Regional Oral History Office University of California The Bancroft Library Berkeley, California

Biruté Galdikas THE LEAKEY FOUNDATION ORAL HISTORY PROJECT: BIRUTÉ GALDIKAS

Interviews conducted by Virginia Morell in 2003

Copyright © 2015 by The Regents of the University of California Since 1954 the Regional Oral History Office has been interviewing leading participants in or well-placed witnesses to major events in the development of Northern California, the West, and the nation. Oral History is a method of collecting historical information through tape-recorded interviews between a narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the historical record. The tape recording is transcribed, lightly edited for continuity and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewee. The corrected manuscript is bound with photographs and illustrative materials and placed in The Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, and in other research collections for scholarly use. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account, offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is reflective, partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable.

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All uses of this manuscript are covered by a legal agreement between The Regents of the University of California and Biruté Galdikas dated August 6, 2003. The manuscript is thereby made available for research purposes. All literary rights in the manuscript, including the right to publish, are reserved to The Bancroft Library of the University of California, Berkeley. Excerpts up to 1000 words from this interview may be quoted for publication without seeking permission as long as the use is non-commercial and properly cited.

Requests for permission to quote for publication should be addressed to The Bancroft Library, Head of Public Services, Mail Code 6000, University of California, Berkeley, 94720-6000, and should follow instructions available online at http://bancroft.berkeley.edu/ROHO/collections/cite.html

It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows:

Biruté Galdikas, “The Leakey Foundation Oral History Project: Biruté Galdikas.” conducted by Virginia Morell in 2003, Regional Oral History Office, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 2015.

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Table of Contents—Biruté Galdikas

Interview 1: August 6, 2003

Audio File 1 1

Louis Leakey: “The Darwin of Human Invention” — Louis Leakey at UCLA — Narrator’s early interest in orangutans and Asia — Tom and Barbara Harrisson — Meeting Louis in Westwood —Louis in the news — Passing a test — Women as astute observers — Louis’s temperament and his relationships — Jane Goodall — A problematic film deal — Robert and Leighton Wilkie’s foundation and its support for orangutan research — Louis as “the key to the universe” — Narrator’s commitment to her work — Gombe and Jane Goodall — Inspiration and commitment

Audio File 2 23

Jane’s modesty — Louis as host and inspiring guide in Nairobi — Narrator’s expedition to Indonesia — The challenges of her work with orangutans — Vindication of Louis’s theories — Louis: “Fundamentally African” — Humor, optimism, and struggle — Support for orangutan research — Louis’s belief in women — Alan O’Brien and Edwin S. Munger

Audio File 3 39

Louis’s frugality — The Leakey Foundation — Vanne Goodall — Mary Leakey’s relationship with Louis — Calico — Louis’s relationship with Ruth Simpson — His loyalty to Mary — Mary at Olduvai — Louis’s death and legacy — More about Vanne — Meave’s findings in Chad — Louis’s theories of human origins — Narrator’s husband Rod’s relationship to Louis — Louis’s generosity of spirit

[End of Interview] 1

Interview 1: August 6, 2003 Begin Audio File 1

01-00:00:10 Morrell: Okay. Biruté Galdikas for the Leakey Foundation Centennial Louis Leakey Oral History Project. Welcome Dr. Galdikas.

01-00:00:20 Galdikas: Thank you.

01-00:00:21 Morrell: Usually what I like to do in these interviews is to ask people how they first came to meet, in this case, Louis Leakey. I believe that was your first contact with the Leakeys overall and we really want to focus quite a bit on—

01-00:00:35 Galdikas: Yes, it was.

01-00:00:35 Morrell: On Louis.

01-00:00:36 Galdikas: Yes, it was.

01-00:00:37 Morrell: And so, you could tell me a little bit about how that first meeting came about and what you knew about Louis before you met him, because I think that you had read a little bit about the work that he’d done in initiating studies of primates in the wild?

01-00:00:52 Galdikas: Right, and actually the first that I remember of Louis Leakey is that of course he was—you know, people called him the Darwin of human evolution, that his discoveries really helped change people’s ideas about human evolution, so I had learned—

01-00:01:19 Morrell: Excuse me, but you heard him referred to as that in your classes? The Darwin of human evolution?

01-00:01:24 Galdikas: Oh, I’m not sure.

01-00:01:25 Morrell: That’s the first time I’ve heard that phrase and it’s a wonderful phrase.

01-00:01:28 Galdikas: Well, I’m not sure where I first heard it, but I certainly learned as a graduate student in anthropology, and I was very young, that Louis Leakey had discovered the oldest—they were called men then, but the oldest humans, and that this was a very important person. I remember taking a class taught by

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James [R.] Sackett who was a faculty member at UCLA where I was a graduate student, and I remember him drawing two world views of human evolution and that was the Leakey view and then there was everybody else. [laughter]

And he was a very important personage and—but more than learning about him, in school and university, I had an experience as an undergraduate, or just when I became a graduate student, you know my memory of exact times and dates is getting a little fuzzy as I get older, but I was just a beginning graduate student, and I think I mention this in my book Reflections of Eden, and I was excavating at a place called Grasshopper and we were excavating the remains of a prehi[storic]—

01-00:02:53 Morrell: This is from Arizona? Grasshopper.

01-00:02:54 Galdikas: New Mexico.

01-00:02:55 Morrell: New Mexico.

01-00:02:55 Galdikas: And I was excavating as part of the Grasshopper field school with my partner, with my pit partner, and she mentioned to me that she had written Mary Leakey and that she had actually gotten a reply. She had wanted to join the Leakeys on their excavations and I remember saying to her, “My goodness, famous scientists actually reply!” And she said, “Yes.” So I guess I remember that because you know as we go through life we gather seeds of information and this was a little kernel of information that must have stayed with me and it made an impression on me.

01-00:03:41 Morrell: Of course it would. That they were accessible.

01-00:03:43 Galdikas: That they were accessible and I guess that little kernel of information probably is what propelled me to go up to Louis Leakey after I heard him talk at UCLA.

01-00:03:54 Morrell: And he had come to give a lecture at the university? One of these big auditorium—

01-00:03:59 Galdikas: Right—well what had happened was—

01-00:04:01 Morrell: —lectures that he used to do.

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01-00:04:02 Galdikas: Right. What had happened was that one of my professors, Dr. Berger, I think his name was [Clemens] Rainer Berger, I was taking an archaeological dating methods class with him as a graduate student and he mentioned that he had invited Louis Leakey, who was a friend of his, to come and give a lecture to our class. Well, as it turned out, there was so much interest in this lecture that the lecture was moved to a much larger auditorium and I remember that when I came into the auditorium, the auditorium was absolutely full and I was standing at the back of the auditorium and Rainer Berger saw me and said, “There’s a seat up here.” [chuckling] You know, way in the front and I couldn’t see from the back, so there must have been several hundred people at that lecture.

So the first time I had seen Louis Leakey, he was very charismatic. He actually seemed very accessible because the way he lectured it was clear he was very good natured. And at this lecture he mentioned the fact during the question and answer period that he had helped Jane Goodall start her study of chimpanzees, that he had helped Dian Fossey start her study of mountain gorillas, and I had never heard of Dian Fossey, although of course—I already knew who Jane Goodall was. And when he said that, then I just knew. I mean sometimes you just have such utter certainty and I knew that he was the person who was going to help me get my study of orangutans going. I mean, it was like I knew—100% certainty. And so after the lecture—

01-00:05:59 Morrell: Had you talked to other people about that?

01-00:06:01 Galdikas: Oh yes I had.

01-00:06:02 Morrell: So Rainer, this Dr. Berger, he knew that you were interested in that?

01-00:06:06 Galdikas: You know I don’t know if Rainer Berger knew. He might have. I don’t recall anymore. But I talked to one or two other professors and they were actually very dismissive, you know, one said it was just impossible. It just wasn’t going to happen.

01-00:06:26 Morrell: You had wanted to do it partly because of the stories you had read about Jane’s research? Or what had triggered you—

01-00:06:31 Galdikas: No, it had nothing to do with Jane. What had triggered—I always was interested in orangutans. I mean—I just can’t explain it, I—

01-00:06:41 Morrell: From a zoo experience?

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01-00:06:43 Galdikas: Well, I remember them from zoos, but mainly I remember reading about them and looking at their photographs and wondering about them and I had always been drawn to Asia.

When I was a child, my mother had mentioned that in Lithuania where she grew up that there was a village next to her village where there were, that she sometimes visited, where there were Tartars or Mongols, you know, people from Mongolia who had settled in Lithuania hundreds of years ago and that these people had horses and that they worked with leather and I just always thought that, had this funny idea in my head that I had some Asian heritage. I guess maybe from these stories that my mother told me of this next-door village to hers. And my mother had very dark hair, which is unusual for Lithuanians because they tend to be blond and blue-eyed and my mother had very dark hair. It wasn’t quite black, but it was very dark brown, unusual for a Lithuanian. And I always thought that—

01-00:08:00 Morrell: Somewhere back.

01-00:08:01 Galdikas: Yeah, it was a conviction that I had some connection to Asia. And so I always was interested in Asia. When I was in Grade 11, I had an experience where you were asked to write a poem and the teacher returned the poems. And he didn’t return my poem and I was almost like, almost upset because I thought something had happened to the poem, it had disappeared, or he never read it, or—and it was a poem about Tibet and then what happened is he read it to the class. He said there was one poem in the class that was like head and shoulders above any other poem he’d ever read by a student. And it wasn’t until he started reading it—but I, so I’d always had an interest in Asia, and there was something about orangutans, the Asian Great Ape that spoke to me. It was something in their eyes. Something in the way they looked. I can’t explain it. I even remember the photographs. The first photographs of orangutans that I saw.

01-00:09:13 Morrell: There was something in those photographs that made you want to get to understand those other beings, or—

01-00:09:20 Galdikas: Right, yeah. And I—so I wanted to study orangutans and I had written letters to the Harrissons, to Tom Harrisson, and I later met Barbara Harrisson and she said, through Louis Leakey, and he said, “Oh he probably filed those letters in the circular file,” meaning the garbage.

01-00:09:40 Morrell: These were—Tom Harrisson and Barbara Harrisson just explain who they were so that—people who are reading these interviews will know.

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01-00:09:50 Galdikas: Right. Tom Harrisson was a very, apparently charismatic figure who was sent by the British to help organize the local people to fight against the Japanese.

01-00:10:06 Morrell: This is in Borneo?

01-00:10:08 Galdikas: In North Borneo and what became Sarawak. I think he may have actually been there earlier on an expedition to Sarawak and if I remember correctly, he upset the then White Raja of Sarawak. This is before the Second World War, because he painted his toe nails red. [chuckling] I think he might even have been semi kicked out, but anyways, he, after the war he stayed in Sarawak and he organized the national museums there, because at that time Sarawak was— Sarawak had been a sovereign nation under the British Empire. But after Sarawak became a British colony after the Second World War.

Tom Harrisson stayed, like I said, established the national museums there, and his wife Barbara Harrisson actually became interested in orangutans and had some orangutans and was involved in trying to study them. But you know, just at the level of somebody who’s interested, as opposed to academically, and she wrote a very interesting book which is called Orangutans, and I read this book because is was basically the only book that anybody had written about orangutans. And it was because of this book that I wrote Tom and Barbara Harrisson, but I never received any reply. I wrote the Malaysian government, never received any reply, and I had told some of my professors that I wanted to study orangutans, and they basically thought it was impossible. One of them said to me, he said, “You could be there for three years and not even meet an orangutan.” And these were, you know, people who—

01-00:12:05 Morrell: Zoologists or—

01-00:12:07 Galdikas: Yeah, who were on the anthropology faculty at UCLA. So when I heard Louis Leakey speak and got a feeling for the person, I don’t know, it just hit me. This was the one. This was the key that would unlock the universe. And I was absolutely certain. I just knew. So I waited until the question and answer period was over, and after the crowd that had formed around him all left, dissipated, and basically it was just me, him, and a few other people, and Rainer Berger in the room and I went up to Louis Leakey and I told him that I wanted to study orangutans. And at first he kind of looked at me like, don’t bother me kid. And then I started telling him about the things that I had already done, that I’d written the Harrissons, written the Malaysian government, and then suddenly he got interested.

01-00:13:05 Morrell: Because he heard that you had made a few steps, that you had tried—

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01-00:13:10 Galdikas: That I was for real.

01-00:13:11 Morrell: That you were for real.

01-00:13:12 Galdikas: Yeah. But the feeling that I had was that he recognized me. Just like I had recognized him. It was just this recognition.

01-00:13:19 Morrell: He could see the determination.

01-00:13:21 Galdikas: Yeah. He looked at me. He really looked at me and then he said, he said that he was going back to Africa the next day, but I should absolutely make an effort to keep in touch with him, and I said, “Well, what about your address.” And he said, “No problem, just write me in Africa.” [laughter] It was with utter certainty that the letter would get there and actually, when I went to his office in Nairobi a few years later, there were envelopes pinned to the wall, that—Louis Leakey, Olduvai Gorge, Africa, that actually had gotten to him. So he kind of brushed aside my concern about the address. And then I left the room. And I knew it was a done deal. Even though he hadn’t told me, and it was a done deal.

