A job as zoo director fulfilled Dr. Jeremy Goodman’s wildest dreams
Lots of kids grow up on the Dr. Seuss classic, If I Ran the Zoo. But Dr. Jeremy Goodman, the executive director of the Roger Williams Park Zoo in Providence, Rhode Island, actually took the title to heart. Today, like the zookeeper in Dr. Seuss’s story, he has ample reason to be proud of his work.
“I always loved animals and zoos,” says this modern-day zoo profesional, tall and rangy, clad in khakis and a royal blue polo shirt emblazoned with the park logo, a leather yarmulke on his head. “I’ve been obsessed since I was two years old. My parents were the type who would bring us to the library every week, and I went through every book about animals. I always begged them to take me to the zoo, and we’d always find another one whenever we went on vacation.”
Born in Highland Park, near Chicago, his family moved to Parsippany, New Jersey, when he was four. The standard childhood pets, like cats and dogs, held no charm for him; instead he preferred gerbils, hamsters, lizards, snakes, birds, rabbits, fish, turtles — “the exotics,” he says. His parents were tolerant, even after his mother was startled by a lizard skittling out of the laundry basket when she went to put in a load of sheets.
His guidance counselor at Frisch yeshivah high school urged him to go to college at Yeshiva University.
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