Theodore M.
isolated ecosystem staying the way it was when the Gatun Lake was filled when
the Panama Canal was built. There are many different species of bats, mostly
fruit bats, living on the island. She worked there for the better part of a year,
helping with a research project which has gone on for some years under the
direction of the curator of mammals at the Smithsonian. She loved that work.
And the job fit her perfectly because she is a night person. They started work
at 4, 00 P.M., went out and collected some bats with nets and analyzed them,
recording species, size, what they had been eating. I think she even identified
a new species. She is an expert on bats.
At the end of a year, she came back and worked at the Animal Welfare League
of Arlington. It was very difficult for her because she had to make decisions
as to which animals to put down-unwanted dogs and cats-and this hurt her.
So when she got a chance to go back to the
Colorado Island, she did. She
left the animal shelter and went back to the Canal Zone for the Smithsonian for
another year.
Since then she has her own business under the name Wildlife Matters. She
helps people, homeowners and condominium livers, cope with bats, raccoons,
possums, and any of the other wild animals that sometime disrupt suburban
life. She puts caps on chimneys to keep out raccoons and all kinds of things
like that. It's a small business and she is the sole proprietor, which made it
possible for her to take six weeks to go back to Panama to help the Smithsonian
with an inventory of the biota on two little islands on the Caribbean side of the
upper end of the country of Panama. That's where she is now.
Are either of your daughters married?
The elder daughter is married and no children. She was married to a young
man and the marriage broke up after nine years, and now she's married again,
just since September. Anyway, they've been supportive.
Now going back to my wife, Kay, four years ago she was diagnosed as having
a brain tumor. It was operated on and it became obvious that it had developed
over a long period of years because it was calcified. Her doctors thought she
would be all right, that the cancer was eliminated by the removal of the tumor,
and that they didn't even need to do radiation. They probably should have done
the radiation because the tumor came back. She had the radiation which kept
it under control for a while, and we've had several good years. But eventually
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