FORTY YEARS IS A LONG TIME FOR ANY BUSINESS TO SURVIVE—
especially a privately held family operation—but this is
not where my story begins. I came from a family of four
boys. Unfortunately, as a child my younger brother had a
number of medical issues, so I was mostly left to my own
devices and imagination. Like many budding aquarists,
I spent hours down at the local creek in Sacramento,
California, exploring the native fishes and lizards and
trying to figure out how to bring most of them home.
Although I shared a room with my little brother, who was
something of a neat freak, I continued to fill my half of
the room with an ever-growing assortment of aquariums,
terrariums, and fishbowls.
When I was 11 years old I got my first job at a pet
shop (Russo’s Wonderful World of Pets in Newport
Beach, California), earning the impressive starting salary
of 50 cents per hour. I loved every minute of it, and by
the age of 13 my focus had narrowed to tropical fishes.
Yes, I was bitten by the tropical fish bug (we called it
“hobby pox”), and I drowned myself in fish literature and
caught rides with my friends to all the local aquarium
shops. During this time the owners of Russo’s asked me
to start an aquarium society, so the Newport Fashion Is-
land Aquarium Society, which included world-renowned
killifish expert Royal Ingersoll, was born.
I spent many hours collecting local native fishes
(both freshwater and marine) and selling them to lo-
cal aquarium shops. Some of the fishes I found back
then were the Desert Pupfish (Cyprinodon macularius)
and Sailfin Mollies (Poecilia latipinna) that lived in the
Cleveland Canal near the Salton Sea. The mollies became
established there when a fish wholesaler who was in
business in the 1940s tried to see if raising tropical fishes
in the desert was viable (apparently it wasn’t, as he went
out of business). Our most famous customer at Russo’s
was the actor John Wayne, and I helped him many times
when he came in to look at dogs.
As it happened, I went to one of the two schools in
the United States that taught offset printing at a high
school level, so we actually printed our aquarium club
newsletter on my high school’s ATF Offset Chief 15
printing press—with photographs, which was unheard
of at the time. The owner of a new local aquarium store
wanted to run ads in our aquarium newsletter and asked
me to come visit; when I arrived, he showed me a price
list of African Cichlids (all Latin names, of course) and
asked if I knew what these fishes were. I said yes, and he
offered me a job. I replied, “Only if I can be the man-
ager,” because I was tired of Russo’s treating me like a
child. Thus began my final aquarium job leading up to
the start of Zoo Med. The store was called Southwest Pet
Center; it eventually started selling purebred dogs and
birds. On a good weekend we sold over 40 dogs! Curt
Lorenz was one of the smartest business owners I had
ever met, and he taught me the power of advertising.
He always wanted to be the first to offer an unusual pet.Right: The company’s
Albino African Lungfish.
Below: Zoo Med today in
San Luis Obispo, CA.
AMAZONAS
A Peek behind the Curtain:
My first decades with Zoo Med Labs