And then I encountered one of my friends who was another Reiner—Protsch, who was one of Rainer Berger’s students and Reiner Protsch had this bombastic—he was an older man—older, it probably meant he was in his mid-twenties, or late-twenties, but he seemed to be [an] older man, and he was very bombastic, very sure of himself, very—he was one of these people that when—I don’t want to say stereotypic Teutonic type, but he had those characteristics. He was very sure of himself. He was a nice man but he was very sure of himself. And—with reason. He was doing all this radiocarbon dating and he got—he finished his PhD and he got a full professorship in Germany. That’s very impressive. It doesn’t happen very often so he was very bombastic and as soon as I told him he started spreading it, telling everybody, oh, Louis Leakey is going to send Biruté to study orangutans.” And it was so embarrassing, because all I’d done was just say a few words to Louis Leakey!

But then I got home and my mother was all excited. And she was excited because somebody had called and asked her to tell me that I had a meeting with Louis Leakey the next day, and this was at Joan and Arnold Travis’s house, although I didn’t know at the time, and there was an address in Westwood that had been left with my mom and my mom was all excited.

01-00:15:58 Morrell: And they were some of the founders or active members of the Leakey Foundation at that time.

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01-00:16:02 Galdikas: Yes, yes. They were very close to Louis Leakey and that was where Louis Leakey stayed whenever he was—

01-00:16:09 Morrell: At their home.

01-00:16:10 Galdikas: Whenever he was in southern California, so they were almost family to him. They were very close to him and they were one of the original founders of the Leakey Foundation. And I was surprised—the reason I was surprised was because I didn’t even know that my mother knew who Louis Leakey was, but she did! You know, so—

01-00:16:35 Morrell: And was that—she knew him because your family subscribed to National Geographic? Or—

01-00:16:40 Galdikas: No, no. I don’t know where she knew him—I think because she was—

01-00:16:46 Morrell: She paid attention to the news. [laughter]

01-00:16:48 Galdikas: Yeah. She was receptive. She was well read and they certainly, my parents certainly read, subscribed to all kinds of Lithuanian-language publications and the occasional English-language publication.

01-00:17:04 Morrell: That would have been the late sixties? Something like that?

01-00:17:08 Galdikas: Yes. Late sixties.

01-00:17:10 Morrell: They were making regular discoveries at Olduvai Gorge. I think Louis was in the news.

01-00:17:13 Galdikas: News. Quite a bit. So I was surprised and then the next day I did go and see him at Joan and Arnold Travis’s house in Westwood where he was very comfortable because he regarded the Travis’s as family. He had a room that was basically—he stayed in when he was there, guest bedroom, and we talked. And he asked me some questions, and he gave me some quizzes.

01-00:17:44 Morrell: What kind of quizzes?

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01-00:17:45 Galdikas: Well, he gave me two. And one I didn’t quite understand. It had to connect some wells with some houses—you know—and there was some trick to it.

01-00:17:59 Morrell: Right, like the shortest possible way.

01-00:18:01 Galdikas: Yeah, and I think you just went through the wells, or something, and I didn’t quite understand it, so I flunked that one. And so he gave me another one—I had to pass one. And he put a bunch of cards on the table and he said, “Which are which, which are black and which are red.” And all I noticed was that some were slightly bent and some weren’t. I said, “Well, some are bent, some are not, so probably some are red and the others are black.” And he said, “Oh yes,” he said, “You passed the test.” He said Jane and Dian had passed it but then he named some men who hadn’t passed it and I don’t even remember who the men were, and he said, “Women pass it and men don’t.” But you know, the thought occurred to me and maybe I’m—the thought occurred to me that maybe he bent it slightly more for women than he did for men. [chuckling]

01-00:18:55 Morrell: [chuckling] Just to reinforce his theory that women were better observers.

01-00:18:58 Galdikas: Well, I’m not sure, but it was so obvious. You just looked at them and you could tell that half were bent and half weren’t. It wasn’t terribly bent, but you could just tell, you didn’t need to have a microscope and I thought about it because what could explain this great divide?

01-00:19:23 Morrell: In Louis’s big test.

01-00:19:26 Galdikas: In Louis’s big test, because that particular test, was very, it seemed to me very obvious. Now—I don’t know, but that was—I like to think about things and ponder things, so that occurred to me afterwards. So he was—

01-00:19:38 Morrell: That it may have been a slightly biased test, biased in women’s favor.

01-00:19:43 Galdikas: Because it could be. The test with the wells, probably not. I just didn’t understand what he was talking about. Anyway, so—he was very positive and he, but before I left he said, he said, “Well, I’m not saying you’re my candidate for studying orangutans.” He made that very clear. But I knew I was. I knew I was and he told me to again keep in contact with him and what I remember about Louis Leakey, is that he was—you know when I think about it now, I think the African in his soul was that he was very good humored. Did you know Louis Leakey?

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01-00:20:35 Morrell: I didn’t, no.

01-00:20:36 Galdikas: Well, he was very quick to laugh. He just had something about him that even though I’ve read all these things about how dogmatic he was and stubborn he was, but it didn’t jibe totally with the fact that he was very easy to approach. He was very, like you said, accessible. And he was just so good natured. Now again, I don’t know whether it’s because I was a woman, but Rod [Brindamour], my former husband also found that to be true. He was just very accessible. As Rod and I discussed, maybe it was because Rod was short. [chuckling]

01-00:21:32 Morrell: Not a threat.

01-00:21:36 Galdikas: I don’t know, because I noticed that other men who seem to get along really well with Louis, like Glynn Isaac, were also short, I noticed. Because Glynn Isaac had no problems with Louis. So I don’t know.

01-00:21:50 Morrell: That’s an intriguing observation.

01-00:21:53 Galdikas: Yeah, because Rod and I got along really well with Louis. So Louis and I maintained a correspondence. But after this first meeting, I went to Europe with my friends and I was in Paris and there was some kind of conference in Paris and my friends who were, one of whom was an archaeologist, said, “Well, let’s just go to this meeting.” And we went and I happened to meet Louis Leakey there and my friends said, “Go up to him, go up to him! You said he’s going to help you, go up to him!” And—you know I was a little shy when I was a youngster but yeah, I’d met him, so I went up to him, and again—he knew who I was immediately and we talked, and again, this is the second time I’ve met him and he was so accessible. Again immediately sweeping you up into his arms, figuratively. There was no distance, there was no barrier. And I remember being so impressed that this great scientist could be so warm to some student that he met once in his life—well, twice, but—so there’s this warmth to him. And again, I think it was the effect of him being born African and being raised an African.

01-00:23:25 Morrell: There was this quality to him that other people have talked about to me about his ability to just relate to everyone right across the board, from the—

01-00:23:36 Galdikas: Oh absolutely. That’s exactly what it was. He didn’t care whether you were, who you were, what your status was—

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01-00:23:45 Morrell: He saw you as a person.

01-00:23:47 Galdikas: Yeah, and he related to you. There was this lack of barriers. You could just go soul to soul with him.

01-00:23:57 Morrell: Amazing.

01-00:23:58 Galdikas: Yeah. He had that. And I, again, I attribute it to his being African, being raised an African. I’ve noticed it in the few friends that I have who are African, but I’ve noticed it more, because the few friends I have who are African tend to be academics, are academics, but I’ve noticed it more, strange to say, when I’ve been in Washington, DC and met with African taxicab drivers. [chuckling] Like in thirty seconds you know they’re from Africa, because you’re just relating. And he had that same kind of quality of just not—just no barriers. There were no barriers, and I wonder if it really is African but I think it has to be because it’s so different from the kind of encounter that you’ll have in Great Britain, say.

01-00:25:03 Morrell: Yeah. Exactly.

01-00:25:06 Galdikas: Even though people might be warm and kind and helpful and gracious, but— there was just something so immediate about his acceptance of other people and it’s kind of funny that he had to devise tests when that was so contrary to his initial acceptance. It was almost that he had to do some artificial distancing.

01-00:25:33 Morrell: Or perhaps to be able to say to people she passed these tests that I gave her. To sort of go along with whatever rules or obstacles or things that people were going to put up in front of him and say, “Well, why did you choose her?” He would then have—

01-00:25:50 Galdikas: An excuse. Yeah. That could be because I think he was going to give me a test until I passed one. [laughter] I knew that! We would have been there all night.

01-00:26:03 Morrell: She’s going to pass one of these tests.

01-00:26:05 Galdikas: Yeah, and I think that’s why because he had made up his mind about me. But it was also interesting, because he showed, when we started a correspondence he showed a letter that I had sent to him to Jane Goodall’s mother, and again, he asked her what she thought, and she was the one who told me the story, and

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she said, “Oh yeah, this young woman seems really positive.” So she reinforced him to which I was always grateful to Vanne Goodall, but I think that was also part of that process.

01-00:26:46 Morrell: Oh yeah, absolutely, because Meave Leakey was actually interviewed at Vanne Goodall’s home—Louis interviewed her there and Vanne was in the room and she said she’s certain that it was really Vanne’s approval of her that led to her being, Louis had her come out and take over managing Tigone or working at Tigone initially.

01-00:27:09 Galdikas: Yeah, and Vanne who died, I think two years ago? Do you remember when Vanne died?

01-00:27:16 Morrell: Something like that.

01-00:27:17 Galdikas: Yeah about two years, very recent, two years ago—was a very positive person.

01-00:27:22 Morrell: I’ve heard so many wonderful things about her.

01-00:27:24 Galdikas: Yeah, she was a very positive, very positive person. She always had a smile on her face and she just had a very pleasant kind demeanor. I just liked her immediately the first time I met her. So when she told me this story about Louis Leakey, I wasn’t surprised. So he also—

01-00:27:48 Morrell: You weren’t surprised that he would turn to her for some sort of confirmation of his—

01-00:27:52 Galdikas: His opinion, because she always was so positive, but it goes along with what you were—

01-00:27:59 Morrell: About Meave, yeah.

01-00:28:00 Galdikas: Yeah, and also what you said about—that he needed to have some explanation for his approval.

01-00:28:08 Morrell: Why he chose you.

01-00:28:10 Galdikas: Yeah, right.

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01-00:28:11 Morrell: And what was the process then. You were staying in touch and it took him a little bit longer, I think, to get you out into the field partly because of some problems in Borneo?

01-00:28:22 Galdikas: Well, what happened—

01-00:28:23 Morrell: Or lack of funding—

01-00:28:24 Galdikas: Of both.

01-00:28:25 Morrell: Both.

01-00:28:25 Galdikas: Well, what happened was that the Malaysian—there are two places in Malaysia where there are wild orangutan populations. One is Sarawak and one is Sabah. And so we had initially, for some reason, Indonesia until 1965 had been ruled by Sukarno who was very anti-Western. It was very difficult. Indonesia had a reputation as not allowing Westerners in. So when I met Louis Leakey, it was 1969 and things really hadn’t seemingly changed that much in Indonesia. So Indonesia was like a black hole at that time. Nobody really knew what was going on.

So I had decided that the logical place to study orangutans would be Malaysia and I had decided on Sabah. Well, what had happened in Sabah at that time was that—[pause]—these are the stories I heard. I’m not sure they’re true. But that some Peace Corps workers had instigated conflicts among the local people, or anthropologists had instigated those conflicts and the Sabah government had said, “All Westerners out.” And so they were not giving any research permits, or not allowing Westerners into Sabah to study anything biological. So Malaysia was out so we had to turn to Indonesia.

So that was the first problem. The second problem was that we needed money, we needed funding and so Louis Leakey was going to help with that and I think because he was so involved with other things, that this was not his number one priority. And we had some, what do you call them, he asked people, for instance—he contacted a movie producer, I even forget who the man was who had won an Oscar for a film he’d produced, for funding and I actually me the guy and we went to Joan Travis’s, and we talked with Louis.

01-00:30:55 Morrell: You were there with Louis—

01-00:30:57 Galdikas: Yes.

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01-00:30:58 Morrell: To try to persuade this man to donate the funds—

01-00:31:00 Galdikas: Right, right. And it became very clear that he— Well, that he wanted—he didn’t want to donate, it was basically a film venture for him. He wanted to make a film and so we were talking about what kind of film he could make, a documentary film, and he—and I think it was at this meeting that Louis Leakey, I think, said, he said he wouldn’t give money and Louis Leakey said, “Well, what about Biruté, what about her?” And this producer turned and looked at me in the coldest possible way and said, “I didn’t adopt her.” It was just so emblem[atic]—symbolic of Hollywood’s cruelty—and the women in the entertainment business who said they felt like meat, you know, just a package of meat. He just looked—it was so cold.

01-00:31:59 Morrell: So dismissive.

