knew him—National Recreation Parks Association Board. And, make a long story short, we did convince him to come to Houston and one of the ways he said—he came down and looked over the political scene and thought it was pretty dim. And he said, well, if you had a strong citizen’s group, maybe I would consider it, so we started the Park People, and about three weeks before Christmas. It was nip and tuck because he said he’d come down and he was going to make his decision in January and if you ever saw
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more people jerked into a park mode fast. But the HGAC was very helpful. There was a guy over there named Steve and—Steven Brooks, and he was great. He acted as our unofficial secretary and set the meetings up and everything and so we had this meeting on like about the 22nd of December. And, I mean, Mike Stude was even up there on the board, and we got Delaporte down to, you know, talk to us and we got some heavy hitters that said, yes, they thought this was a good idea. And there were quite a few people there and there were a couple of Hispanics on the back row. I was really glad to see them because that community is…So we all made our pitch and Delaporte went away and eventually did open the office there, but that evening when I went back and said thank you for coming. They just sort of looked at me blankly and I discovered that they were a couple of crews that somebody—they didn’t even speak English, but they’d been brought in by somebody to fill the room. There were about 20 or 25 of them; half the Hispanics in the back row didn’t understand a word of what they’d said. I love that. But, Delaporte
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wanted all of us to represent the—the—the state, the city, the county, and the citizens. And, the governor held up six months to even appointing anybody. He was supposed to have two appointments and the two people he appointed never came. The city worked hard at it. See we did the Green Ribbon Report, that was the result of that effort.
DT: Which showed…
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TH: Showed where we needed—oh, and Vanden Bosch, this in interesting, I’d forgotten this. Vanden Bosch, at that point was in between, he had left the Corps—hadn’t gone for Public Works yet, he was there and I was chair of the committee that was supposed to identify where parks were. Now you would think that maybe the park department might know where the parks were. And the county had no map of where its parks were because they were all in the individual commissioner, the county commissioners’ precincts. They knew where their parks were, but nobody else did. Or when they were open, or what was in them. There was no—no coordination. And I looked at that and realized that
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was something I absolutely with all the intentions in the world, couldn’t do. But my role, really, has been kind of catalyst, trying to get people who ought to be doing things—ought again—to do the things that ought to be done, and get them together and work, that’s, you know, what I do. You don’t have to know everything yourself. You can ask questions. But you have to respect smart people and go find them. And say, hey, this is—people don’t mind doing what they do well. And you ask—you ask a person that has these aptitudes to do this sort of thing and it’s hard. You ask him to do things that are in his aptitude and he’ll say, oh, sure, I’ll work it in, you know. So anyway, I went to Vanden Bosch on that and I said, I need to know where the parks are, and he said, I’m busy. And I said, I know you are, but you can do this. I said, Hey—you took troops
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through Vietnam, you can find out where the parks are in Harris County. And he laughed and said, all right, he did it. He was the first one that identified where all the parks were, put them on a piece of paper and handed it to them and said, here. Great guy. He’s Public Works now. Anyway, so we did that. Did the Green Ribbon report, which, for the first time, identified what parks we had, how big they were, where they needed to be. Do you need more neighborhood ones here? Do we need another regional one here? We did it. And they’re doing a couple more big studies now, but it’s pretty much—pretty much what we said back then. So, the Park People came as a result of that and they stayed and they have been a very, very—over the years, very, very helpful group in pushing the acquisition of open space and better utilization of what we have. And I remember Glenda
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Barrett was, at that point, was vice-President of the League of Women Voters, and was supposed to be President. And I said, hey, I—I need you to come and be secretary. And she said, I’m busy, and I says, this won’t take much of your time. Twenty years later, she was President—she was Secretary, Vice-President, President, Chairman Of The Board, and yyou don’t have any money to pay anybody in an office peanuts for what they’re doing. It’s all volunteerism, we call it—call it. Well, anyway, volunteerism even—even—even if you’re getting your car fare going to and from, and somebody had just resigned again, and Glenda and I looked at each other and said, what are we going to do, and she said, oh, I’m down here all the time anyway, I might as well be the
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Executive Director. And that’s how she came in. So, she did it all those years, and done a wonderful job of building that organization, and it’s done a lot to help push the need for acquisition. All right. The most important thing we need, of course, is population control. That’s absolutely the—without pulling our numbers back, we’re sinking the planet. And so, when you’re talking about saving open space and critters, it’s very desperately needed.
