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Bio Pages |
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| Fish |  Larry Arnold getting ready to go to lunch (Kellie Pic) Dear Ndungu: I started keeping fish when I was 10 years old -- back when there were three kinds of fish food -- small, medium, and large. And they were all made by Longlife. If you overfed, the pellets grew long moldy strands to let you know you added too much. I
also enjoyed food fishing with my father and uncles -- including the seining
for bait and traveling to different locations. Other jobs included catching nightcrawlers and occasionally going out with the bait house's aerated truck to catch chubs, which paid ten cents per chub. Now we're talking big cash. Fish retreated to the background when I went to college while working nights. But after I graduated, got married, and moved to day work, I started "fishing" again. Eventually I accumulated 120 aquariums in the basement. Most were research tanks. I belonged to the Greater Iowa Aquarium Association and served for years as their editor. I also served as editor and president for the Federation of American Aquarium Societies. I wrote the suggested judging standards for FAAS also. I judged many fish shows around the country, gave numerous presentations, met hundreds of fish hobbyists, shot thousands of 35mm slides, wrote over 100 35mm slide shows to rent to aquarium societies, and penned hundreds of articles for aquarium societies.
Some three decades ago, I dropped out of aquarium societies and started Aqualand as a part-time job that took much less time than the 120 tanks in my basement. We have four times as many tanks but an entire crew makes them easier to keep. |
Yes,
my two offspring worked at Aqualand. They soon figured out that
computers paid more than bagging guppies. They now maintain webs
for large corporations in Omaha and Kansas City. They
both own their own 10-acres with horses, ponds, and kids.
But we were talking about Aqualand ... Since we guarantee our fish, we give info to our customers that helps keep the little critters alive (the fish, not the customers). Some three decades later we found ourselves sitting atop a couple computers full of fish info and pet info -- plus quite an accumulation of pre-computer info that may never see the light of the www.com sun. Voila. February, 2003 we decided to build a web site. Here it is 2/15/03 some 170 pages later -- about a third done. Now we need to go back and fix some of our pages. And at $2 a pop, we'll soon start putting some of our hundreds of 35mm slides on the net. (1,267 pics as of March 23, 2003) Do not attempt this at Walgreens. Digital cameras work great on large objects, but have severe limitations when photographing fish and smaller objects. August, 2005 Update. We have exceeded 10,000 pics of varying quality and get a little over 3,000 visitors a day.
3600 Sixth Avenue Corner of Sixth & Euclid Avenues Des Moines, IA 50313 515 283-0300
Outside Activities:
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