YELLOWSTONE'S WILD WORLD

I want to tell you a story of how one thing leads to another, and sometimes in the most unexpected ways. In 1974 I graduated with a BS degree from Texas A&M in wildlife science. I had know idea what I was going to do for a living but I was figuring out no one was going to pay me to pet dolphins, which is what I wanted to do, so I was helping writing a manual on how to clean up oil spills in the civil engineering department at A&M. One day in early October, 1974 someone from the biology department called the civil engineering department and said to tell Judy Brown (me) there was a job opening at Spring High School, north of Houston, for a biology teacher. I didn’t know many people in the biology department and to this day I don’t know who called. I got the job teaching 10th grade biology and 1 class of wildlife science. I loved it! I had never given one thought to teaching but it turned out I loved it.

I taught at Spring HS for a while, then at an all boy’s school in Johannesburg (a story for another day), then I got my MS degree in biology and taught at 2 different colleges in the Houston area. Around 2006 I got a prosumer movie camera and started filming any organism that wasn’t human and showed them to my students. I fell in love with pikas and wanted to show them to students, but I wanted some music to go with the footage. I looked and looked and finally found a wonderful song, “Pika, Pika” by Walkin’ Jim Stoltz, on iTunes. I made a music video from that song and my footage. The students loved it! I then emailed Walkin’ Jim. He called me and we agreed to make a music video DVD for kids with his songs and my footage. I’ve since used 11 of his wonderful songs to make a DVD and I am working on some other movie projects, with a camera much better than the one I started with.

So you see my entire professional life has come from 2 phone calls, one in 1974 and one in 2007. I can’t believe how lucky I have been to have 2 very different, fun, rewarding careers. And it ain’t over yet! The following is one of the movies that will be on the “Kid For the Wild,” the Walkin’ Jim music video DVD for kids.