I was photographing these cuddling siamangs on January 9th when Bob Westfall arrived to order me out of the zoo for taking pictures
On January 23rd the San Francisco Chronicle ran a story about my experience at Oakland Zoo written by Phillip Matier and Andrew Ross. Entitled "Oakland Zoo Bounces UOP Professor and Camera," the article is available online at: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/01/23/BAAFUJRFA.DTL
Here's how it came about: Though I wrote to Nancy Filippi, Joel Parrott, and the Mayor of Oakland, nine days after I'd been expelled from the zoo I still hadn't heard a word from any of them. So on January 18th I sent a copy of the letter I'd written to Mayor Ron Dellums to Andy Ross at the Chronicle.
On January 22nd Andy Ross called Joel Parrott to talk to him about my being expelled from Oakland Zoo. The same day the reporter called him, Dr. Parrott sent me an email apologizing for the incident. In an email to zoologist Terry Schulz, who also had written to him about this, Dr. Parrott made it clear that his staff members (Nancy Filippi and Bob Westfall) had misinformed me about there being restrictions on picture-taking by teachers or anyone else at Oakland Zoo. Whew...
I'm grateful to Andy Ross and the San Francisco Chronicle for paving the way towards resolution to this matter.
No comments:
Post a Comment