01-00:32:00 Galdikas: Yeah. He said, “I didn’t adopt her.” Like, what are you talking about, to Louis Leakey.

01-00:32:05 Morrell: What was Louis’s reaction to something like that?

01-00:32:08 Galdikas: Oh, he was just—

01-00:32:09 Morrell: He must have been rather shocked.

01-00:32:10 Galdikas: He was, because again, I don’t think that—he was a very kind person and I don’t think he could even imagine people operating at that kind of level of non-regard for their fellow human beings.

01-00:32:32 Morrell: Yeah, that was even stabbing you in the back, right?

01-00:32:35 Galdikas: Right, right. And in fact Louis Leakey had a heart attack and one of Louis’s sons actually wrote this producer and said that he’d caused it because he apparently withdrew—some deal was made even though I wasn’t that hopeful. Some deal actually was made and then this producer withdrew it.

01-00:33:04 Morrell: Yes, I vaguely remember actually seeing those letters. Louis saying that these things were causing him heart attacks.

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01-00:33:15 Galdikas: Well, no, he actually had a heart attack and it came after he found out that this producer had withdrawn the money for the study so—but I remember that when he said, “I haven’t adopted her.” He had to pers[uade]—it was about money, it wasn’t about science or—

01-00:33:36 Morrell: No. So with those sorts of setbacks, you don’t have a donor, you don’t have funding, and Louis is ill, what—he recovered, but what were your thoughts? Did you think he could still somehow—

01-00:33:50 Galdikas: Oh, I believed—oh yeah.

01-00:33:51 Morrell: Pull this off?

01-00:33:52 Galdikas: Oh, of course, I mean, he was Louis Leakey. He could do whatever he wanted to do. Yeah, no, well, yes and—

01-00:34:01 Morrell: Did he talk to you after this incident and just tell you not to worry, that he would—

01-00:34:06 Galdikas: I don’t think he actually—he was a very positive person. I don’t remember him telling me not to worry, but certainly he had other people and other sources and other thoughts. The problem was that we wanted to raise a certain amount of money before we would go out, and so the first person that he—the first people who did give us money were the Wilkie brothers.

01-00:34:36 Morrell: That’s right, yeah.

01-00:34:38 Galdikas: —and who took it upon himself to sort of help, was Robert [J.] Wilkie.

01-00:34:46 Morrell: Did you meet him?

01-00:34:50 Galdikas: I knew Robert Wilkie better than Leighton [A.] Wilkie. I met Leighton Wilkie a few times, met his widow, then widow once or twice—yeah, I remember Leighton Wilkie at a fundraiser for Jane Goodall, you know, hundreds of people in the crowd and Jane is acknowledging people and the only person who actually stood up at his table and gave a long speech was Leighton Wilkie and he was in his nineties! [chuckling]

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01-00:35:22 Morrell: Wow! And these brothers had their own foundation. They had a tool manufacturing business in Chicago, I think it was.

01-00:35:29 Galdikas: Yes.

01-00:35:30 Morrell: And they had a foundation for giving money for research in tools and somehow they teamed up with Louis because he was interested in early tools. I think that’s the story.

01-00:35:40 Galdikas: That’s right and these people, at that point in time believed that the crucial difference between humans and non-humans was their ability to make tools to make other tools. Of course, this was exactly what their business was. They were some kind of machines that made—

01-00:36:04 Morrell: Tools. Yeah, right.

01-00:36:06 Galdikas: Yeah. I can’t describe it but—like machinists?

01-00:36:10 Morrell: Like tool and die set or something like that sort of thing. Yeah.

01-00:36:13 Galdikas: Yeah. They’re machines that made tools. So yeah, it was a perfect fit and also it was a perfect fit because both Leighton and Robert Wilkie were sort of these kind of crusty individualists. I mean they were very nice people but they were—there was something crusty about them like you couldn’t—they were very determined and very opinionated and I found them warm and lively. And I think Louis Leakey was like that. It was kind of like what you and I talked about earlier. That sometimes you bond instantly with people of your own generation even though you come from totally different cultures like you and that Chinese lady. Totally different experiences but—

01-00:37:06 Morrell: An age set—the generation that experiences of the world with a world view because you grew up in that period of time.

01-00:37:12 Galdikas: Time, right. And that was, I think that’s what the bond between Louis Leakey and Leighton and Robert Wilkie was. They were similar ages and similar outlooks that were very individualistic and very—and very optimistic about the potentialities of what an individual or person could do.

01-00:37:32 Morrell: And they weren’t the least bit offput by the fact that you were a young woman going off to do this research.

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01-00:37:38 Galdikas: Oh no. No, as long as Louis Leakey said I was okay, I was okay. [laughter] No really! I mean, they had funded, apparently they had funded other important research. They’d helped Raymond Dart, for instance, relating to early hominid evolution. I actually got to know Robert Wilkie quite well. I used to—he lived in southern California, so in later years I actually visited him a great deal after he retired. And he lived originally in La Jolla and actually we would go and stay overnight at his house and then he moved to—I think, Rancho La Mirage. I don’t know if you know anything about Rancho La Mirage, but it’s like there’s no lights at night and all these winding country roads and so sometimes I would arrive there like, close to midnight, after meandering through these roads for hours. He would always wake up and greet me and be cheerful and—

01-00:38:51 Morrell: Excited to see you.

01-00:38:52 Galdikas: Yeah, yeah.

01-00:38:55 Morrell: Wonderful. So it was their money then that led to you actually getting over to—

01-00:38:59 Galdikas: They were the first. I think they gave me the first two grants. And we’re talking a thousand dollars here, a thousand dollars there. And then there was another crusty type of person who I never met but I did meet his widow and actually stayed with her several times and that was Justin [Whitlock] Dart, [Jr.] and his wife was Jane Dart. And she had been an actor. She told me she had specialized in playing parts of—she was always Bette Davis’s younger sister—that’s what she specialized in. But then after she married she quit acting. She had known Ronald Reagan through the acting, and so, her husband, Justin Dart, was actually one of the so-called kitchen cabinet. You know, the group of Californians that had supported his initial bid for governor and then president. But anyway, so Justin Dart and Jane Dart gave another bit of that money and then finally Louis Leakey introduced me to National Geographic and then they gave a small grant, I think $2,000 dollars.

01-00:40:17 Morrell: Before you went even.

01-00:40:18 Galdikas: Oh yes.

01-00:40:18 Morrell: They had that much faith because of his success with—

01-00:40:22 Galdikas: Right.

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01-00:40:21 Morrell: Jane and Dian.

01-00:40:22 Galdikas: Dian, right.

01-00:40:23 Morrell: And did you meet Mary Griswold, now Mary Smith at the time of the grant giving?

01-00:40:30 Galdikas: I met her—Louis Leakey took me to see her before I went to Indonesia so I think that I saw her once and then a second time just before Rod and I went and that’s when Rod got the photographic equipment because Rod agreed to take the photographs.

01-00:40:53 Morrell: Okay. So Louis really did—you said he was—you recognized when you saw him that he was your key to the universe.

01-00:41:01 Galdikas: Absolutely.

01-00:41:02 Morrell: It was a beautiful expression that you used and he really was that. Here he opened all these—

01-00:41:06 Galdikas: Doors.

01-00:41:07 Morrell: Doors, yeah.

01-00:41:08 Galdikas: I would have studied orangutans one way or another, but I wouldn’t have studied them so soon and he made it—my guess is, I was born to study orangutans. I was fated to study orangutans, so I know I would have done it one way or the other, but he made it possible for me, this is my guess, to actually do a long-term study. Because without funding, it’s just impossible to do these things. And I know it’s true because I met people who said that after three years their funding ran out and they had to leave Indonesia. There’s nothing else they could do and they couldn’t get more money. So the support of the Leakey Foundation—well, first of all Louis Leakey, subsequently the Leakey Foundation, is what enabled me to do my long-term study even though the Leakey Foundation stopped funding me years and years ago, but they provided that impetus and National Geographic too. And basically what happened was after that, I found Earth Watch and then after that I established the Orangutan Foundation International.

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01-00:42:33 Morrell: But the initial start, through that initial startup phase and making it possible for you to stay there longer than just a two-year period—

01-00:42:40 Galdikas: Oh yeah!

01-00:42:41 Morrell: —was key to having support from the Leakey Foundation and the Geographic.

01-00:42:44 Galdikas: Right and that was Louis Leakey. I mean, that was Louis Leakey. Without his support, I don’t think I could have gotten those grants repeatedly and on such a long-term basis. That was Louis. That was Louis’s doing entirely.

01-00:43:03 Morrell: And once he had that funding, the initial funding set up for you, then what was the plan? You were going to go to Borneo but he wanted you to come to see him in Africa first, in Kenya I think.

01-00:43:16 Galdikas: Right. Yeah, he wanted me to see Jane Goodall’s chimpanzees, to work with her briefly and then to work with Dian. But as it turned out, Dian wasn’t— when I was ready to go to her camp she wasn’t there. She had sent Louis telegram saying that she was elsewhere, so we decided that we couldn’t go there without her being there. We couldn’t go to her camp or even try because she just wasn’t there. She was in Zaire or something. And I went to Gombe. I went to Gombe with Jane. She chartered a plane from Nairobi to, I think it’s Arusha?

01-00:44:00 Morrell: Yeah, to Arusha.

01-00:44:02 Galdikas: Arusha and there I met Paul and, oh gosh, who are The Population Bomb— Paul and—

01-00:44:13 Morrell: Yeah, I know who—Ehrlich.

01-00:44:14 Galdikas: Yes, Ehrlich. So they came with Jane and they were forging some alliance.

01-00:44:20 Morrell: How neat.

01-00:44:22 Galdikas: Yeah.

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01-00:44:22 Morrell: Boy. That must have been wonderful to hear the exchange of views, the discussions of those people.

01-00:44:31 Galdikas: Yeah, yeah. But what was really wonderful were the chimpanzees and just the beauty of Gombe. Beauty—it was paradise on earth. The pictures that I had seen in National Geographic magazine did not do it justice.

01-00:44:48 Morrell: It was hard to capture that feeling that you get in that camp by the lake.

01-00:44:55 Galdikas: Right, well, it’s kind of like what you said about Ethiopia—that people think of Ethiopia as dry, desert, and that was kind of—I had a picture of brown and maybe that’s when it was easiest to take photographs or maybe that’s when the chimpanzees did interesting things.

01-00:45:14 Morrell: Well, it would be the easiest, because it wouldn’t be raining! [laughter]

01-00:45:17 Galdikas: That’s right! So when I went there it was lush and green. It was just amazing and I was so impressed by the magnitude of what Jane Goodall had accomplished.

01-00:45:31 Morrell: Did you find that daunting at all? Or—

01-00:45:34 Galdikas: No.

01-00:45:35 Morrell: Was it more sort of inspiring.

01-00:45:36 Galdikas: It was inspiring. It was inspiring. That you could get so close to wild chimpanzees. And you could almost touch them and they just totally ignored you. I had chimpanzees actually running over me. It was like I was a tree stump or a piece of vegetation. And that was very awe-inspiring to me—that somebody could accomplish this.

01-00:46:07 Morrell: Did Jane talk to you about the chimpanzees during these encounters? Or did you wait until—and go back to her house or—

01-00:46:17 Galdikas: Well, you know Jane was different then. I’ve known Jane for thirty years, I guess. I started meeting her—over thirty years. And Jane has really changed. She’s a different person now than she was then. I asked her—you know, I did approach her and I stayed—Louis—one of the things when Louis Leakey was

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staying in London, where there was a long period of time. It must have been 1970, I don’t think it was 1969—I forget which year it was now. I’d have to go back and check whatever notes I have, but—it might have been 1970.

So Louis Leakey stayed in the apartment. They had a flat at Earls Court and— I think it was 1970—and the whole time that he was there I stayed there as well, but I slept someplace else because they didn’t have enough bedrooms. And I had much opportunity to interact with Jane and Dian who came by later, and I did ask Jane and she kind of shrugged her shoulders and said, “You’ll do exactly as I did,” she said. “You’ll just,” what did she say—she said, “You’ll do exactly as I did. You’ll just go out and find them.” And that was like her direct advice. And so much of the—

01-00:48:00 Morrell: And it was just delivered straight. She wasn’t telling you this is impossible. It was just the facts.

01-00:48:06 Galdikas: “You’ll do what I did,” she said, “You’ll do exactly what I did.” Like—

01-00:48:12 Morrell: This is what it takes.

01-00:48:13 Galdikas: Well, this is how it’s going to be. “You’ll do exactly as I did,” she said, “You will go out and find them.”

01-00:48:21 Morrell: Boy.

