In a 1995 Vanity Fair profile, Gingrich told how he had been a solitary child, filling his time by collecting lizards, fossils and snakes. (His second wife, Marianne, apparently picked up on this early interest, buying him an emerald tree boa that the couple housed in the bathtub.)
As a child, he devoured books about famous zoo directors, including the Bronx Zoo’s Raymond Ditmars and National Zoo visionary William Temple Hornaday, whose credits also include saving the American bison from extinction.
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GOP presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich on Thursday said that being the Republican "attack dog" is not an asset.
Gingrich once dreamed of being a zookeeper or a vertebrate paleontologist, he has said in interviews, perhaps presaging the T. rex skull that would one day grace his speaker’s office.
While in Congress, Gingrich helped Zoo Atlanta acquire a black rhino he named Boma, after former Georgia congressman Howard “Bo” Callaway, a political mentor.
And after resigning from Congress, as he pondered his next steps, Gingrich stipulated to his advisers that he must not be robbed of time to indulge in his favorite hobbies — reading, learning and visiting zoos.
Zoos are such a part of Gingrich’s thinking, he recently reached for a zoo metaphor in criticizing the Obama administration.
“It would be like taking your child to the zoo and explaining that a lion is a bunny rabbit, and [it] was really okay to get in the cage and play with the bunny rabbit, and then you were shocked that the lion ate the . . . your . . . I mean, that’s how far out of touch with reality the Obama administration is,” he said in an interview with the Jewish Channel.
The idea to open a zoo in his childhood home of Harrisburg struck the young Gingrich after an afternoon matinee of two animal films, he wrote in “America’s Best Zoos.” As he left the theater, he saw a sign for City Hall, walked through the front door and asked how to go about the task. A park official, who happened to be an old flame of his grandmother’s, explained that there had been a zoo previously but it was closed because of rationing during World War II.
The old man suggested that he take his case to the city council. Gingrich’s effort ultimately failed to get the city a zoo but managed to launch a successful career in politics.
Staff researcher Lucy Shackelford contributed to this report.
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