The Bobby Bones Show - Episode #7: More Than A Job: The Story of Jim Laurita

Episode Date: June 26, 2019

How can a job become more than a job? Sometimes a job becomes an identity and a legacy through all the people your job touches. How you live on through the people you know and had an effect on. This is the story of an elephant trainer and activist, Jim Laurita, who died a few years ago. Jim was adored by the community and started an organization called “Hope for Elephants” to help rehab hurt elephants and educate the community. When he died mysteriously, the community was devastated. This story is told through Jim’s family, friends and fellow trainers - an extraordinary person doing an extraordinary job, and the legacy he left behind. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Get to know Express. Go to Expressprose.com. Welcome to On the Job. This season, we're bringing you stories about people finding their professional stride by virtue of who they know. Whether it's breathing new life into an age-old profession, taking the reins in a family business, forging your own path with a new idea,

or landing the perfect job doing something you'd never before even considered. The final episode of this season is about a man named Jim Leroy, His work as a veterinarian in the town of Hope, Maine, has had a profound effect on a lot of people. He was always really good with animals. You know, we had dogs and cats and all of that, and he was probably the one who really got them the best. The story of Jim Loretta and the trajectory of his work is a pretty wild one, and a big part of that trajectory was his brother Tom. So I'm Tom Loretta. I am Jim Loretta's elder brother. Tom is the CEO of New Leaf Symbiotics, which is a big plant microbiocompany in St. Louis, but in his early days, he had a much different job.

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, welcome to Carson and Barnes, the world's only five-ring circus. Tom went to college for about two years before leaving in 1977 to become a juggler and ring announcer at Carson and Barnes, the largest tented circus in America. gentlemen, the prima ballerina of Spangoland. Ladies and gentlemen, the amazing Captain Donald Carr. Tom and Jim grew up in a rural part of the Adirondacks before moving to the closed-off suburbs of Yorktown Heights in New York. But one summer, a two-bit circus came through town and captivated them. It was this big window into a world that they just hadn't known before.

You know, there was always this image of running away and joining the circus, of course, that lots of people grew up with. And that is, in fact, what we ended up doing. Tom ran off to the circus first. Meanwhile, Jim was in college studying zoology when Tom called him and said that he could get him a job with animals in the circus. And the job was shoveling elephant manure. So we had 26 elephants that were traveling with the show. That's a lot of elephant manure.

You have no idea how much manure that is. Jim showed incredible talent for working with the elephants and eventually worked his way up to trainer for the second largest herd of elephants in the United States. We would have what was called the long mount, so all 26 elephants would come rumbling into the tent. It was a huge tent. The first elephant, who was the matriarch, would stop, and then the one behind her would get on her haunches and put her two front feet on the back of the first one, and then the third and the fourth, et cetera, all the way through. So, you know, my script was, Now count them.

And it was one, two, all the way to 26. And I guarantee you no one who saw that, you know, is ever going to forget that. Once he worked with elephants, he was stuck on that. He loved elephants. And that was always his dream. Jim later told Tom that when he left the circus, he made a promise to one of the elephants. That one day, he'd be back. They both left the circus after a few years.

Jim went out to do a ton of cool gym. He worked on an Alaskan oil rig. He worked on Japanese fishing boats, monitoring sustainable practices. He went to India to study elephants. And eventually, he ended up in this little town in Maine called Hope, where he was going to open up his own veterinarian office. People in the community there immediately loved Jim. Tom said he was always a guy that people wanted to be around. But he thinks that he still kind of always preferred the company of animals.

He would say, you know, people are mean. People are dishonest. and animals are not. Animals are who they are. I can remember being in his vet practice, and there'd be some dog come in that was growling, and you could see this thing was going to bite, and I was like, whoa, I don't want to go near this animal.

He would just walk up to it, you know, put his hand on it, and he had no fear, and the dog felt that, and it would immediately calm down. It was amazing, really. He says if your dog was sick, you could call Jim at 1 a.m., and he'd head right over. And if you didn't have any money, he'd just say, pay me when you can. That's just who he was.