01-00:48:22 Galdikas: Yeah, but you see, it was like, even though I was a little surprised because I wasn’t used to this kind of manner—and I—

01-00:48:37 Morrell: Was it was a little too direct for you? Is that what you’re—

01-00:48:40 Galdikas: No, no. But it was foreign. And so the person I was staying with was a Canadian, a very good friend of mine who had actually won a scholarship to study in Great Britain and stayed there a long time. So I asked him. It was very good that I stayed with him because he really had, because he’d been in England for years and years, and I think he had an aunt and an uncle in England. He explained to me about British culture, or English culture and how things worked in England. Because there were a lot of questions and a lot of things that didn’t make sense to me, like why would Louis Leakey be sleeping on a mattress in a flat in London? Like again, it didn’t quite jibe with what I expected because of my North American upbringing you know, where normally the only people who slept on mattresses were hippies. It just didn’t happen normally.

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01-00:49:52 Morrell: So what did he tell you that Jane’s behavior as it—

01-00:49:58 Galdikas: Well, he told me that it was typical of British gentry, which is what Jane is, that what happened in the city had nothing to do with what happened in their real homes which were in the country. And this was exactly how it was that Vanne Goodall, just—she told me. Her exact words, “She adored London.” And when she got older, in her nineties, it was more difficult for her to go back to London and she really missed it. But London is not where she stayed. London was not where her house was, so her real house was out in the country at Bournemouth, and London was just a flat, so it was just a temporary kind of thing.

01-00:50:46 Morrell: That’s why he slept on a mattress on the floor.

01-00:50:50 Galdikas: And that there was nothing wrong with it. He did charity work, and he told me he did charity work with some duchess and he said it was just astonishing how, you know, they didn’t have their servants in London. It wasn’t their real life and so people—that’s just what they did. And it also—there were sets of different values that were not so materialistic that were associated with the British gentry and I think it had something perhaps to do with the increasing impoverishment of the British gentry, too. I‘m not sure.

01-00:51:34 Morrell: That and also probably the deprivation that England went through during the war.

01-00:51:37 Galdikas: The war, right, exactly, because these were older people.

01-00:51:42 Morrell: Jane even, talked to me a little bit about her dislike of people who were overweight—and the hoarding. When I traveled with her once to Kigoma she was collecting all the little salt, and pepper, and sugar bags on the airplane to take with her to Gombe. Even at this point didn’t want to see anything go to waste.

01-00:52:06 Galdikas: Yeah. Louis Leakey was like that too.

01-00:52:10 Morrell: Interesting.

01-00:52:10 Galdikas: That there was a very strong sense of frugality and making use of resources wisely and not wasting anything. Yeah, I think it did have a lot to do with the deprivation that the British did undergo during the war which probably

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exceeded anything that anybody in North America had to face of our generation.

[interruption]

01-00:52:41 Galdikas: Yeah, in terms of rationing, yeah.

01-00:52:43 Morrell: Did Jane make this remark to you before you saw her at Gombe? Or this was after.

01-00:52:50 Galdikas: No, no. This was in London when I stayed at her house, at her flat.

01-00:52:55 Morrell: Before you went—

01-00:52:58 Galdikas: To Indonesia, yes.

01-00:52:58 Morrell: And was it after your trip to East Africa and you’d seen—

01-00:53:03 Galdikas: No, no, no.

01-00:53:03 Morrell: It was all before.

01-00:53:03 Galdikas: No, it was all before. It was all before.

01-00:53:04 Morrell: Did her attitude differ when you actually were there in the forest seeing the chimpanzees?

01-00:53:13 Galdikas: No, no. It was like—“You’ll—.”

01-00:53:17 Morrell: This is the way it is.

01-00:53:18 Galdikas: Yeah. “You’ll do what I did and be successful.”

01-00:53:22 Morrell: Well, that—yeah, and you will be successful.

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01-00:53:26 Galdikas: It was like the same thing about Louis Leakey, it was like, once he decided that he would support me to study orangutans, wild orangutans, it was like it was a done deal. It had already happened. [laughter] No—it was like—

01-00:53:43 Morrell: Interesting.

01-00:53:43 Galdikas: It already had happened. I already was doing it and of course, please remember I was very young and—

01-00:53:51 Morrell: About twenty years old?

01-00:53:53 Galdikas: In my early twenties. And it was breathtaking. It was breathtaking that he— I’d never even seen a wild orangutan and he was including me with Jane and Dian as people who had done very successful studies. But that was that certainty.

01-00:54:16 Morrell: How inspiring.

01-00:54:19 Galdikas: It was this optimism that he had.

01-00:54:22 Morrell: It just must have—instilled a determination in you, I would think, to have someone of his stature believe in you to that extent.

01-00:54:31 Galdikas: Well, you know, he and his wife Mary had worked at Olduvai Gorge for twenty-seven years before they found Zinjanthropus. So that was the inspiration. In his case it took twenty-seven years. And of course, [regarding] Jane, it had taken years as well to habituate the wild chimpanzees, so—and Dian, it had just taken enormous courage to go into that part of the world and have the experiences that she had initially in Zaire. So—yeah, it was inspiring. [interruption]

[End Audio File 1]

[Begin Audio File 2]

02-00:00:02 Morrell: I think we’re recording. So this is part II of the interview with Dr. Galdikas. We had gotten to a point where—I’m trying to remember exactly where we were.

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02-00:00:11 Galdikas: I think we were somewhere in London. And I was staying during the day in Vanne Goodall and Jane Goodall’s household.

02-00:00:23 Morrell: Right and we were talking about, and comparing Jane when you met her there and then when you actually saw her at Gombe and the advice that she was giving you.

02-00:00:33 Galdikas: Actually she was exactly the same. The difference is now, thirty years later, now that she’s spent a lot of time in the United States, I think it has made her a somewhat different person than when she was—

02-00:00:45 Morrell: Easier to connect with a little bit?

02-00:00:48 Galdikas: I think more open. Because as I said, she did come from the British gentry and there’s just a way of dealing with the universe that is culturally different than say, North America, where we tend to be very much more open, individualistic, and you know. I don’t know just much more immodest, perhaps. [chuckling] Because one thing that I did notice about the English is that they are very modest.

02-00:01:22 Morrell: Yeah, that’s true.

02-00:01:25 Galdikas: Very modest, very low key, and I think Jane is in that pattern. She’s a very modest person even now.

02-00:01:32 Morrell: Yeah. That’s one of the things that’s very appealing when you—and in her lectures, I think, people see that. She always tells a story, I remember her telling a story about a turtle, that it was at the top of a fencepost and she said that this farmer was telling her this joke and it was clear that that turtle hadn’t gotten up there by itself and she said the same was true about her. I always liked that story.

02-00:02:01 Galdikas: Yeah, she’s truly modest. And it’s an expression of the English culture that she grew up with. I had those experiences. I remember sitting in a green room waiting for an author, a British author, and I said something to him like, “Well, how does it feel to be an author?” He said, “Author—,” and this is a guy who’s just sitting there because he’s written a book, right—he said, “Author, I’m not an author, I’m barely a reporter.” Like author was such a mighty title to give to—and I’ve had those experiences repeatedly with English people. And Jane is very—

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02-00:02:44 Morrell: Much a part of that.

02-00:02:46 Galdikas: Yes. It’s very much part and parcel of her culture. That’s very English.

02-00:02:52 Morrell: And when you, after you stayed at Gombe you came back to see Louis? Or— you spent some time at Olduvai—

02-00:03:01 Galdikas: No, no, I never saw—

02-00:03:02 Morrell: You only saw him in Nairobi.

02-00:03:04 Galdikas: I never saw him again. That was the last time that I would ever see him, because he died a year later.

02-00:03:10 Morrell: So you saw him in Nairobi, you went to Gombe, and then you went on to Indonesia.

02-00:03:15 Galdikas: Yeah. I went on to—yeah, because this was—I had seen him in London before, but this was the final journey when Rod and I left for Indonesia.

02-00:03:28 Morrell: Right. So that time that you saw him in Nairobi. Were you seeing him say once or twice?

02-00:03:36 Galdikas: No, we stayed in his house.

02-00:03:37 Morrell: You stayed in his house at Langata.

02-00:03:39 Galdikas: Yeah.

02-00:03:39 Morrell: And what was Louis like sort of on a day-to-day basis.

02-00:03:44 Galdikas: Exac[tly] as he—

02-00:03:45 Morrell: Did he take you guys around?

02-00:03:47 Galdikas: Yes, he actually did take us around. Yeah, he really did want us to see things. He really took his role as host seriously. He took us to places that he wanted

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us to see like the Nairobi National Park and other places and he was very genial. He was exactly the same on a day-to-day basis as he was when you met him for an hour for a meeting. He really didn’t change. He was who he was and he didn’t hold anything back.

02-00:04:26 Morrell: Did he talk to you about watching animals? Did he give you any guidance about animal behavior?

02-00:04:30 Galdikas: Yeah, he actually did. I don’t remember the details so much but—he did. He was, in fact, he was always making comments and teaching. That was the other thing about him is that he did teach you. He was a teacher. He was really a mentor. He would always be making comments that were—

02-00:04:55 Morrell: To open your eyes to something.

02-00:04:58 Galdikas: Exactly. Yeah. Always, that was part of—some of the things were, you know, were sometimes, didn’t even make sense to me but he had views and he had experiences and he shared those views and experiences in a very open, genial, kind way. He really was an inspiration to me in that way.

02-00:05:27 Morrell: Of what you could do as someone in his position in terms of opening up the world to a younger person.

02-00:05:33 Galdikas: Well, yes, and trying to explain things, and trying to get one’s experience to students or other people so they could perhaps benefit from having that experience. I always appreciate it when people do that for me and certainly, Louis Leakey was a prime example of that.

02-00:05:59 Morrell: So at the end of that time then at Gombe you went off to Indonesia and you began to correspond with Louis? I think as I recall from our earlier interview some years ago that you said that it turned out to be far more daunting a task to make contact with the orangutans than you realized it was going to be.

02-00:06:22 Galdikas: Well, because they’re arboreal and they live in swamps and they’re individual. So you habituate one orangutan—you habituate them one at a time. And after you habituate one—

02-00:06:38 Morrell: Exhausting.

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02-00:06:39 Galdikas: —and he or she disappears, that’s it. With chimpanzees or virtually any other primate, you habituate groups, so one individual may disappear but you still have the rest of the group. With orangutans it was one-on-one. It just took so long. It took so long and it totally depended on their personalities and their ranging patterns, how frequently you encountered them.

02-00:07:12 Morrell: And you were in the swamp.

02-00:07:13 Galdikas: Much of the time in the swamps, yeah.

02-00:07:15 Morrell: I remember—maybe it was for the story I did for Science about you and Jane and Dian, but I remember you—when you got out into the swamp and saw that you could only do one orangutan at a time and the conditions being wet most of the time, I think you said to me, “Gee, this is,” you realized mentally, “Gee, this is really going to be hard.” I was so impressed with what that message, what that statement says as the size of the task and the simplicity with which you said it. Did you convey that to Louis?

02-00:07:51 Galdikas: I don’t really think so because he really didn’t care about the hardness of it. He knew it was going to be hard because everything that he had experienced, he talked about Olduvai Gorge and how in the early days it would take them days to even get there—

02-00:08:14 Morrell: Yes.

02-00:08:14 Galdikas: When there were no roads and the experience he had when he thought he was going to be killed by hostile Africans or strange Africans whom he hadn’t met or hadn’t had contacts with. After twenty-seven years and finally finding Zinj, I don’t think he was impressed by tales of hardness, I really don’t. [chuckling] It was—

02-00:08:38 Morrell: It went with the territory.

02-00:08:40 Galdikas: It went with the territory.

02-00:08:41 Morrell: If you were going to do this thing you had to expect it.

02-00:08:44 Galdikas: Yeah, and it’s hard. I mean, it’s still hard. It hasn’t gotten all that much easier. It has gotten easier in some ways but the fundamental reality is it’s still hard.

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02-00:08:57 Morrell: Did you worry that you were going to let him down at all? Because of the difficulty and the fact that they were such individual animals, such solo animals, or solitary animals, that you were going to have, weren’t going to be able to do it to extent that you wanted to. That you might let him down in some way.

02-00:09:19 Galdikas: No, because—I mean I did worry about it for myself, but I didn’t, no, I knew I had to do it. I had to do it for him and for the orangutans and for myself and for everything. [chuckling]

02-00:09:36 Morrell: All the reasons that you were there.

02-00:09:36 Galdikas: Yeah, for everything to move forward.

02-00:09:39 Morrell: Did he stay in touch with you? Did you have a somewhat active correspondence? Or it was difficult because of—

02-00:09:44 Galdikas: No, we had correspondence, and it was difficult because it was Indonesia and sometimes our letters just weren’t sent or whatever. But then you know he only lived a year after I went into the field so—and I’m not even sure he lived a year, so, we only had a few letters, but I know that he was pleased because I remember people telling me that they heard his lectures during that year and he did mention my work.

02-00:10:20 Morrell: What you were doing.

02-00:10:22 Galdikas: And the fact that it was successful. And then not even that—

02-00:10:28 Morrell: That was part of his vision that if everything was already done.