DT: Is this something you worked on through Planned Parenthood?
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TH: Well, I was on the board of Planned Parenthood and I—its—you kind of go from board to board and, you know, but I think that’s the most important thing we have is—is population control. Because without it, we’re just going down the tube.
DT: So what’s the threat that you see? Is it near term, long term, which part of the world?
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TH: Well, talk to—back to Dr. Jared Diamond who wrote Guns, Germs, and Steel. I recommend it highly to you and he—he’s looking at us, once we came and where we went and why we’re here, it’s very readable, very readable. And he so—sort of bases it on geology. He came up to the—when we came out of Africa to the present circle and then we came across—it was the same general topography and climate. We followed the climate. And they asked him—and the end of—he laughed when he talked to Rice and he said he had to digest history into 420 pages, and now he had to do it in 42 minutes. And
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at the end of the lecture, a young person got up and asked him, Dr. Diamond, can you take one more question? Where do you think we will be in 5000 or 50,000 years, and Diamond looked at him and said, young man, we’re lucky if we have 50. And the room was silent. And I think he’s right.
DT: What happens because…
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TH: I think we’re on a downhill trend, slide. Most wars have been resource wars, somebody needs something that you’ve got over there, they cloak them in religion. It’s easy to say, By God, your God’s a bad guy and I’m going to go over and knock him in the head and you believe my God and, you know, so they go marching forth. We’re about using up the resources. Now there’s another little problem we have, you gentlemen. The homo sapiens male is warlike: he’s testy; he fights; he’s always fought. We needed you all to be fighting when we were at the head of the cave and we had babies that are young a long time and need protection. They’re not like the little deer that hit the ground
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running, you know, somebody’s got to fend off the tiger for a couple of years. So that trait that was needed in the homo sapiens male is not so needed now. And we are fighting all over the place; you know, shoot an arrow and there’s a war going on. We didn’t know about it because we didn’t have the New York Times telling us about it. We knew we were fighting with our next-door neighbors. It’s not a very happy prognosis.
DT: On the flip side, women seem to have different instincts. Instincts of nurturing and instincts of volunteerism, and I was wondering if you can speculate about why the women, including yourself, have been involved in some of the conservation work?
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TH: Well, I think you said it yourself that women are nurturing because—not through great intelligence, but because of instincts. We’re programmed to look after the baby of the world. We fling ourselves in front of the tiger or the train or thing to protect the baby. The men will fling themselves in front of all those things to protect the family too. We’re—they’re protective. But, meanwhile, they like to fight. And, I think the women are lazier or whatever, I don’t know. We don’t like to fight so much. We have had—or maybe it’s over the years, because we’re smaller than you all are. We’ve had to be more circulatory. We can’t just go barreling to the objective,. We have to kind of get there that
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way. I had a psychiatrist once that called it where you had to be like snakes, to get to the same place you all would go that way. I mean, I don’t always think you’re being manipulated at home, but there’s the possibility. You’re bigger than we are. That makes a big difference, friend. If I’m somebody’s size and he punches me in the nose, I can punch him back. If I’m a small woman of five feet and he’s a big man of six feet, there’s not much you can do about it. Think upon that.