In fact, he was a terrible businessman in that sense, because he didn't really equate the fact that he was doing this thing that he loved with animals to the idea that he also was supposed to be making money. And he could have been on Park Avenue in a vet practice, you know, making a gazillion dollars. But he really wanted to be in Maine. And he always had this dream of having elephants. So much so, that he had a little bit of having elephants.

this little picture of an elephant on the wall in his office, and he told everyone who came in, one day, I'm going to take care of elephants here in Maine. Did you think he was crazy the first time he told you? Well, I thought it was unusual. This is Carrie Loretta, Jim's wife of 20 years. I mean, I just seemed, but I was so used to, you know, off the wall sort of wacky things from him. And he just came at life in a different way. And I believed it 100%.

Yes, I thought it was weird and great. crazy, but I didn't doubt it for a second. Carrie first met Jim bringing her ex-boyfriend's cat to the clinic. She and that guy eventually broke up, and after just two dates, Jim and Carrie moved in together. And it was instant and totally meant to be. He was magnetic. He had no judgment of anyone ever. A couple years after they met, they got married. They ended up having two boys, Henry and Lewis. And the whole time they were together, Carrie knew that the elephant thing was eventually going to happen, because that's just the kind of guy that he was. Exactly. If he said he was going to do something, he did it. If he said he was going to, anything, anything that he said he followed through on. And so I knew, I knew it would happen.

In 2011, it did. We're here in Hugo, Oklahoma, to begin the process of moving these animals up to Maine. Rosie and Opel are going to be coming to Maine this week to begin their new life. This is a clip of Jim. He started a YouTube. channel with a bunch of videos documenting the elephants. This is one of the first, when he and Tom established Hope Elephants in Maine, which was basically an old folks home and rehab center for retired circus elephants. Their first two elephants were Rosie and Opel, who were from the original herd that Tom and Jim worked with in the circus years before. I think they're going to be very comfortable. They're going to have an hour and a half of physical therapy a day each. They are going to be exercised regularly. Their feet are going to be worked on every day. Rosie and Opel both had a lot of lot of physical ailments and were about 40 years old when they came to Maine, which is pretty old for elephants. Rosie was very young when Jim first met her in the circus, and out of the 26

elephants, Jim really bonded with her. She is the elephant that Jim promised he'd come back for all those years ago. Rosie was the first elephant that was a candidate for this, and she had severe arthritis, so she had a real limp, and she was also an outcast in the herd. because she was more interested in people than she was interested in the elephants and the other elephants didn't like that in fact even when I had her when she was young when I was taller than her you couldn't walk her past certain elephants they pushed her around and they would kick at her

and they would throw their trunks at her and so we said well that's not a good way to live and so we said can we find a special friend for her and we did find a special friend and her name is opal so she and opal get along together very well So Opal was someone who kind of got along with Rosie. So that's how the decision was made by Jim and the owners of the elephants that they would come to Maine to go through this rehabilitation

and become part of Hope Elephants. I felt an instant connection to Opel. I just remember the eye contact, and it was crazy, unbelievable. Oh, she's such a good girl. Good girl. This is from a video of Carrie holding Opel's trunk and walking with her on a sunny day. Jimmy would say she was, you know, she was mischievous and he would say she has crazy eyes. Opal was a little bit of a wild card, but I like that about her.

She was spicy, kind of like me, which is probably why we had that instant initial connection. Rosie was very sweet and kind of more docile. I just think of her swaying back and forth with her eyes sort of half closed. Just there, you know, comfortable there, peaceful. And this one is from a clip of Jim spraying Rosie down with cold water. We're all your friends jealous? Oh, yeah. They didn't even know what to do with themselves when we brought them over.

These are Carrie and Jim's two boys, Henry and Lewis. Yeah, I'm Lewis. Jim's youngest son. Henry, the oldest. Both boys are in college, Henry's studying zoology. just like his dad. But you guys are like the elephant kids. Yeah.

