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1965–1994
The Zoo Mobile: The zoo's founding mission — children and animals — left the grounds early. In 1969, Director Earl Wells established the Zoo Mobile program, which, in the city's Franke Park history's words, "visited every third-grade classroom in Allen County." A travelling menagerie in the sanctuary's 1955 circus-wagon line, now systematized: every third-grader in the county, every year, met the zoo's animals in school. The zoo's life in the city's classrooms is told in full in the school-life entry below; the mechanism begins here, four years after opening.
The first expansion: In 1976 the zoo made its first major expansion, the African Veldt, where savanna animals grazed in open fields east of the Central Zoo. The Veldt was the zoo's big-animal ground for thirty-three years — the setting the 1996 film In the Company of Men used when it shot at the zoo, as the Film section of this record tells — until the African Journey replaced it on the same ground in 2009.
The zoo at seventeen: The city's history preserves a census of the young institution. By 1982 there were about 550 animals in the zoo, with 12 permanent staff and 50 seasonal workers, and nearly 100 volunteers helping where needed. From eighteen exhibits and five and a half acres in 1965, the zoo had become a mid-sized American zoo with a volunteer corps nearly as large as its paid staff — the community-built character of the founding, carried into operations.
Sources:
- City of Fort Wayne Parks & Recreation Department, "Franke Park History" (the 1969 Zoo Mobile visiting every Allen County third-grade classroom; the 1982 census of animals, staff and volunteers), cityoffortwayne.in.gov.
- Fort Wayne Zoo, published history (the 1976 African Veldt expansion, savanna animals east of the Central Zoo), as carried in the zoo's history record.