DT: Nevertheless, I know that you’ve never been a wallflower, and I was wondering if you could tell about some of the efforts within pretty contentious and large organizations like the Parks and Wildlife Department, where you served on the Commission. And you tried to move some agendas ahead, and I don’t think you had to use bows and arrows or axes or anything to do that, but can you tell me about how you tried to move the Land Trust initiative ahead or conservation easements…
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TH: I was on the Trust for Public Lands board and I learned two things there that it took me a little while to bring back into the lair, but I finally got back. When I was on the Texas Parks and Wildlife board and realized that 94, or 97, or 98%, they use different figures all the time, of how much of the property is privately owned in Texas. And discovered the recalcitrant nature of some of the bigger landowners that just, you know, it’s mine and the rest of you stay away. And there had to be a way, and there wasn’t any budget, particularly, since Parks and Wildlife has to raise its own money to operate, which is pretty silly, too. There had to be some way to protect land if we’re going to—because the
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population is still growing. The parks you’ve got over at Enchanted Rock, if you want to go to the park, you’ve got to park outside and wait for an hour before your car can get it. And yet, we’re not buying any, we had—we—the—the acquisition budget went down from a pittance of $5 million to nothing my second year. And I suddenly remembered conservation easements that—that were being used in other parts of the country, quite happily. Because it’s a total volunteer program, if you want to put a conservation easement on your property, just you an—but you have to have a land trust to—to accept it and monitor it in—for perpetuity. And it was a new concept here, we didn’t have many but we do now. We had—Andy Sansom was wise enough to assign one person from Parks and Wildlife to be the—the keynote person there, so it’s Carolyn Vogel, of Vogel
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Orchards, right over here, her family. And, so that gave—they gave a focus to the movement. And Lee Bass wasn’t very happy about but he finally decided it wasn’t evil so he let us have some land trust meetings around the country, talking about around the state, explaining what the program was. So that has—that’s taken off and that’s done a lot because if people want to preserve their land with whatever method they want, they don’t have to sell it. You don’t have to have public access. You can do whatever you want to. This is sixteen hundred acres, I’m going to say this—if you call this old house a house, I’m going to say only two more houses, one every five hundred acres won’t hurt the critters. No hunting. Did the same thing in the Colorado ranch, no hunting, no timbering.
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You know, pretty well protected, for the future, forever. So that is a way that you can protect land without buying it. And that—the other thing that I brought back from the Trust of Public Land board was the concept of community gardens. I hate grass, I’ve always hated grass, you have to mow it, fertilize it, carry on, it’s just a waste of time. You can have a garden out there and feed yourself. And so we now have over ninety community gardens in Houston. We didn’t have any when we started that program. And little Wendy Kelsey helped to build that. And Dr. Bob Randall, who had worked in the
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backward countries of the world, teaching them how to grow stuff. He’s the—he was a professor at University of Houston and he’s been chair of that. So that’s been a very interesting program to watch grow. A good one, I think.
[Misc.]
DT: I hear that you also were a proponent of the non-game, non-consumptive uses of parks and public lands, as opposed to some of the more hunting and fishing traditions at Parks and Wildlife. Can you talk about that kind of effort?
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TH: Well, I felt that that whole philosophical take was sort of being ignored. It was kind of a good old boy white hunt club. I didn’t know that, it was called Parks and Wildlife, and I like parks and I like wildlife, and I thought, well, I’ll do what I can. Apparently it was a very coveted position. I didn’t know that either. And it was not was—actually the Sierra Club was pushing me and they said, well, you got to write Ann Richards, I knew Ann, but not well. If I’d known her well, I’m sure she never would’ve appointed me because she didn’t know what I thought about hunters, I’m sorry. I’m just—I just don’t like to kill anything. I’m not a Buddhist, but I’ll step over an ant. I—I just don’t like to kill, and certainly not killing for fun. That, to me is sick. But, anyway, enough of that stuff. When I said so at my first meeting, it was kind of tempestuous. But, anyway. It was
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genuine bewilderment. I sat through twenty-three items—agenda items on hunting and the twenty-fourth was to join up with another group that was going to start another hunting—se—series of hunting awards for the oldest person that could totter out there, the youngest person who could pick up a gun, I mean it was the weirdest thing, and I thought, what? And said so. It was at that San Antonio group. Anyway. I—I just personally don’t like to kill anything. It’s taken me a long time to kind of back into—to not eating meat when we have two cattle ranches. That’s hard to explain. But, uh, I just—I’m a guilty carnivore. I love meat.
