I continued to work on taxidermy while attending college. In my sophomore year, Walter Eisserer, a renowned Austrian gunsmith, dropped by my fathers home to ask if I'd be interested in mounting a chamois that he had hunted in Austria. I showed Walter some of my work. He liked it, but he told me that I'd learn more by working for a museum studio. His suggestion encouraged me to pursue taxidermy as a vocation. He advised me to call Steve Horn at Jonas Studios in Mount Vernon, NY. Walter is still a good friend of mine, hard to believe, forty years later.
I decided to see if I could get a job with Jonas Brothers in Mount Vernon, New York. Like Walter, the Jonas Brothers also emigrated from Austria. There were three of them — Louis Paul, who started his studio in New York, Coloman, who started his studio in Denver, and Guy, who had a studio in Seattle. Steve Horn had acquired the business from Louis Paul Jonas about forty years earlier when Jonas decided to step back from the commercial side of the
