Marietta Janak

In 35 years at the zoo

When Marietta Janak started volunteering at the Dallas Zoo in 1976, she worked with a possum, a chicken and a snake.

Janak, 75, and other volunteers would bring these “teaching animals” to schools, nursing homes, clubs and anywhere else they were invited, and give presentations about wildlife.

She was even allowed to take animals home with her, and her family took a particular shine to the boa constrictor. She tells a story about putting the snake in bed between her husband and herself one cold winter night.

“My daughter always says she never knew what she was going to find in the bathtub when she got home from school,” Janak says.

Janak later handled a screech owl and a ferret in her years as a volunteer teacher for the zoo. Later, she worked in the nowdefunct nursery, feeding and playing with baby gorillas and orangutans, among other baby animals. And for years, she helped gather scientific research at the zoo.

Times have changed.

The zoo now has professional animal researchers on staff. There is no more nursery. Animals born in the zoo stay with their mothers. And animals only leave the zoo under the watchful eye of a professional nowadays.

Janak’s job has changed too.

Most days, she can be found in the Jake L. Hamon Gorilla Conservation Research Center, where volunteers man an information desk and answer questions about the zoo’s gorillas, Juba and B’Wenzi. When she’s not there, she’s at the Giants of the Savanna, talking about elephants and giraffes.

“The size of the zoo has doubled,” she says. “But I’m glad they’ve kept a lot of the historical features. The building in Zoo North, which is Bug U now, used to be the entry to the zoo, and it was made by the WPA.”

Nowadays, people are better informed about wildlife because of all the nature shows on TV, she says. Many times, kids want to tell the zoo volunteers everything they know. There are humorous moments. About one in every thousand visitors to Giants of the Savanna sees the ostrich egg on display and gasps, “Oh! Is that an elephant egg?”

It takes a sensitive person to answer that question with a straight face: “No. Elephants are mammals …”

The zoo staff members’ attitude toward Janak and the other volunteers has changed as well.

She says they once were treated like “bored housewives,” but now zoo employees are always supportive and grateful of volunteers.

“The people I’ve met, and the friends I’ve made,” she says. “We all had one common love, and that’s for the zoo and the animals.”

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Old mechanics never retire

Airplanes are Jim Walston’s life.

His dad was an airplane mechanic in World War I, and Walston always knew he wanted to work with planes.

He started working on airplanes in the early ’40s, and now at 88 years old, he’s still working on them.

Walston is a member of the Vaught Retiree Club, having worked in the Vaught Aircraft Industries structures test lab for 37 years. The club currently is restoring a 1942 V-173, “The Flying Pancake.”

It was an experimental plane. The U.S. Navy wanted to build a plane that could take off and land in very short distances. And only one was made.

Walston works on the plane at the former Vaught Aircraft Industries plant, which is now owned by Triumph, twice a week.

He and other volunteers started rebuilding the plane in 2003, and they expect it to be finished by the end of this year. Once it is restored, it will go in the Frontiers of Flight Museum at Love Field.

The surface of the Flying Pancake looks like shiny metal. But the aircraft actually was built with a wooden frame, covered in canvas that is painted and sanded. The club had to rig stands for the plane as they worked on it because they can’t walk on its surface.

This plane is the most unusual the club has worked on, but they already have restored three other Vaught planes. They’re working on a reproduction of the first plane Vaught ever built, the 1917 V-E7 “Bluebird.” And they’re restoring two other vintage planes.

Walston went to airplane tech school in Fort Worth just after he graduated from

High School in Italy, Texas. He went to work as a mechanic, working on Fairchild PT 19s, in Vernon. And then he joined the U.S. Army Air Forces in 1942. He served in England and France during World War II, from March ’44 until June ’45.

After the war, he attended Texas A&M University. Upon graduation, he received a job offer from Vaught. The last plane he worked on, in 1988, was Northrop Grumman’s B2 Spirit, the “Stealth Bomber.”

It was a fun career because he received a new project every five years or so, he says.

After retirement, he played more golf at Stevens Park. He also volunteers at Methodist hospitals. And he and wife Glenna have been members of Cliff Temple Baptist Church since the ’40s. But volunteering with the plane restorers has kept his mind on a life-long passion.

In Walston’s home office, there is no computer. But there is a poster of the Stealth, amid pictures of airplanes and grandkids. He pulls out an old book showing World War I airplanes.

“I always loved airplanes,” he says. “I was always looking at airplane magazines.”

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