DT: Would you call yourself an environmentalist? I understand that you find that term a little bit odd.
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TH: Well, it’s a term that’s been overworked to where it doesn’t have much meaning. At the—at the Water Conference yesterday, they were quoting some polls that were being taken and I don’t know what the audience was of the polls but they were quoting it. But on the front page, they a—asked if people were environmentalists and 83% said no, and over a few pages, they asked if they cared about the natural systems and 75% said yes. What’s in a name? I think the en—I think everybody has some concern for the environment in its purest term. I mean, we care about the weather, and the growing things, and critters to some extent. I think conservationist is a better term.
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Environmentalist got to be kind of like communism was after the war. You were communist if you told people to stay out of the flood plain. You’re a feminist if you wear a bra or don’t wear a bra, I’ve forgotten which it is. And some terms just get overused and so let’s go find another one. So right now, people are using conservationist more. But I think—I think anybody that’s got any sense has got to care something for the natural world. Because it supports us.
[End of Reel 2188]
DT: Terry, we’ve talked about your contributions of time to many non-profit groups, but you and your late, wonderful husband, Jake Hershey, ran and continue to run the Jacob and Terry, Terese Hershey Foundation. I was wondering about your experiences in running that foundation, in large part to help small environmental groups.
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TH: Well, Jake started that. He had the Foundation a couple years before I ever kn—even knew he had it. And it was just called the Hershey Foundation then, and he finally got smart when we got a little bigger and more people in and realized that people, you know, got it mixed up with the chocolate company and the Hershey Foundation is the chocolate company. So that’s when he changed the name, again, with no input from me. He did—Jake just did things. But, he—we realized that since we are, at this point, a—a small family foundation. We don’t have large amounts of money to give away. So, we did two things. We tried to narrow our mission statement to the things that we felt were most important, because there’s so much out there that needs doing. And so many worthy
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causes and problems. And so we—we narrowed the mission statement down, and then we sort of put a cap on what we could give, so that we could spread it around. And doing that made us able to give seed money to things, we’ll buy stamp money when some would want projects and we would prefer infrastructure to get groups going, to help them. It’s those first few years sometimes with a group that is so hard to—to get going. They have a great idea, and they don’t really know, kind of, how to move it on and they eventually have to hire somebody and—if you can help them over the humps. And then, as to the mission statement: we pulled it down to, first is planned—population control. And then, habitat for people and critters and winged things and caretakers thereof. And education of the young into the problems of the ecosystem. And we eliminated some things like health, because every disease has its need and quite a few things we just, sort of,
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eliminated, but the education takes in a lot. And so those—those are the things that we give to, and we now have seven board members and—and they’re all very dedicated. And, incidentally, our newest board member, our—ma—Jake’s grandson, Jeffrey came on last year. He runs a park in Austin. And one of our newest ones, Lorraine Butcher, died last—several months ago, and she had been Jake’s longtime secretary, helped him set it up, and our newest board member is Art Story. I thought that might get your attention. I said, Art, you’re really sure you want to do this, after they moved him up to Infrastructure, we’d talked to him about it, and he said, yes, he says, I think it would be good for both of us. So…
[Misc.]
DT: Can you give me some examples of some of the groups that you’ve supported and maybe tell us a little bit about why you thought they were important?