Yeah, we got some comments about the smell after go shovel dung in the morning and then go to our 8 a.m. classes. It wasn't like having just regular pets. Rosie and Opel became a huge part of the family's life and became a fixture in the community. Everyone says they played a lot of tricks on each other and on the family, hiding hay from one another

and using their trunks to steal treats from your back pocket when you weren't looking. They even figured out how to turn off the electric fences around the enclosure. They're like two mischievous old ladies. Yes, that's exactly what they were. Pretty much. All only thing was a handbag. We'll get back to the story in a second. First, a word from express employment professionals.

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And now back to our story. Hope Elephants was completely open to the public, and they'd have school groups and all sorts of people travel from everywhere to see Rosie and Opel. And to Jim, it was a lot more than just a retirement. home. The other purpose was education and 99% of people who came to Hope elephants walked away thinking, oh my God, this is just so amazing and so cool and these animals are so beautiful. And the idea was that people would be inspired in some form or in some way to care about elephants through seeing the interaction and trying to preserve elephants or at least bring awareness of the probable extinction of elephants.

The elephant enclosure was literally in Carrying Jim's backyard, and taking care of them was a ton of work. Would you say your dad was kind of like a workaholic? Oh, yeah, for sure. Like, elephants just functioned with the sun, so seven days a week, just up at dawn, down at dusk. Yeah. He was all in. I mean, if one of them was sick, he'd put a cot up in the barn and, you know, spending

the night there, making sure that they were okay. People used to say, Jim, you need to take a break, you need to come in. You know, he was always in the barn, and he didn't have to be. He wanted to be. I mean, he loved, loved, loved being around them. Jim had a great rapport with them. Great rapport. This is Cindy Preventure.

I was the other elephant trainer. To keep elephants, you legally have to have to have. have a backup handler on call in case of emergency. She's retired now. She lives in New Hampshire. But she and her son Travis would go up and take care of the elephants with Jim. They became like family. So one night in September of 2014, Cindy said that she gave Jim a call to give him crap

because her son said that Jim had been working too hard. This was on a Monday night. You know, and of course he saw my number and he was like, hey girl, because that's what he always said. Hey girl, you know. one of the elephants had she had a bad belly and he had been and he had been walking her a little bit and

over the weekend and my son had mentioned well yeah he's tired you know he hasn't gotten much sleep and we had just had this conversation like weeks prior to you know you're not alone in this like I can come up in hell you know

so that you're not exhausted whatever and so he's like yeah no she's fine she's better now. I'm going to get some sleep tonight because I'm like, I'm on my way. I'm going to grab a bag. And he's like, no, no, you know, we'll see you on Wednesday.

And the very next morning, Carrie called me. Could you kind of bring me back to the day that Okay, hang on one sec. That's okay. Okay, so the routine was

he would go out first, first thing in the morning. unless he'd slept there and check the girls, give them their hay, give them their, you know, just the usual morning routine. And we had a baby monitor left over from the kids that we had in the living room so that whenever he did come in, he would, you know, listen for anything going on out there, any noises or any upset if, you know, if they, if he left them alone. and I heard him make a bizarre sound, you know, and then he said, no, Rosie. And I thought, well, that's weird. And I went out there and the door was locked and I couldn't find the keys. And by the time I got in, he was laying on the ground.

And both the girls were just, you know, in the pen and he was laying there. Jim, his hip was shot and he knew he needed to. a new hip and he was always putting it off. And like the last person he ever took care of was himself. So what I think happened is probably he fell. And I think that Rosie tried to help him up. You know, the way an elephant helps another elephant up is they use their foot to sort of, you know, pick them up. And I mean, I'm 100% sure she didn't try to hurt him.

You know, she tried to help him, but in helping him, crushed his, crushed him. It was my freshman year, and then I just hopped to plane back. You know, it was like a Tuesday, and I was like, you know, like, woke up early for school and, like, um, like heard some stuff going on through the monitor. You know, I was just like right in the heat of it. It was kind of popped out of nowhere. felt really, really protective of the boys and of, I don't know, I just wanted to be in a bubble. I didn't want the real world to be out there waiting.