02-00:10:30 Galdikas: Exactly, and not even that, but that somebody, one of my friends told me that Sherry Washburn, who was kind of a colleague but a rival—

02-00:10:42 Morrell: Yeah, an anthropologist at UC Berkeley.

02-00:10:45 Galdikas: Yeah who was very influential, very prominent, that he even said in a lecture after Louis Leakey’s death that Louis Leakey was right, that orangutans could be studied like the chimpanzees and the gorillas, and cited my work.

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02-00:11:01 Morrell: My gosh.

02-00:11:03 Galdikas: Yeah, so that would have really pleased Louis Leakey.

02-00:11:06 Morrell: That really would have.

02-00:11:07 Galdikas: To have Sherry Washburn saying, “Louis was right and I was wrong.” So that really pleased me because I, yeah, of course we want to do well for our mentors, our teachers, and he—he just had an incredible generosity of spirit and again I attribute that to Africa. He was so fundamentally African. I didn’t understand that then, just like Jane is so fundamentally English. That you can explain a lot of things about her just from being in England and meeting lots of English people.

02-00:11:48 Morrell: Yes, you see that she is English.

02-00:11:51 Galdikas: Oh yeah. A lot of her traits are related to the fact that she probably had a relatively standard English background. Even though of course, the things with the animals and all that, but the British are crazy about animals.

02-00:12:08 Morrell: Yeah. Dr. Doolittle. [chuckling]

02-00:12:13 Galdikas: Yeah—love animals, even that is characteristic of the culture, and that her mother tolerated it is characteristic of the culture. My mother—I brought back two dogs from the pound and the next day they were back in the pound. [chuckling] Different attitude—although my father loved dogs, but—these were medium-sized dogs.

02-00:12:37 Morrell: Not to stay. So when you saw Louis in Africa, in Kenya associated with Africans was that when you began to see that some of his behaviors came out of the Kenyan culture around him? Or was this more as you lived amongst the Indonesians that you began to—

02-00:12:55 Galdikas: Yeah, it was after I lived in Indonesia for a long time and saw how Indonesian culture affected them, the Indonesians, and how it affected me, because over the years, as I’ve lived in Indonesia, I’ve noticed that I’ve taken over Indonesian attitudes without even really being conscious of it and that sometimes people find that off-putting because they don’t understand it because they see my white face—

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02-00:13:32 Morrell: And they expect you to behave in a particular way.

02-00:13:33 Galdikas: They expect me to behave a particular way, a Western way that—and these are very subtle kinds of things.

02-00:13:42 Morrell: Yes. But Louis in his case, it wasn’t necessarily subtle. I mean, he was—

02-00:13:48 Galdikas: Well, it was subtle because of his—there were a lot of subtleties about him. I mean, he had a certain kind of equanimity, a certain kind of serenity that just bubbled forth in his smile and his laughter. He was always making jokes. He always—and I find that characteristic of aboriginal people everywhere. Of course, it’s personality too, but there’s also—it’s like with Indonesians, it doesn’t matter where you are, they’re always joking about something. I mean even the most terrible things they’ll joke about and they’re always joking. And half the times the jokes aren’t even funny but everybody’s always joking. Everybody’s always laughing, everybody’s always smiling. And that’s the culture. It’s not—and like we were talking about before, the genetics probably reinforce it, the culture reinforces the genetics.

02-00:14:48 Morrell: Yeah, his father was a great jokester.

02-00:14:51 Galdikas: Louis Leakey?

02-00:14:52 Morrell: Yes.

02-00:14:52 Galdikas: Oh I didn’t know that.

02-00:14:53 Morrell: Yeah, his father was and his sister. I interviewed his sister Julia and she told me about that, how he was always playing jokes and things on them and Louis was very much—in fact, Richard has a great sense of humor and a great wit and his daughter Louise is the same way. She’s got that same—and his daughter {Anne?}—when Richard had his first leg amputated he was working on writing, actually the first draft of this wildlife book and she said that she had the perfect title for his book and he said, “Oh, what’s that?” And she said, “One foot in the grave.” [laughing] Which is such, it’s such typical Leakey humor, it’s kind of black and makes fun of your personal suffering—kind of like your aboriginal humor.

02-00:15:46 Galdikas: Yeah, but it enables you to survive, that black humor, if you didn’t have it, and I think that’s maybe why aboriginal people have it because their lives are

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so close to the ground in terms of life and death. And maybe that’s why they were so successful in Africa because they had that humor to buffer the hardship and the suffering and the—

02-00:16:09 Morrell: I think you’re right.

02-00:16:09 Galdikas: And the struggles. Yeah, because he was always making little jokes and half the time the jokes weren’t really that funny, but he’d laugh at them. [laughter]

02-00:16:20 Morrell: Just because he enjoyed laughter.

02-00:16:21 Galdikas: Yeah, I have such fond memories of how genial he was and how kind he was and yet somehow there was this other image of him that was different.

02-00:16:35 Morrell: The other image.

02-00:16:37 Galdikas: Well, that he, again, that he was stubborn and—

02-00:16:40 Morrell: Irascible.

02-00:16:41 Galdikas: Irascible, whatever, just this other image. I don’t—he could get upset, but he just didn’t seem to carry a grudge. Not on a personal level. Maybe he did on a scientific level, I don’t know, but—so he was very genial. That’s the image that I carry of him after all these years is the geniality.

02-00:17:08 Morrell: A wonderful memory to have.

02-00:17:09 Galdikas: Yeah and that’s kind of the memory I have also of Dian Fossey and you know, that she was so much fun and—she was different—but she also had, and again maybe this is why I think of Africa, because she also was always making jokes and laughing. They were a different type of jokes, but she was always—

02-00:17:40 Morrell: {Anne?} made an—

02-00:17:40 Galdikas: Yeah, she was making jokes and again, sometimes they weren’t even funny.

02-00:17:44 Morrell: She was looking for the lighthearted moments anyway.

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02-00:17:50 Galdikas: Yeah, yeah.

02-00:17:49 Morrell: Which is quite a wonderful character trait.

02-00:17:52 Galdikas: Right, although in her, especially in the last few years, I did sense a deepening darkness, because I think she was dealing with issues of her own coming death, which Louis Leakey, I mean, he just, whether he died or lived, I don’t think he thought about that very much because he’d survived so many things.

02-00:18:23 Morrell: He just plowed ahead.

02-00:18:25 Galdikas: That’s right. And in fact, he was all excited, and he was waiting to get a large grant, which at that time was like a hundred thousand dollars to do an excavation.

02-00:18:34 Morrell: Right. He had another expedition he was going to lead.

02-00:18:37 Galdikas: Yeah and he talked about that. And he was always very future oriented and also what I mentioned before, about the certainty, that once he had a plan, it became a reality for him.

02-00:18:52 Morrell: A wonderful trait to have.

02-00:18:54 Galdikas: Well, because it helps you get things done. It’s very optimistic.

02-00:18:58 Morrell: Yeah. Ultra optimistic.

02-00:19:01 Galdikas: Yeah, and that was Louis Leakey.

02-00:19:04 Morrell: For your field of research, for primatology, looking forward to, say fifty years, or a hundred years from now, how do you think people will view Louis’s contributions?

02-00:19:15 Galdikas: You know, it once hit me—you know what they said, they said that history is written by the victors and it’s very not true. Those who write the history become the victors. I mean, so—I think it depends on how it’s written. I think it’s—so I don’t know how it will be written. But if it’s written correctly and if it’s written broadly enough for primatology, I think he will continue to be

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viewed as the giant that he was, because basically he sent out people into the field and those people have had repercussions, repercussions that we’re not even aware of. I’ll give you an example. In my case, virtually, I’d say about half the Indonesians who do fieldwork are my former students. They don’t go out wearing t-shirts that say Former Students of [Biruté Galdikas] but they are and so this can’t help—and they bring with them a certain viewpoint. And that viewpoint is very conservation oriented.

02-00:20:52 Morrell: Which is an enormous change for that society.

02-00:20:55 Galdikas: Right and even—it’s not even, it’s conservation oriented because this is the way that Rod and I saw it when we first came there. And many of these students are students from twenty-five years ago. I was shocked. One of my first students is now retiring from the forestry service! And I was just—of course, they retire earlier in Indonesia. And Louis Leakey was responsible for this.

02-00:21:25 Morrell: Did he see that, did he talk to you about the conservation side of what you were going to do?

02-00:21:30 Galdikas: He was very conservation oriented, but in a global sense. He worried about nuclear war, he worried about what was happening to the planet. It was at that level. So that’s just one tiny thing. So I think, it’s like throwing a pebble in a pond—the ripples spread out and the thing is that you sometimes don’t even— it’s difficult to realize that these ripples had anything to do with the stone that was thrown into the pond. So with Louis Leakey, I think that’s how it was. He was a stone in the pond and we don’t know how far those ripples extend, but I see it, I see it. And that’s just one example. I’m sure in Africa, which is where he was concentrated on and where he worked and where his life was, I’m sure that those ripples are like waves. In Indonesia, they’re ripples. He never came to Indonesia and as far as I know, I’m the only person that he supported who actually worked in Indonesia. There may have been others but I never heard of them. So—he has, he really had a tremendous influence. Far more than many people who had lots of formal students in universities.

02-00:22:59 Morrell: Yeah. That would be my guess too. And because of the length of the studies, I think, the fact that he really wanted these long-term studies done.

02-00:23:11 Galdikas: Yeah. He gave me ten years. I never quite understood what he gave me ten years for, but he said, “I’ll give you ten years.” I remember him saying that, “To contact the orangutans. If you haven’t contacted them in ten years, I won’t support you any longer.” [laughter] Well, I guess that means that I have to meet an orangutan in the wild before those ten years are up.

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02-00:23:35 Morrell: How long did it take you?

02-00:23:37 Galdikas: Actually it took—the second day. Actually meeting a wild orangutan, not following her very long. But meeting, no, I started meeting orangutans quite soon and again that had to do with—well, the thing about Louis Leakey—my success had to do with the way that he organized helping me. So the first thing he did was he found out who the appropriate official was in the Indonesian government from his numerous contacts, and I think he actually—let me step back, actually the first thing that he did was he contacted Barbara Harrisson, he contacted the Harrissons. He contacted Barbara Harrisson, he had me meet her—oh, she really gave good advice because she had worked in the region. She was also my first visitor. And so she was the one that actually gave the practical advice, the detail—

02-00:24:43 Morrell: How to go about doing this.

02-00:24:44 Galdikas: Yeah, because she had been there all her adult life, virtually. It’s like Jane, you know, asking Jane, Jane had never been to Indonesia. What kind of advice could she really offer. And even Louis Leakey. He gave lots of—he was always explaining about things that he’d seen, his own observations and how he did things, but it was Barbara Harrisson—so he was very practical. He got ahold of Barbara Harrisson. He invited her, spent time with him, then she told him who exactly to contact, then he contacted that person. And how did he do it? Well, he did it in a typical Louis Leakey way. He wrote this man and said, “I want to help you.” [chuckling] “I’m going to help you find money.” It wasn’t like I want you to do me—

02-00:25:43 Morrell: I want something from you—instead I’m giving you something.

02-00:25:46 Galdikas: Yeah, I’m going to give you something and I also want to send a student to Indonesia. So he knew how to do it. He was very practical. If some professor had written a letter, from UCLA where I was a student, he wouldn’t have done or he or she, but actually in those days it was all hes, he would not have it the same way that Louis Leakey did it. Louis Leakey was very practical. So when I arrived in Indonesia, this official was so happy to see me! So happy to see us, and “how is Louis Leakey doing.” It was very different from how—and he really took us under his wing.

02-00:26:36 Morrell: And because of this contact with Louis.

02-00:26:38 Galdikas: Right. And that was through Barbara Harrisson. So you know these things don’t happen by accident. Louis Leakey’s success in the world and doing

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what he did was not accidental. It had to do with his good humor, but it also had to do with this practicality. He understood how people worked and what they wanted and also it had to do with his eternal optimism.

02-00:27:08 Morrell: And this ability to see people as people. He treated each of these people as an individual, not just as an official, but as people who also had needs or desires or things that he could help them with. He recognized that.

02-00:27:25 Galdikas: I remember he invited an Indonesian official from the Indonesian embassy when he was in Washington to his hotel suite and it was paid for by National Geographic, and we had a nice lunch together, and actually I stayed friends with that government official for at least five or six or seven years after I went to Indonesia because he was sent back. And he was always very positive and supportive.

02-00:27:55 Morrell: What about Louis’s take on women being better suited for these long term, ten year, twenty-year studies.

02-00:28:04 Galdikas: Oh Louis really believed in women.

02-00:28:07 Morrell: Did he talk to you at all about that?

02-00:28:07 Galdikas: Oh all the time. That was one of the things that he was teaching. Yeah, he believed that women made better field researchers, at least for the great apes, because they were more patient, they were more perceptive, and because they didn’t, they wouldn’t attract the aggression of the adult males as much as men would. And I think as far as Western culture goes that all three are correct. There are all kinds of studies that show that women in Western societies are more perceptive of small details than men are.