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TH: Well, the things we’ve mentioned, and we support that wonderful lady out in Burney who takes in all the—the big critters that, you know, Lynne Cuny, yeah? And, very supportive of Texas EGG. That’s what you and, I think, Ann [Hamilton] have pushed. That’s Texas Environmental Grantmakers, spells EGG. We hope it will hatch into something. And, that’s—that’s a good group because I think the group—the foundations that are coming are growing. It started out just three or four came and now we seem to have ten or twelve represented at most of the meetings, try to have two or three around the state; I think that’s very important. Yes, it is true that—that things of a natural resource basis have not had the support that some of the other things—I think churches, most church groups are the most heavily supported. That’s I believe it’s right. Technological
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things, medical things, big money there. All of us are going to get sick and die of something and we get very solicitous about our parents or we, somebody’s dying so you want to give money to help cure something. So that’s sort of understandable. I understand the religion part of it. We’re very concerned about who we are, and why we’re here and what we’re supposed to be doing about ourselves. And, my major was philosophy, so many of my best friends have been dead for several hundred years, and it’s a—you know, I had a lot of good conversations, but they couldn’t answer back. I think Aristotle. I think he took a hemlock because he looked at the world and thought, to hell with it. Frankly, you know, he had exile or death. He talked a good game, through some of the same problems that we have today and you to a point where you sort of think, I’ve done my best; now move on. Philosophy is an interesting major. As I say, you visit with great minds, and I think my role mostly has been that of a catalyst. You don’t have to know
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everything if you know somebody that knows it. And you know somebody over here that needs the knowledge. You put them together and you think, I’ve done something good.
DT: Well, I guess philosophy takes the long view, and I was wondering if you could look in your crystal ball and look into the future and think, what are some of our big conservation challenges that you think we face?
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TH: Well, past population, which I keep mentioning, is water. I think, water is the—the biggest problem, because there’s no more of it. Recycles around, but where it goes and who’s using it is going to be a big problem. And I think somehow—you hear a lot about it suddenly, so everybody’s kind of waking up to it, I think. It’s—I shouldn’t say everybody because I think very few people really—everybody’s so busy. There’s only one common denominator, and that’s twenty-four hours a day. Nobody’s figured out how to get any more. And so it’s what you do with it. And I think, when I was in school now, you—you know, you stayed in school six or seven hours a day and then you went home. And everything I was learning was important. All right, you all that are in school are
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learning twice that much, but you’re still learning it in six or seven hours a day. And they take athletics out and then they put them back because we’re obese and—and so there—there’s—that’s another couple of hours of your… I hated gym. You waste so much time going down there and changing all those little clothes, sitting around and waiting for someone to throw a ball at you. I don’t know. Time. There’s more to learn and the same amount of time to learn it in. And I don’t know. It’s your all’s world and I don’t know how you’re handling it. Are you piece-mealing it down so that you become sort of an authority in this, and then you don’t know about all these other things? You don’t know
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about all the problems? When’s the time to read? I go to bed at night—I tell you how I’m going to get killed. It’s the stack of books on the bed beside me is one day going to fall over and crush me. Because I think if I get them that far, you know, maybe I’ll read a little of them before the morph gets me. And so they just rise, because the curiosity is greater than time. What are you all doing about time?
(misc)
DT: You talked about school. What do you think a message might be that teachers might tell their students, or parents might tell their kids to get a younger generation interested in the things that have taken so much of your time and energy?
9:32 – 2189
TH: It’s really hard with our urbanizing population to connect youth, I think, with the ecosystems. They don’t know where that slab of meat wrapped up in a grocery store came from. They don’t see the lambie. They don’t know that pigs are probably smarter than we are, they just don’t have hands, they don’t have the opposing thumb. And don’t get me started on the opposing thumb. That will take another tape. We thought we had big brains. What we have is an opposing thumb. When you all leave, try to—try to do anything in life without your thumb. You can’t even pick up a glass of wine without
10:10 – 2189
spilling it on yourself. It’s not the brain; it’s the opposing thumb. And only the primates have it. And on that subject, I will leave you another note. There’s only one primate that doesn’t fight. Do you know about that primate, the closest one to us in the DNA? They used to call it the small chimpanzee. It’s called a Bonobo and it lives in Zaire, and unfortunately, the bush trade is eating it. They’re eating gorillas and everything else, too. But the Bonobo does not fight. It is the only primate species where the female is as big as the male. And on that note, I think I should bid you all goodbye.
DT: Well, thank you very much, I appreciate your time.
TH: And go read about the Bonobos. They’re fascinating.
11:02 – 2189
[End of Reel 2189]
[End of Interview with Terry Hershey]