All Episodes
Previous Next
June 26, 2019 - Sean Hannity Show
25:34
On The Job Podcast: More Than A Job: The Story of Jim Laurita
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
This is an iHeart Podcast.
On the Job is brought to you by Express Employment Professionals.
Express Employment Professionals is a leading staffing provider that employs nearly 600,000 people annually across more than 800 franchise locations in the U.S. Canada and South Africa.
Our long-term goal is at the heart of our company's mission to help as many people as possible find good jobs by helping as many clients as possible find good people.
It takes more than just online searches to land a job.
It takes real people who will identify your talents.
A person invested in your success.
Express employment professionals understands what it takes to land a new position at a top employer or start a new career in today's job market.
Express knows jobs.
Get to know Express.
Go to ExpressPros.com.
Music.
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've never before even considered.
The final episode of this season is about a man named Jim Lorita.
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 Lorita 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 Lorita.
I am Jim Lorita's elder brother.
Tom is the CEO of New Leaf Symbiotics, which is a big plant microbio company 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.
Nice.
Nice.
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.
Ladies and 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 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, etc., all the way through.
So my script was...
Now count them!
And it was 1, 2, all the way to 26.
And I guarantee you no one who saw that, you know, is ever going to forget that.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Once he worked with elephants, he was stuck on that.
He would, you know, he loved elephants, and that was 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 jobs.
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 uh animals are 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 you know growling, and you could see this thing was gonna 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, uh, and the dog felt that and 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 he didn't have any money, he'd just say, pay me when you can.
That's just who he was.
In fact, he was you know, a terrible businessman in that sense, because he didn't he didn't really equate the fact that he was doing these 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 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 I thought it was unusual.
This is Carrie Lorita, 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.
I mean, he just came at life i in a different way, and I believed it a hundred percent.
Yes, I thought it was weird and crazy, but uh 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 um 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 gonna happen because that's just the kind of guy that he was.
Exactly.
If he said he was gonna do something, he did it.
He said he was gonna 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.
Uh Rosie and Opal are gonna 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 Opal, who were from the original herd that Tom and Jim worked with in the circus years before.
I think they're gonna be very comfortable.
They're gonna have uh an hour and a half of physical therapy a day each.
They are going to be exercised regularly.
Uh their feet are gonna be worked on every day.
Rosie and Opal both had a 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 a uh severe arthritis, so she had a real limp.
And she was also an outcast in the herd.
Um, because she was more interested in people than she was interested in 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, uh, you couldn't walk her past certain elephants, so he 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.
Um, 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 Opal.
I I just remember the eye contact, and it was crazy unbelievable.
Oh, she's such a good girl.
This is from a video of Carrie holding Opal's trunk and walking with her on a sunny day.
Yeah, well.
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.
And Rosie was 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.
Were 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, and Lewis, um, Jim's youngest son.
Um Henry, um, 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 shuffle dung in the morning and then go to our 8 a.m. classes or whatever.
It wasn't like having just regular pets.
Rosie and Opal 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.
Well, the only thing missing was a handbag.
We'll get back to the story in a second.
First, a word from Express Employment Professionals.
A strong work ethic.
Takes pride in a job well done.
Sweats over the details.
This is you.
But to get an honest day's work, you need a response.
You need a callback.
You need a job.
Express employment professionals can help.
Because we understand what it takes to get a job.
It takes more than just online searches to land a job.
It takes someone who will identify your talent.
A person invested in your success.
At Express, we can even complete your application with you over the phone.
We'll prepare you for interviews.
Plus, we'll never charge a fee to find you a job.
At Express, we could put you to work with companies of all sizes and industries, from the production floor to the front office.
Express knows jobs.
Get to know Express.
Find your location at ExpressPros.com or on the Express Jobs app.
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 Opal.
And to Jim, it was a lot more than just a retirement home.
The other purpose was education.
And 99% of the 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 uh awareness of the probable extinction of elephants.
So The elephant enclosure was literally in Carrie and 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 to bad dawn down at dusk.
Yeah.
He was, you know, all in.
I mean, if they were if one of them was sick, he'd put a cot up in the barn and you know, spend the night there, uh, making sure that uh they were okay or 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 he wanted to be.
I mean, he loved, loved, loved being around them.
Thank you.
you you you you you you Jim had a great rapport with them.
Great rapport.
This is Cindy Preventure.
I was the other uh elephant trainer.
To keep elephants, you legally have to 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 um 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 and help, you know, um, so that you're not exhausted, whatever.
And so he's like, yeah, no, no, no, she's fine, she's better now.
I'm gonna get some sleep tonight, because I'm like, I'm on my way, I'm gonna 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.
Um, could you kind of bring me back to the day that um Okay, hang on one sec.
That's okay.
Okay, so the routine was he would go out first first thing in the morning.
Or 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 if 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'd left them alone.
And I 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 a new hip, and he was always putting it off.
And um, like the last person he ever took care of was himself.
So what I think happened is probably he fell.
Um, and uh 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 a hundred percent 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 a plane back.
You know, it was like uh Tuesday.
Um, 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 right in the heat of it.
It was kind of popped out of nowhere.
I I 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 to, I didn't want the real world to be out there waiting.
It took a while for 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 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 in all the shock, it was like, what are we gonna 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 um, 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 Opal's original herd that Tom and Jim had worked with in their circus days had retired to a similar organization in Oklahoma called Endangered Ark.
Within a few days, they sent up a truck and Rosie and Opal 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.
Cause 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 as Jim did.
The memorial for Jim was a massive event in hope.
It was even televised.
Oh, that was wild.
I mean, I there must have been a thousand people there.
I mean, it doesn't it seems like uh 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.
Um that's true both in the context of family and I think the community as well.
Um a lot of the decisions that I make and a lot of the things that I do, and a lot of the way I approach the world is a product of how um he did all of those things.
I mean, the the true 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 gonna do it, it was his dream, and he did it.
I mean, that that is worth 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 see that.
Even with Hope Elephants Gone, Rosie and Opal'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 Lorita 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 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 Lorita lived his life.
And you gotta wonder what would the world look like if we all pursued work like that if you had to give uh like a ringmaster exit to Jim how what would you how would you do it?
Probably something like, ladies and gentlemen, the man and the legend, Jim Lurita, he'll be back.
And there they go, those ponderous pachyderms, Rosie, Opal, and Jim.
Jim Huge thanks to Lorita family to Cindy Preventure, Marty Larita, and Endangered Arc.
You can find pictures and videos of Jim Rosie and Opal on our website ExpressPros.com slash podcast.
For On the Job, I'm Otis Gray Thanks for listening to On the Job.
Brought to you 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 iHeartRadio and Apple Podcasts.
If you liked what you heard, please consider rating or reviewing the show on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen.
▲
Export Selection