[This portion of the transcript is sealed until 2065]

Partially probably because they see the details more. How the animals, the apes are going to react.

02-00:30:25 Morrell: Right, more sensitive, more aware of—

02-00:30:28 Galdikas: Of what’s happening at any moment.

02-00:30:30 Morrell: Yeah. Interesting. So and that perception of Louis’s has also colored the field. I think when I did that story for Science about you and Jane and Dian, we also

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sort of looked at the statistics. It really is a field that’s rather dominated by women, or for a field of science it hasn’t—

02-00:30:55 Galdikas: Increasingly so.

02-00:30:57 Morrell: There are a tiny percentage—

02-00:30:58 Galdikas: Oh yeah, and I think, I really think that we humans do, the greatest imitators on the planet, and we do follow role models. I mean, whether we’re conscious of it or not. And I really think that the fact that there were women in this field so relatively early has colored the perceptions of women, girls.

02-00:31:26 Morrell: And high-status women.

02-00:31:26 Galdikas: Yeah. In high schools and colleges. Oh I totally agree with that. And that was because of Louis Leakey.

02-00:31:37 Morrell: I wonder if he realized that that would have that effect too, or it’s one of these ripple examples that you were talking about.

02-00:31:43 Galdikas: I don’t think he did. I don’t think he did. He had a very good relationship with women. I mean, he really did. I don’t know—I still, I think you and I talked about this. I still don’t think that he had the affairs that he supposedly had. I really don’t. I mean, I just don’t believe it. He had platonic affairs, because he talked about them. But—

02-00:32:15 Morrell: Not the sexual ones.

02-00:32:18 Galdikas: Well, of course, I met him when he was—

02-00:32:19 Morrell: Close to death.

02-00:32:21 Galdikas: Close to death and walking with a cane and—but I just, so I don’t really know. And then also, I was married, so I think those kinds of things were very sacrosanct to him, so I have no idea. But he really did like women. He had no fear of women.

02-00:32:46 Morrell: He enjoyed their company a lot.

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02-00:32:49 Galdikas: Yeah, and I don’t know enough about Africa to know if that’s African or not. I really don’t, but certainly, when I went to Indonesia and met Indonesian men, particularly Dayaks, I noticed that Indonesian men particularly Dayaks, have no fear of women. Dayak men and vice-versa. But of course, an American anthropologist, several of them have told me Dayaks are probably the most egalitarian, represent the most egalitarian societies on this planet in terms of male/female interactions. And that may be one of the reasons why Western women find Dayak men so attractive. I suspect that’s it.

02-00:33:46 Morrell: That makes sense.

02-00:33:46 Galdikas: But Louis Leakey also had that. I mean, he genuinely liked women. He liked being in their company.

02-00:33:53 Morrell: Part of that—his sister, he and his sister Julia were great pals growing up and I always thought that when I was working on the biography about Louis and about the Leakey family that that must have helped color his—

02-00:34:12 Galdikas: Was she older?

02-00:34:14 Morrell: Yeah. She was and they were just pals. They did all the natural history and everything together. She said her older—there was an older sister who was reading all the time and the younger brother was always in their way so the two of them would go off together and try to get rid of this little annoying younger kid and they had projects to do that they did together, but they were great pals.

02-00:34:36 Galdikas: Like what, what did they do?

02-00:34:37 Morrell: They collected insects together, they would go just birding together or botanizing together. They did lots, and they had little projects—you know he had a museum and they collected stuff for the museum. And things like that. But they were the best of pals.

02-00:34:54 Galdikas: And how much older was she than him?

02-00:34:56 Morrell: I want to say she was two or—let’s see, she was two or three or four—she was probably four years older, something like that. But not—you’d think that that’s a big age difference, but there was something about that because she remembered being taken to the parents’ home. She traveled with the family

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when they first got there to Kenya, so she must have been three or four at that age and then Louis was born that next year. So she was a few years older than he was, but they were pals. And I’ve always thought that that must have contributed to his comfort, his ease being around women as pals and as social equals. And that he enjoyed their company like he enjoyed his sister’s company.

02-00:35:50 Galdikas: Yeah, oh I’m sure that would have something to do with that. If she was like the main relationship in his youth. Yeah, well, he certainly had no fear of anybody. But he certainly had no fear of women.

02-00:36:08 Morrell: And that’s one reason, I think, that the Leakey Foundation also—you know, it was started by Joan Travis, it was men and women, but I think a lot of the women were his backers just because he could see them as real people, and like you said, didn’t feel afraid of them.

02-00:36:26 Galdikas: No hostility. There was no hostility towards women.

02-00:36:29 Morrell: Or a need to put them down or any of that.

02-00:36:32 Galdikas: Exactly. In fact, he told me that he thought that the Leakey Foundation, he kind of—I don’t know if disapproval is the right word, but almost, of whoever it was that was in charge. I think there were—

02-00:36:49 Morrell: I’m trying—different times there were different guys but there was—

02-00:36:52 Galdikas: Right in the beginning.

02-00:36:53 Morrell: Alan O’Brien?

02-00:36:54 Galdikas: No.

02-00:36:55 Morrell: Because he loved Alan O’Brien.

02-00:36:56 Galdikas: Yeah he loved Alan and his wife. No there was—who was the guy from Caltech?

02-00:37:02 Morrell: Oh I know who you’re talking about, but I know who mean, so I can put that in—

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02-00:37:08 Galdikas: Who was that? Make sure we have the right person.

02-00:37:11 Morrell: [Edwin S.] Munger?

02-00:37:13 Galdikas: Yes! [emphatically] Yes, Ned Munger. And it was really funny because he, I mean, he never said anything but it was like he would say that really what— the Leakey Foundation should be run by a white-haired woman operating on top of a garage, with her office on top of a garage. That’s what he—[a clicking sound begins in the background]

02-00:37:40 Morrell: Oh I hope this thing isn’t behaving badly. Why is it making that sound?

[Begin Audio File 3]

[interruption]

03-00:00:53 Morrell: There’s plenty of time.

03-00:00:54 Galdikas: There’s plenty of time [chuckling]

03-00:00:57 Morrell: It’s actually kind of freeing, I would think, in some ways.

03-00:01:01 Galdikas: Well, [Indonesians] are liberated, in some part of their essence, they’re much more liberated than Westerners. Because we have to succeed, we have to rush someplace. And Indonesians have no place to rush to. I mean, even, the way that President Suharto behaved. Everybody said there was going to be a bloodbath to get rid of him and I knew exactly what he would do, because he did exactly what a man of his culture had to do and that is, when it becomes very clear that you’re standing in the way of the serenity or whatever is the equilibrium of the group, you have to get out of the way, and that’s what he did. He just stepped down. There was no blood bath.

03-00:01:54 Morrell: So, we’ll just go back a bit. You were talking about what Louis felt was important for the Leakey Foundation was to have—his description was a white-haired lady on top of a garage. What was the—

03-00:02:08 Galdikas: A white-haired lady with an office above a garage. That’s what he—and you know it goes back to his ideas of frugality. And oh, he complained about primatologists staying in fancy hotels in Nairobi and drinking bottled water. He couldn’t get over this concept of bottled water, which at that time was a lot

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stranger than it is now. Our society really has changed in the last ten years. Twenty, thirty years ago, bottled water—but he really talked about this bottled water and the Jeeps and that they rented the cars that they rented. He really didn’t like it. He thought it was a waste of money. So I think he was always aware that money could be saved and that money should be used for what he thought were real programs or real projects.

03-00:03:11 Morrell: [chuckling] So by being on top of a garage that implied that you were renting something that wasn’t a full building but you were being frugal with the resources.

03-00:03:23 Galdikas: Yeah, he was frugal. He was generous but frugal. He was very generous. He bought me books. He thought it was important. He did get me, sent books, reports and he paid for them himself. Nobody paid them for him.

03-00:03:44 Morrell: When he wrote to you in Indonesia, did he offer any bits of encouragement or advice?

03-00:03:52 Galdikas: You know I would have to go back. He was always very positive and encouraging so I don’t remember anything specifically during the year that I was first there but I know that when he died it was, it wasn’t a surprise, but it really was a letdown. I did feel orphaned but the good thing is that the Leakey Foun[dation]—the foundation that he helped establish, it was established for him, lived on, and the Leakey Foundation really, I mean, my gratitude to the Leakey Foundation is boundless because they enabled us to survive.

03-00:04:46 Morrell: So the money kept coming to keep you in the field and to do the ten years, the twenty years.

03-00:04:53 Galdikas: Well, it kept us there for the first, almost I think the first ten years. And that— there were other funding that came in. We got money from the New York Zoological—but that was the basis and that was him. Him and—it was him. It wasn’t Mary, it was him.

03-00:05:18 Morrell: Right, right. No, it was, it was Louis.

03-00:05:22 Galdikas: It was Louis because he had such a generosity which, which, was just boundless. He really was kind. That sparkle in his eye that he had, that gleeful, almost wicked look in his eyes. [laughter] You mentioned that their father liked to do tricks and little—yeah, that makes sense. I’ve never heard that before but that makes sense because Louis kind of liked practical jokes. And

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actually I think that was part of his bond with Dian, because she was fond of practical jokes.

03-00:06:02 Morrell: That makes perfect sense. I’d never heard that about her, but when you said it I thought that’s got to be one reason—like you—that he and Dian liked each other.

03-00:06:11 Galdikas: Oh yeah, because she—yeah, she was the type of person that would put a banana peel in your way so that she could watch you slip. But it wasn’t in a mean way, it was just—it was just she liked to laugh. She was always joking.

03-00:06:27 Morrell: I hadn’t heard that about her before.

03-00:06:31 Galdikas: Oh she was hilarious! In the last few years, it kind of, it wasn’t so free and there was a certain rage that welled within her that I hadn’t seen before. And again, the public image is so different from the actual reality even though there’s truth to the public image. It’s just not the whole kit and caboodle. I did see Dian in very bad straits, but I think [lowering voice] alcohol had something to do with it.

03-00:07:19 Morrell: Yeah. It has in many people, I think.

03-00:07:23 Galdikas: Yeah, but—but they were, there was a kinship there. And of course the kinship with Jane was very powerfully with her mother. You saw that too, right?

03-00:07:41 Morrell: I’d heard about it because Vanne declined to give an interview for the book about the Leakeys because she said the book was about the family and she didn’t know the family, so it was a gracious way [for her to say] she didn’t want to talk about her relationship with Louis.

03-00:08:00 Galdikas: That is so strange.

03-00:08:01 Morrell: I know. I thought so, and I was disappointed, because Meave had told me how wonderful Vanne was.

03-00:08:07 Galdikas: Well, she was.

03-00:08:07 Morrell: Yeah, and I had, and I thought that’s—you know, Meave is quite a wonderful person and I thought for Meave to say something like that, this woman must

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be exceptional. And I was really looking forward to meeting her and was quite disappointed when I—it was a nice letter she wrote, but she declined and then there was a woman who had worked with Vanne and Louis as their secretary, I can’t think of her name now, but she also declined on the same grounds, so it seemed to me that the two of them had discussed this and had decided that they wanted to keep what they had with Louis private. But I was sorry about it, because I felt that Vanne especially could have offered just images of Louis, it would have been quite wonderful to have recorded, to have had.

03-00:09:06 Galdikas: Oh absolutely, yeah. The two weeks that Louis was in her flat, which was basically Vanne’s flat, it was very clear that they had a very special relationship but that special relationship, really I don’t think in Louis’s case intruded in any way, shape, or form on the relationship that he had with Mary. He was so loyal to Mary. He just spoke of her in the most glowing warm terms. And unfortunately, Mary, for whatever reasons did not reciprocate that. Mary herself told me that she was, what was the word she always used, she used that—she was embarrassed or ashamed to be a Leakey because of Louis Leakey. Actually it was because of his support for Calico but—

03-00:10:09 Morrell: Yeah I was going to say, I think when she felt that way, she even said that in her biography was that she began to—well, I can’t quote it word for word, but essentially, lose her regard for Louis because of his waning intellectual abilities, or something to that effect—because of his support for Calico which he was just—and she would tell people, you know, she asked Mary Smith to make sure that the magazine didn’t do a story about Calico. It was like she was trying to protect him and protect his reputation.

03-00:10:40 Galdikas: I don’t think he needed that protection.

03-00:10:43 Morrell: No. Probably not. But it was a good thing they didn’t do a story about Calico nonetheless.

03-00:10:52 Galdikas: Well, I don’t know. I think sometimes a little bit of opening up of the eyes is good and Louis was just open, so he—

03-00:11:03 Morrell: That’s true.

03-00:11:03 Galdikas: He could be deceived or he could be—

03-00:11:05 Morrell: He was so eager to recreate the young guy again who turned over all the old ideas.

