The Official Houston Zoo Blog

Meet Dale.

Photo by Stephanie Adams

Dale has been a docent at the Houston Zoo since 1990. Back then he was working full time and came to the zoo on weekends.  Once he retired and got some traveling under his belt, he got even more involved. It was around that time, in October 2003, that the zoo had not just one but two elephant baby watches going on at the same time. Dale decided to take one of those shifts, having no idea just how long it would last. You see, it’s hard to estimate the delivery date for animals like elephants and giraffes; his watch ended up lasting until August 2004!

But Dale put all those hours to good use. “We were doing a four-hour shift a couple of times a week,” he explained.  “At the time I signed up, I was also volunteering in the Registrar’s office helping them catch up on old paperwork that needed to be logged into the computer. So I spent much of my time on birth watch going through boxes and boxes of old reptile and amphibian records and entering that information.”

That was just one of the many ways that Dale’s productivity would manifest.  For almost 20 years he’s lent his talents for organizing materials and creating databases to department after department  here, which I imagine has made an immense contribution to how much more easily things run behind the scenes zoo-wide.

For instance, Dale pulled together the zoo’s entire photographic  collection, estimated to be over 1800 slides, into one a central place to serve all the departments. He did similar cataloging with the engineering department’s approximately 4000 drawings, logging them into an Excel spreadsheet for easy reference, then filing the originals in a conference room where they could be properly preserved and accessible when needed. Then he helped Graphics convert their database to digital images and along the way has contributed to our ongoing registry of all the zoo’s animals.  The list goes on.

With the zoo growing all the time it needs to make use of all that technology offers. The hardest part is getting new foundational systems in place to build on, and then making it user friendly for everyone.  Dale was an integral part of this process. That takes not just skills but real commitment. It’s no wonder that he’s received Volunteer of the Year Award!

Dale Martin receives his Volunteer of the Year award from Andrea Anders.

Photo by Stephanie Adams

You might be asking right about now how it is that he can do all these things. Well, as I’m finding as I interview more and more volunteers, he’s led a really interesting life and done some unique things professionally. If I were to do them justice, we’d be here all day.  A few highlights: Dale became a radio man in the Navy, and after a short stint as an electronics technician in the research lab of the famous heart surgeon Dr. DeBakey he went on to NASA, working for many years in Communications.  That allowed him to do a wide variety of things as his career path there progressed.  For example, the video we’ve all seen coming down from the shuttle or space station went through Dale’s office. His department oversaw all Johnson Space Center TV, processing the video that came in and distributing it to the world. There he did quite a bit of archiving of that historic media, which at some point included the photography department, and located and documented information systems and data packages going up to the International Space Station. Whew! So you see, he is very, very good at handling a diverse variety of content and putting it in top notch order.

Another fascinating fact — Dale’s been a ham radio operator since he was 13.  That interest and his years at the space center came together many years later, when he became the first person at the Johnson Space Center to speak to someone on the orbiter outside the official NASA folks… and he did it via ham radio!

Astronaut Owen Garriot carried a ham radio on board the shuttle, with which he began communicating to operators around the world, essentially letting amateur radio folks on the shuttle.  An article from NASA Science News put it best: “This contact was the first communication between astronauts and people on the ground outside of “official” channels, which are usually reserved for presidents and heads of state.”  How exciting that our Dale was the FIRST one!

Dale Martin, KG5U, (L), and NASA Astronaut, Dr. Owen Garriott, W5LFL (R), at one of the W5RRR HF station consoles, when BOTH were on terra firma -- earth!

Photo by Dale Martin /http://www.w5rrr.org/sta-pix.html

Obviously Dale has worn many hats here, which is the great thing about being a volunteer at the Houston Zoo. If you have more than one interest or many talents to contribute like Dale does, the truly wonderful folks who oversee all the volunteers — Lauren McLaughlin and Andrea Anders — really make the effort to make those opportunities available.

These days Dale comes in as if he were a full timer. When I asked how he’d describe his most recent incarnation, it was no surprise that he rattled off a list a mile long.  “I upload images to the digital imagery database (for Stephanie Adams, our Staff Photographer), handle incoming requests for images, go out on photo assignments when Stephanie is elsewhere engaged or assist her on projects.  I also work for Kelly Russo, our web manager, updating web pages, and making zoo videos to go up on the zoo homepage, YouTube, and now Comcast On Demand Zoo channel.”  WHEW!   Wait, I think I already said that.

Dale certainly has his finger on the pulse of everything  going on here at the Houston Zoo. Most days you can find Dale on the grounds, photographing whatever catches his eye. One thing I know for sure, is that Dale is having fun. I can’t imagine he’d devote so much of his valuable free time to us if he wasn’t.  Our beloved Zoo as well as those who know and work with him, are much, much richer for it.