Depending on how you might feel about the Shedd Aquarium and its 2-year-old marine mammal pavilion, you might wish to praise or damn the late Northwestern University biologist Dr. Orlando Park.
In the late 1940s, Park liked to take his undergraduates on field studies around the metropolitan area. One of the frequent destinations was the Shedd, the granite-clad jewel of a living museum gracing the lakefront at the south end of Grant Park.
And one of those undergraduates was William Braker. As a child, Braker, a South Side son of a railway executive, had often visited the Shedd’s cool, darkened galleries of lighted tanks filled with exotic fish and aquatic life from around the world.
“In those days,” Braker said, “the aquarium had a postage stamp/Noah’s ark collection of specimens like all zoos and aquariums. Every thing was two-by-two, a male and a female of each species on display. Education was taken care of by putting a sign by each tank or cage, listing the scientific and the popular name of the animal inside.”
Braker, now 66, credits the late Orlando Park, an early champion of ecology from the biological sciences, for first suggesting to him how educational the aquarium could be.
“He opened my eyes to the fact that there was more to a fish than something you hook on the end of a line,” Braker said. “He took us from tank to tank and showed us how the body form and shape of a fish would relate to its environment, its feeding habits, its mode of swimming.
“I’ll take memories of his lessons to my grave.”
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Better than that, Braker has spent the last 43 years trying to impart Park’s lessons and sense of excitement to hundreds of thousands of schoolchildren, college students and adults who annually visit and use the Shedd.
Braker graduated with a degree in zoology from Northwestern in 1950 and went back to the Shedd looking for a job. Walter H. Chute, hired in 1924 to help plan and oversee construction of the aquarium and its director since its opening in 1930, gave Braker a one-month tryout.
Braker was a bit of an oddity for the Shedd: He was the first college graduate ever to go to work there. Even Chute stumbled into the small world of public aquariums accidentally, as a Boston hotel worker who had a personal interest in catching and keeping exotic tropical fish.
Braker’s tryout was a success, Chute took him on permanently, and Braker has been there ever since, except for a two-year Army stint during the Korean War and a detour for a master’s degree in biology from George Washington University in Washington, D.C.
In 1964, he succeeded Chute, becoming the only other boss the Shedd has ever had. On Monday, however, he announced he would retire at the end of the year.
Braker used his tenure to transform the Shedd into an unquestioned national and international leader in public aquariums.
“The Shedd has always been a leader in the aquarium community,” said Tom Otten, director of the innovative Point Defiance Zoo and Aquarium in Tacoma, Wash.
The Shedd’s Oceanarium began as Braker’s dream more than 25 years ago to broaden the Shedd’s collections to include marine mammals. It became a reality mostly on the sheer strength of his determination. That and the support of John Shedd Reed, a retired railway executive and grandson of John G. Shedd, the aquarium’s original benefactor who got it started with a $3.5 million gift.
Clearly the Oceanarium is the crowning achievement in Braker’s career.
It also, ironically, has made the Shedd the main target of a well-orchestrated international animal rights campaign attempting to stop capture and display of wildlife in general and of large marine mammals in particular.
Animal rights activists argue that it is immoral to capture large mammals such as beluga whales and dolphins. They argue that keeping such large, intelligent animals away from the vast ocean spaces is cruel.
Since construction began on the Oceanarium more than six years ago, the Shedd has been a regular target for picket lines organized by local animal rights groups.
Canadian animal rights groups worked assiduously to stop the Shedd from collecting beluga whales in Manitoba’s Churchill River along the Hudson Bay. The death last September of two recently captured juvenile whales at the Shedd minutes after being administered medicine has worked to cause the Canadian government to ban future whale captures.
Since then, a loose coalition of California animal rights groups has vowed to stop Shedd plans this year to collect three more Pacific white-sided dolphins from that state’s southern coast.
“Because we are a big institution that became very visible with the Oceanarium,” Braker said, “we have become the main target of these groups nationally.”
Braker is clearly pained by the attacks on him and his institution. A small, fit, slender man, his professorial appearance masks a prickly, determined nature that has served him well in recent animal rights battles.
“I almost resent the fact that these people are called animal rights activists,” he said. “Long before it became fashionable, zoo and aquarium people were almost the only people around sticking up for animals and wild habitats, and we still are.”
In the case of the sort of marine mammals now at the Shedd, Braker said most of what is known about these species and what will be learned in the future comes from studying captive individuals.
“If we are going to educate adults and children about these animals and the threat to their survival because of the way man has been befouling the Earth, we will have to get (people) to care,” Braker said. “You can’t get emotionally involved and attached to a wild animal from a photograph or a videotape.”
That’s not an argument that has swayed animal rightists, who say wild animals should be seen in their natural habitat or not at all.
Despite the animal rights campaigns against the Shedd, Braker said he will leave it well on the way to achieving his goal of making the Oceanarium an important breeding center for its animals. Even with the devastating death of the two belugas last year, the aquarium still has a male and three females, all juveniles entering into sexual maturity. The four dolphins, a male and three females, are at the same stage.
To get the Shedd from where it was when he started there to where it is 43 years later has forced changes on the institution that Braker concedes are breathtaking even for himself.
“In retrospect, it’s almost unbelievable,” he says. “In 1950 there were 40 employees here, and there are 220 here now. We went from a budget of $250,000 a year to $20 million. I was the only college-trained person on the staff, and now it’s almost mandatory to have a degree to get on our professional staff.
“It’s a remarkable change from when I got here and most of those taking care of the tanks were mostly retired cigar makers, hog sellers, cement masons or icemen.”
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Braker said he decided to announce his December retirement early to give the Shedd’s board plenty of time to search for a successor. He does not know if the board is leaning toward choosing someone already on the aquarium’s staff or if it will look for an outsider to bring in.
He said that he and his wife, Patricia, decided this was a good time to leave, since she retires in June after 25 years of teaching junior high school science in Homewood.
“We’re going to do some world-traveling and golfing,” he said, “and we’re going to spend some time visiting our four grown children and our grandchildren. And who knows? There probably will be a little time for some fishing.”