Paging Through Memories

I was going through some old boxes at work yesterday, mostly full of moldering old papers, when a sudden flash of color caught my eye.  Digging into the box, I pulled out first one, then a handful of short, glossy magazines.  Before I even turned the one of top around so I could see the cover, I knew what they would be - Zoobooks, an educational kids magazine that was published starting in the 1980s.  I shouldn't have been surprised to find a few tucked away in here.  Zoobooks weren't just a defining feature of my childhood - they were a feature of the childhood of almost every zookeeper of my generation that I know.

Nor was it just Zoobooks.  There was also its fellow kid's magazine, Ranger Rick, published by the National Wildlife Federation (which later took over Zoobooks as well).  I loved Ranger Rick as a kid, with its combination of articles, photos, games, and educational stories focused around the namesake Rick, an anthropomorphic raccoon who always wore a park ranger hat.  I outgrew it (or at least thought I'd outgrown it) at some point in elementary school or middle school, and had barely thought about it since... until I watched Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy a few years ago, and Chris Pratt's Peter Quill derisively referred to Rocket as "Ranger Rick."  Memories came flooding back.

Nor were all of the animal memories in print.  The other day, I found myself humming a song, but was unable to remember what the words were - or where it even came from.  Days later, it came crashing back.  It was an educational song from a TV program called Really Wild Animals, narrated by Dudley Moore.  Each episode usually had four or five songs - some quite catchy, it would seem - to help illustrate the messages of the show.  It was sort of a stepping stone between Walt Disney and David Attenborough.

I was visiting with some younger relations when I was startled to hear them mention the name "Kratt" - as in, Chris and Martin, the Kratt Brothers.  When I was a kid, I loved watched Kratt's Creatures, followed by its successor, Zooboomafoo (which, if nothing else, is responsible for many people being able to recognize a sifaka, the show's mascot).  The Kratts were basically Steve Irwin for kids.  They themselves are getting a bit on the older side now, and I was amused but not too surprised to see that most of their televised shenanigan's are in animated form these days.  I did, however, get to fill like a little of a bigshot when I was able to tell the kids that not only had I watched their (earlier) shows growing up, but I'd met them too, when they visited my zoo twenty years or so ago.

I don't think it's so much that I owe my love of animals to the Kratts, or Zoobooks, or any of the other media of my childhood.  I think I was drawn to them because I already loved animals.  What these magazines and programs did, however, was encourage that love, show me that I wasn't alone in it, and encourage me to dive deeper and learn more.  The holiday seasons are coming up, so if you've got a young animal lover in your family, there's all sorts of fun and educational resources that you can get to help fan that spark to encourage that passion (and if they aren't into animals, find what they do have a passion for, and focus on that... and then try to switch them over to animals).

As for me, I'm going to see if I can finish up with work a little on the early side today, and then maybe plop down on a haybale somewhere... I'm pretty sure at least a few of these Zoobooks are issues I didn't have growing up.