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03-00:11:13 Galdikas: Yes, right, exactly.

03-00:11:15 Morrell: I don’t think that Calico was nearly the site that he was looking for but he sure wanted it to [be].

03-00:11:20 Galdikas: Right. He did, he did. And again it was because of his relationship with a woman—Ruth Simpson. He bonded with Ruth.

03-00:11:32 Morrell: She was a great believer in him.

03-00:11:34 Galdikas: Yeah, and I think had the site been run by some man—because there were some people, many people, who believe that humans came to North America earlier than the standard thought, I don’t think he would have given it a second look. It was because of his relationship with Ruth who actually reminded me of Mary somewhat.

03-00:11:58 Morrell: In the loyalty that he had too, yeah.

03-00:12:01 Galdikas: Well, maybe and even the age, because she was older. I didn’t know her at all, but I saw her and saw them talking together. Yeah, I think in the relationship that they were able to establish—she was a classic example of how he got along with women. I mean—she wore combat boots! [laughter] She wore these boots, you know, which at the time was not what women necessarily wore.

03-00:12:40 Morrell: Right, right. Louis wouldn’t even—he might see that but he wouldn’t see it in another sense.

03-00:12:47 Galdikas: No he wouldn’t see it—he’d see it as a positive, which I mean, I think so too, but Ruth—she was a very strong woman and—

03-00:12:55 Morrell: And she needed these for her work tramping across the desert and so she did that rather than play the feminine part. It would just be another example of someone who was dedicated to their work. I’m sure that would be how Louis would see it.

03-00:13:08 Galdikas: And I think he really admired that. I think he really admired that about Mary. His loyalty to Mary was beyond belief and one of the things that I really enjoyed—you asked me about things that I remember in terms of the science is sitting there in the, after dinner in the house in Langata, at their home in

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Langata, and listening to them, Louis and Mary, you know, a few students, whatever, discussing human evolution and their finds and they’re drinking an after dinner brandy or sherry or something and just—it was just wonderful to hear them.

03-00:13:57 Morrell: It must have been.

03-00:13:59 Galdikas: Yeah, that was one of the benefits, one of those wonderful side benefits of being part of that household for that particular time. And the other thing that happened, I have to tell you this, I don’t even know if I mentioned it in my book Reflections of Eden, because I’ve forgotten what I took out, what was in, you know—Mary Leakey actually asked me to stay at Olduvai and work on the faunal remains.

03-00:14:29 Morrell: Really!

03-00:14:29 Galdikas: Yeah. And I really, of course I couldn’t do it because I had to go to Indonesia, but I was so upset about that.

03-00:14:42 Morrell: Yeah, like a great gift.

03-00:14:45 Galdikas: Well, but you see, and Rod and I spoke about it and perhaps I was a little more disgruntled or grouchy than I normally would be and Rod said, “Well, you’re—just because you can’t stay and work with Mary,” he said. But I really felt very strongly that she was making me this wonderful offer, you can have all the faunal remains, because she wanted to take me away from Louis. It was very interesting.

03-00:15:16 Morrell: She didn’t want him being distracted again—being—

03-00:15:21 Galdikas: It was deeper than that. It was much more personal. Think about it. Here she’s offering—because I had told her that I had worked on faunal remains at some prehistoric Indian sites in California, sorry, in British Columbia, but I’d learned a little bit of faunal analysis from working in California, so she made this offer. She said, “If you stay you can work up all the faunal remains at Olduvai.” What an offer! Right?

03-00:15:55 Morrell: Oh yeah.

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03-00:15:56 Galdikas: So she was trying to take me away from Louis. And she made the offer privately, so it’s very interesting that—I found it psychologically very interesting because on one hand you had this total admiration and loyalty and on the other hand, she would just—she never stopped attacking him, attacking Jane. It was very uneven. It couldn’t have been—and it was also very unnecessary. I think that’s what bothered me about it.

03-00:16:54 Morrell: And she attacked Jane in what sense.

03-00:16:58 Galdikas: Oh she told nasty stories about Jane. I mean she really told nasty stories about Jane, and Dian she just dismissed. So—but it was so unnecessary because— and there was another woman there that she was really—hated—

03-00:17:20 Morrell: {Elizabeth Marinov?}?

03-00:17:21 Galdikas: Yeah that was her, and it was such negativity and yet, I guess the reason I’m saying this, mentioning this, is that this negativity never affected Louis. Can you imagine being in that situation? Of course it should tell us something about Mary and how she felt.

03-00:17:45 Morrell: She had a lot of insecurities.

03-00:17:47 Galdikas: Yes, and her insecurities—

03-00:17:50 Morrell: And also she felt abandoned at Olduvai, like they’d started it together and she was the one who was left to do the work.

03-00:17:58 Galdikas: Yeah.

03-00:17:58 Morrell: I asked her that, I phrased it just like that, I said, “Did you feel that you had been left at Olduvai to do the work?” And she said, “Oh, I was, I was.”

03-00:18:10 Galdikas: So you interviewed her for your book?

03-00:18:13 Morrell: Yes.

03-00:18:14 Galdikas: That was before her death.

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03-00:18:15 Morrell: Yeah, and so she felt that—she appreciated him going off raising the money, but that still left her alone at Olduvai which was a very lonely place to be. And it was hard.

03-00:18:34 Galdikas: For her, emotionally—

03-00:18:36 Morrell: In all sorts of—emotionally, psychologically, all sorts of ways, and then she would see him fasten onto something, a new project which would yet again take him and his energies away from Olduvai, which had been their thing together, and their success in finding Zinj is like the Star is Born kind of phenomenon where on the one hand it brings them wonderful things as a couple and on another hand it ended up splitting them apart.

03-00:19:08 Galdikas: Stardom does that, doesn’t it.

03-00:19:11 Morrell: Yeah, so. She had—that’s why I said that it probably it wasn’t directed so much at her taking you away from Louis as taking Louis away from another thing that was going to distract, further distract him.

03-00:19:27 Galdikas: Yeah, I agree with you, but it was so clear that—

03-00:19:33 Morrell: Calculated, yeah.

03-00:19:35 Galdikas: That that’s what she was doing and had I been some other—

03-00:19:37 Morrell: That’s interesting I didn’t know that.

03-00:19:39 Galdikas: Well, had I been some other student—she had students there, and I suspect that she didn’t make that offer to any of them, because she was very, what is the word, protective, of the work that she was doing, and for her—I was flabbergasted.

03-00:19:59 Morrell: She had some very—she usually worked with, the people that she worked with who were discovering the faunal material from Olduvai were all folks who were well established in their fields, the rhinoceros expert, the rodent expert, they were folks who were of her caliber.

03-00:20:16 Galdikas: Right, well, I mean, it was a ploy. That’s—all of them—you can stay here and access to everything kind of thing. Well, you’re right, she wanted to split

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Louis from this and also I think it would have been—but I think it was, I got the impression that it was really quite deep. It was almost like it would have been a victory for her vis-à-vis him.

03-00:20:46 Morrell: Yes, no, I’m sure. There wasn’t an easy relationship between the two of them toward the end and I don’t know how much of Louis’s loyalty on the one hand was because of the feelings of guilt that he may have had—because you know he wasn’t around for me to interview and talk to, but surely Mary felt abandoned.

03-00:21:10 Galdikas: Yes, especially if he was gallivanting around the world raising money, which is I’m sure how she saw it.

03-00:21:20 Morrell: Yeah, yeah, and being led astray by yet another woman. [chuckling]

03-00:21:25 Galdikas: Yeah.

03-00:21:24 Morrell: [chuckling]—is really how she saw it.

03-00:21:27 Galdikas: Yeah and maybe this loyalty to the projects translated in her mind as loyalty to the woman.

03-00:21:38 Morrell: Yes, and he had had—

03-00:21:41 Galdikas: Oh yeah, I’m not surprised, you know thinking about it, I can see him perhaps having those kinds of affairs, because let’s face it, I mean—

03-00:21:53 Morrell: He was an attractive man.

03-00:21:55 Galdikas: Well, no, but I mean—wasn’t Mary married? Didn’t he leave—

03-00:21:59 Morrell: Exactly. He left his first wife for her.

03-00:22:01 Galdikas: Right, and the thing is that of course what they say, those who live by the sword, die by the sword, so—she had been in that position and so she was always left—

03-00:22:11 Morrell: She knew what was going on.

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03-00:22:13 Galdikas: Wondering, probably. Because she probably understood him better than most people did. I only saw him at the very end of his life and I think at that stage of his life he had ascended a plateau, a different plateau where he was operating on a different set of circumstances in the sense that he really was accepted as a great man and a prophet in his own way. And when people, I think, reach that level and accept it in their own psyches, then I think it makes them capable of incredible generosity. And I think he was always a generous man, very genial, but he was very much at peace with himself and I think that peace might have come because in the end, his struggles were seemingly vindicated. Even Calico—people, some agreed, some didn’t. It wasn’t really solved at the end of his life. And all the other issues, and I think that he probably was more right than wrong. He had that vision.

03-00:23:42 Morrell: Yeah. That’s the thing that I think frustrated his critics, was that they would start to criticize him about something and then get into the subject themselves and then discover that gee, he was right after all.

03-00:23:56 Galdikas: He knew a lot. He really knew a lot. And that was the other thing. After he died, we heard the BBC. It was just so funny because Rod had the radio on and we had reception and so we heard about it basically when he died, in our little camp.

03-00:24:20 Morrell: When you were out in your Camp Leakey.

03-00:24:21 Galdikas: Right. Famous anthropologist dies in London. And I said to Rod—I said, it’s got to be Louis Leakey, because the only other person it could be is Margaret Mead and she’s American, she doesn’t go to London that often. So she would have died in New York. So it was Louis.

03-00:24:39 Morrell: It must have left you feeling kind of—

03-00:24:42 Galdikas: Orphaned. Orphaned. It was feeling orphaned. And at that point of my life I hadn’t had many people die that were important to me, so, it was sort of the first shock. Now that I’m older, it becomes more frequent.

03-00:25:05 Morrell: Yeah, but someone who was that important in getting you, making a reality of your innermost dream—that’s a blow.

03-00:25:15 Galdikas: Well, he really adopted me—and Rod actually, so it’s not just making the dream come true, because the dream could have come through in other ways. That’s the other thing that I think it’s really important for people to understand

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is that Jane Goodall would have done what she did without Louis Leakey, and I think Dian would have found a way and I would have found a way, but he made it so much—he smoothed the path and opened up the path so that—of course there were struggles and hardship, but he just made it, I don’t want to say easier, but he smoothed the path, he widened it.

03-00:26:01 Morrell: He made it possible.

03-00:26:02 Galdikas: Well, no he didn’t make it possible. I would have studied orangutans and Jane would have probably ended up studying chimpanzees, and I know Dian would have studied gorillas because that’s what she wanted to do, so it’s not like he made it possible. He made it possible at that time and that place. I would have done it and my life would have been different but I still would have done it. The same is true of Jane and especially Dian. Now I don’t know enough about whether Jane’s doing this influenced Dian or not, I don’t know, but I know I would have gone to Asia and studied orangutans because that’s where my interests—

03-00:26:51 Morrell: Yeah, exactly.

03-00:26:52 Galdikas: I was going to get to Asia one way or another, so, and orangutans, but it wasn’t—he adopted us. That’s the difference. He welcomed us into his home.

03-00:27:11 Morrell: It made you part of this extended family with Vanne Goodall and—

03-00:27:17 Galdikas: That’s right. And Vanne kind of understood it.

03-00:27:20 Morrell: Yeah, more than Mary did, I think, which is why I was sorry, again that she was not willing to give an interview.

03-00:27:30 Galdikas: Well, Mary saw it as somehow like you said, very diplomatically, as taking Louis away from her. And Vanne—again, Vanne was so much a part of Louis’s life.

03-00:27:52 Morrell: The impression I get of her is that she had the same sort of generosity of spirit that you talk about Louis having.

03-00:28:01 Galdikas: Yes.

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03-00:28:02 Morrell: That there was something there that was very similar about the two. She didn’t have the negativity of Mary.

03-00:28:07 Galdikas: Oh no. She was so positive and again, she was fun, I’ll always remember— she’s an older woman, right? And she put on some what do you call them, nylon stockings, pantyhose, and she came into the dining room and we were all sitting around, or the kitchen, I think it was the kitchen actually, and she raised her skirt real high and she showed them to Louis! And she had great legs! I’ll always remember that. Everybody’s laughing. And then there she is, but that so typified her lack of pretense, her lack of pretense. And again, she loved to laugh, and she joked, and I have to say that I really, really liked her the first time that I met her. I visited her shortly before she died. I called her up and I said, “I’m in London, and I don’t know when I’m going to be next in London,” and I said, “I’d like to come up to Bournemouth and visit you.” And she said, “I know what you’re really saying.” [laughter] Well, that she was going to die.

03-00:29:40 Morrell: [laughing] Die. Yeah, you want to come say goodbye.