It took a while to get through that. I remember pulling out of my driveway, and I remember pulling up to their house. This again is Cindy, the other elephant trainer. The two elephants were in the outside. pasture when I got there and, you know, I just went out and I didn't even call them or anything. I just kind of stood and they both came like walking up and like Rosie was like putting her trunk all over me and chirping and as if to say like something's wrong and they knew. I mean it took a couple of days for me to even go out there and then when I did I didn't want to leave

it was really emotional in a good way I mean I missed them and I could tell they missed me but it was that much harder because I knew they were leaving so many so many emotions

you know in all the shock it was like what are we going to do with these animals and what's the right thing to do and we quickly realized okay this is it I mean we can't go on with hope elephants and they have to go back

to Oklahoma, which was always the plan, by the way. And Jimmy had always said, if something happens to me, they need to go back to the herd. And so that's what we did. The rest of Rosie and Opel's original herd that Tom and Jim had worked with in their circus days had retired to a similar organization in Oklahoma called Endangered Arc. Within a few days, they sent up a truck and Rosie and Opel were on the road south. Yeah, I was sad to see that go. But I don't think it would ever be the same if Jim wasn't there.

Because, like, Jim was, like, he was a superstar. You know, people die all the time, but not many people touch as many other beings as Jim did. The memorial for Jim was a massive event in hope. It was even televised. Oh, that was wild. I mean, there must have been a thousand people there. I mean, it doesn't, it seems like a fiction. Kind of.

Just his trajectory and his life. You know, he kind of just had this like... Magnetism. Magnetism about him. You know, it attracted people. And it, like, held people together. And that's true both in the context of family and I think the community as well.

A lot of the decisions that I make and a lot of the things that I do, A lot of the way I approach the world is a product of how he did all of those things. I mean, the true lesson was that he, you know, he followed his dream. He had that dream since he was young and he made it happen. Yes, it was horrible and devastating and just shattering. But he, you know, he said he was going to do it. It was his dream and he did it.

I mean, that is worse everything, that above all, to have the boys know that and to know that myself. He was living his dream, which I don't think very many people can say that. Even with Hope Elephants gone, Rosie and Opel's presence in the town is still felt there and is a big part of their story now. And Jim's work, bringing attention to the conservation of elephants, reverberates far outside of Maine's borders. Even National Geographic made a video remembering Jim and all that he did. In 2017, Opal passed away at the age of 48. Rosie is still living out her years happily amongst the herd that Jim first met her in. Jim Lareda was a veterinarian.

That was his job. But his real work was providing a window into a world that people hadn't known before. Something bigger than that. He took a crazy idea and made it into his legacy, a story that will be told by everyone who knew him for years and years to come. The biggest thing that I got from hearing Jim's story, story is I think it's important that instead of who we are being defined by what we do for a living, we really need to start thinking about what we do for a living being defined by who we are.

That is how Jim LaRita lived his life. And you've got to wonder, what would the world look like if we all pursued work like that? If you had to give a ringmaster exit to Jim, how would you do it? Probably something like ladies and gentlemen, the man and the legend, Jim Lareda, he'll be back. And there they go, those ponderous pachyderms, Rosie, Opel, and Jim. Huge thanks to the Lareda family to Cindy Preventure, Marty Lurita, and Endangered Arc. You can find pictures and videos of Jim, Rosie, and Opel on our website, Expressprose.com slash podcast. For On the Job, I'm Otis Gray.

Thanks for listening to On The Job. by Express Employment Professionals. Find out more at ExpressPros.com. This season of On the Job is produced by Audiation and Red Seat Ventures. Our executive producer is Sandy Smallins. Our producer is Otis Gray. The show is mixed by Matt Noble at the loft in Bronxville, New York. Find us on IHeart Radio and Apple Podcasts. If you liked what you heard, please consider rating or reviewing the show on Apple Podcasts

or wherever you listen. We'll see you next time. for more inspiring stories about discovering your life's work. Service opens doors, and at American Military University, it can open doors for the whole family. If you have a loved one who served in the military, you may qualify for reduced tuition.

AMU offers flexible online programs designed to fit your schedule so you can keep moving forward wherever life takes you. Learn more at AMU. APUS.edu slash military. Open doors to the future for you and your family with the help of American Military University. That's AMU.

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