Mutual of Omaha

Each day, a touch more yellow, and even some red here and there, in the trees of the northwest suburbs. Mostly still tired-leaf greens, but not for long. The days are still summer-warm.

I wrote about a mixed-use development in Omaha recently. I noted that the land owner is insurance company Mutual of Omaha, causing me to suggest to the editor -- but not as part of the article, and not seriously -- that the project ought to be named after Marlin Perkins, instead of its ordinary-sounding real estate development name. He put Mutual of Omaha on the map, so to speak. The very least they could do is put up a statue of him at the development -- after the style of TV Land statues. Maybe Perkins handling a python.

Then it occurred to me how little I knew about Mr. Perkins, other than his work with Wild Kingdom, so naturally I looked him up. Learned quite a bit from the Museum of Broadcast Communications, including: "Interestingly, Wild Kingdom found its largest audience as a prime-access syndicated program, playing to an estimated 34 million people on 224 stations by 1974, and beating out the likes of The Lawrence Welk Show and Hee Haw to top the American Research Bureau ratings for syndicated series in October of that year."

Even more interesting to me is that for a time, Perkins was director of the Lincoln Park Zoo. The entire article is here.