03-00:29:42 Galdikas: Yeah, and then I said, I said, “I’m going to bring you some flowers and I’m going to kiss you on each cheek. I won’t stay long.” And she said, “Oh, no, no, you can come and see me, stay as long…” So I went. I drove out with a friend and Jane was there and she and I, and I came and I kissed her, and she said—I gave her the flowers, and she said, “No, no, no,” she said, “you promised both cheeks.”

03-00:30:09 Morrell: How wonderful, how wonderful.

03-00:30:11 Galdikas: I kissed her one cheek. Yeah. We had a really good talk. And then I never saw her again because the next year she was dead. And do you know what Jane said? I said to Jane, “I’m really sorry about your mother’s death.” And Jane said, “Hmmph, she was ninety-three, what did you expect.” Practical to the end. She has a very practical side to her.

03-00:30:41 Morrell: [chuckling] That sounds like—I can also hear one of the Leakeys saying something like that.

03-00:30:46 Galdikas: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was the end of an era. So I think I’ve got to go and—

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03-00:30:52 Morrell: I was just going to ask you real quick. You know that chart that your professor drew—the one that showed Louis Leakey’s idea of human evolution and everybody else’s.

03-00:31:02 Galdikas: Everybody else’s, yes.

03-00:31:02 Morrell: How do you think people, where will people come down today looking at that?

03-00:31:11 Galdikas: Well, I don’t think it’s finished yet. I really don’t. And all these new finds that people like Mauve Leakey—

03-00:31:24 Morrell: Yeah, Meave.

03-00:31:25 Galdikas: Meave Leakey, Meave Leakey have made and then the French, didn’t they make a find in Chad?

03-00:31:32 Morrell: Yes, exactly.

03-00:31:33 Galdikas: I don’t think we’re finished yet. I think the jury is still out, but I think one of the things that I remember about Mary and Louis Leakey laughing about and that they, Mary could be very scornful of people who didn’t agree with her. And I have to say that you know, Louis Leakey, as I remember him, was not like that. And maybe my impressions are tainted because he had adopted us and welcomed us to his home and his life in such a very real way that we do— our memories are colored by what we ourselves experience. So—so maybe, but I don’t think so, but she was very scornful, and one of the things that they were really scornful, she was very scornful about and he agreed with her was that the South African australopithecines did not play any part in our human heritage. And I think that’s probably true. I don’t know, but—

03-00:32:54 Morrell: That’s certainly in part of the Leakey perception of human ancestry and in fact it may, like you say, that could very well be the case.

03-00:33:03 Galdikas: Well, the South African ones, probably, didn’t, I mean, they were an offshoot, probably. I’d be very surprised if we were directly descended from the South African australopithecines, and even Raymond Dart’s Taung find, some people have actually thought that it’s so late that it might actually be a robustus. I’ve heard. I don’t know if it’s true. I heard it once because it’s just so late that particular find, and it’s a juvenile. You can’t really tell for sure, so

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I think they were right about their skepticism of how early the human lineage actually extended. And I think that chart was that it took the australopithecines out. So, you know, they may turn out to be right after all, because maybe it’s not—the australopithecines that we’re looking at, maybe it was another creature similar to the australopithecines, but they had all these reasons why it couldn’t be the australopithecines—certainly the South African ones.

03-00:34:28 Morrell: How wonderful for you as students to be in on this casual conversation between the two of them.

03-00:34:36 Galdikas: Yeah, and there were other students there too and they were her students. And she—she really made it clear that they were her students and we were his students, you know. But yeah, she offered and the interesting thing was that Louis Leakey actually worried about whether she would even allow us to stay in his house, in their home, but in the end she did. There was no issue, because he did mention that she might actually kick us out, but she certainly had the graciousness not to do that. So—I feel very privileged.

03-00:35:25 Morrell: Do you have a lasting memory of Louis saying goodbye to you at the airport or any last image of him, the way that you picture him?

03-00:35:36 Galdikas: Well, I do, actually, and that is smiling, standing—I don’t picture him ever sitting down. Whenever I think of him, I’m thinking of him in motion, standing, and he was already on these—

03-00:35:58 Morrell: The crutches.

03-00:35:58 Galdikas: The crutches and it never slowed him down, and so yeah, I do have a picture of him standing there saying goodbye as we drove to the airport. And I knew, I knew that, I just knew that I would never see him again. That this was going to be basically where it ended in terms of physical—certainly not in terms of psyches and emotions, but that I’d never see him again. I just had that feeling, just like I had that feeling with Dian when I last saw her in New York that I’d never see her again. But his spirit was still so—his eyes were always gleeful, but they always had this little bit of wickedness in them. You know, I’ll bet you his father had that too.

03-00:37:02 Morrell: I think so, I think so.

03-00:37:04 Galdikas: That’s where he inherited it. He was just so full of life.

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03-00:37:09 Morrell: And I’m sure that image kept you going a lot there at Camp Leakey even.

03-00:37:15 Galdikas: Well, it certainly helped, because, and I was really surprised at how—[you should talk to Rod, he]—

03-00:37:29 Morrell: I know he has—I’ve talked to him before.

03-00:37:33 Galdikas: But for this library project, because it kept both Rod and me, it wasn’t just me—Rod did meet Louis in Los Angeles once or twice, I think. Oh he met him in France, also, the first time that I saw Louis in Europe, didn’t—wait a second, no, didn’t—I’m trying to figure out if Rod saw him in England. Not the two weeks that I was there, I think I was by myself then, so it couldn’t have been immediately before, it was the year before I went into the field and then I think Rod was there just before we went into the field, so it was 1970 and Rod was there in 1971. But when Rod came and stayed in Nairobi with Louis, it was very clear that he was also adopted. That was the two of us, and Rod had a very strong relationship with Louis Leakey on a personal level that Louis and Rod felt very comfortable in each other’s presence. And I already knew that people had said Louis didn’t get along with men, didn’t have male students, but it wasn’t the case with Rod at all. So it wasn’t just me, it was also Rod. It was the two of us who felt that we really had to live up to what Louis Leakey had expected of us. Yeah. No, I’m very grateful. That’s been one of the wonderful things about the life that I’ve led is I had the privilege of knowing Louis Leakey in a way that I think very few people did, even though it was just for a few years at the end of his life.

03-00:39:51 Morrell: You were very fortunate.

03-00:39:54 Galdikas: I benefited from his belief in the work that I was going to do. And he is one of the few people who are gone that still influences me to this day. And then to a certain extent, after he died, both Jane and Dian took over, to an extent, it wasn’t massive, but they took over that role.

03-00:40:41 Morrell: For you.

03-00:40:42 Galdikas: Well, they consciously did it.

03-00:40:44 Morrell: How interesting.

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03-00:40:45 Galdikas: I mean, Jane, shortly after he died, Jane actually found some money for me, some funding for me. And she could have taken that money, but she didn’t. She said Louis would have wanted Biruté to have this funding. So they kind of took it over. Not in the same way, but—

03-00:41:07 Morrell: In the spirit anyway.

03-00:41:09 Galdikas: Yeah, I was like shocked.

03-00:41:11 Morrell: Yeah, that’s very impressive.

03-00:41:25 Galdikas: Well, because how often do scientists give money that they could take and say, “No, this money is for her,” for somebody else. So—

03-00:41:27 Morrell: Much more likely to be as a competitor not as a—

03-00:41:29 Galdikas: Yeah, so.

03-00:41:28 Morrell: Very interesting. That’s a lovely story.

03-00:41:31 Galdikas: Yeah, so Jane did take over, although, you know, again, it’s not in the same way, because I’m not her protégé. I was Louis’s, but she felt, and certainly Vanne was always very kind. So—and even Dian, to a lesser degree.

03-00:41:52 Morrell: And you in your own life have kept him as a sort of a model for yourself in terms of relating to some of your students.

03-00:42:04 Galdikas: And even people, and assistants, people who come into my life. And I think we do it unconsciously. We don’t necessarily do it totally consciously but that was my mentor and he was very generous. He was very generous in giving of himself to others. And I think it must be so because my husband and my children complain about it, so there must be something to that.

03-00:42:41 Morrell: They complain about your—

03-00:42:44 Galdikas: They complain that I give away too much of my time and effort helping people. I know it sounds strange because they’re very compassionate and

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wonderful people. Like I said, my family are my best friends, but they do complain about it. So I think—

03-00:43:06 Morrell: You must be doing the same.

03-00:43:09 Galdikas: Well, and then going back to Mary, right? And her feelings of abandonment, so I’ve seen just a touch of it. Not very much, but my husband does complain about that very forcefully and he says, he says, “You give to people and they don’t give back,” is what he says. So maybe that is how I was touched by Louis Leakey.

03-00:43:39 Morrell: If they’re going off into conservation like you’re saying, they are giving back, but perhaps not in the way that—

03-00:43:47 Galdikas: Well, no, it’s not just conservation. I don’t know how it’s happened to me, but it’s like every person who has a severe medical problem [chuckling] ends up at my doorstep and you can’t draw a line—if you help people get an education, it just sort of spreads.

03-00:44:14 Morrell: Snowballs, yeah.

03-00:44:15 Galdikas: Because in Indonesian society, it’s like Polynesian societies, it’s like people get reputations for being generous and my husband has that reputation as well, I have to tell you. And once you achieve that position or that role in the society, it’s an informal role, it spreads. People come to you if you’ve helped somebody get an education or you helped a student or you did this or you do that, it just—there’s no end to it. And my husband—

03-00:44:56 Morrell: Like hearing about the letter to Mary Leakey.

03-00:44:58 Galdikas: Well, exactly, exactly, and my husband actually has basically opted out now because he went back to being a rice farmer, so if you try to find him, you’re not going to find him. And one of the reasons is that when he was accessible, people came to the house morning, noon, and night. He had no peace because he was expected to solve people’s problems for them and one of the reasons, and I think Louis Leakey had that role too, in Africa.

03-00:45:39 Morrell: Yeah he did.

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03-00:45:39 Galdikas: In African society, because I remember Africans coming to him and wanting a reference letter, wanting this, wanting that. They spoke, I guess, Swahili or Kikuyu and I didn’t understand what was wanted, but—and I also noticed on the part of people around Louis Leakey who lived in Africa that they also had this kind of attitude, well, that’s Louis, he gives of himself and maybe he shouldn’t or just not—

03-00:46:14 Morrell: It’s like disapproval.

03-00:46:16 Galdikas: The tiniest bit of disapproval. I remember one time everybody’s—we were going someplace and an African man showed up and wanted something and so we had to wait while—everybody had to wait while Louis dealt with it and there was that slight tension of why is he giving his time to this person who clearly didn’t have anything to do anymore with what Louis and the museum were doing right now. So—he certainly achieved that role and I think he carried that role to North America and Europe wherever he traveled. I’m still amazed. I remember once picking up a TV Guide, right—a TV Guide, this was maybe ten years ago. I normally don’t pick up TV Guides, and I opened it up and I started reading the story of an American, there was a picture of her, she was a black American woman and she had written, was a script writer. So they were interviewing her—how did she get started in writing scripts? Well, you know how she got writing scripts for television? Louis Leakey!

03-00:47:44 Morrell: My goodness! [chuckling]

03-00:47:45 Galdikas: And what had happened is that she had either written him or I think maybe had spoken to him—she wanted to help at Olduvai, she wanted to help him, but what he said was, “Fine,” he said, “you get over here to Africa, get yourself over, and you can work with me.” And so, she had to find a way of making a lot of money quick and she wrote a script for television because that was the only thing she could think—and she became so successful at it that apparently she never went back to—

03-00:48:24 Morrell: She never went to Africa.

03-00:48:25 Galdikas: Well, to see him, anyway. And I’ve had those experiences not an overwhelmingly many times, but—

03-00:48:36 Morrell: It’s a consistent pattern.

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03-00:48:38 Galdikas: It seems to be, so I’m sure like, you know, when I said, I don’t know if there are any people that he actually sent—I was being fully serious, because there could be somebody.

03-00:48:50 Morrell: Yeah, exactly.

03-00:48:51 Galdikas: Whose life was changed because they met Louis Leakey or who was able to achieve something because they—easier with—

03-00:49:00 Morrell: Because of Louis.

03-00:49:01 Galdikas: Louis Leakey. And that’s where I’d like to end this interview with is that image of Louis Leakey and why those ripples in the pond—we don’t know how far they will extend.

03-00:49:16 Morrell: That’s nice. Thank you so much.

03-00:49:18 Galdikas: Well, you’re so welcome. And it’s such a pleasure talking with you because you understand and you know the story and so I don’t have to explain.

03-00:49:30 Morrell: Thank you, thanks. Thanks so much Biruté.

03-00:49:34 Galdikas: Well, you’re welcome, and I’m really glad I came up here.

03-00:49:37 Morrell: So am I! It has been fun. [laughter]

03-00:49:40 Galdikas: So ironic—

[End of Interview]