More Than A Job: The Story of Jim Laurita

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. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
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(01:08):
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

(01:31):
season is about a man named Jim Lurita. 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

(01:52):
story of Jim LaRita 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 law Rita.
I am Jim Loreta'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. The Ladies and Gentlemen. Boys

(02:18):
and Girls, Welcome World to Carson and Barns, the world's
only five ring circus. Tom went to college for about
two years before leaving in nineteen seventy seven to become
a juggler and ring announcer at Carson and Barnes, the

(02:38):
largest tinted circus in America. Ladies and Gentlemen, the Prima
Ballerina of spangle Land. Ladies and gentlemen, the Amazing Captain
Donald car 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.

(03:01):
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

(03:21):
zoology when Tom called him and said that he could
get him a job with animals and circus. And the
job was shoveling elephant manure because so we had twenty
six elephants that were traveling with the show. It's a
lot of elephant manure. You have no idea how much
the maneuver that is. Jim showed incredible talent for working

(03:41):
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 twenty six elephants would come rumbling into
the tent. It was a huge tent. The first elephant,
who was the matriarch, would stop, and then one behind
her would get on her haunches and put her to

(04:03):
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 to all the way to six.
And I guarantee, and no one who saw that, you know,
he is ever gonna forget that. Once he worked with elephants,

(04:29):
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.

(04:49):
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 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's still kind of always preferred

(05:10):
the company of animals. He would say, you know, people
are mean, people are dishonest, and animals are are not.
The animals are who they are. I remember being in
his vet practice and there'd be some dog come in
and it was growling and you can see this thing
was going to bite, and I was like, whoa, I
don't want to go near this animal. He would just

(05:31):
walk up to it, you know, put his hand on it,
and he had no fear, 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
one am and he had right over and if you
didn't have any money, he'd just say pay me when
he can. That's just who he was. In fact, he was,
you know, a terrible businessman in that sense, because he

(05:51):
didn't 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 this

(06:17):
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 Lurita, Jim's
wife of twenty years. I mean, I just seemed but
I'm so used to, you know, off the wall sort

(06:39):
of wacky things from him, and he just came at
life in a different way, and I believed it. Yes,
I thought it was weird and crazy, but I didn't
doubt it for a second. Carry first met Jim bringing
her ex boyfriend's cat to the clinic. She and that
guy eventually broke up, and after just two dates, him

(07:00):
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 of 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,

(07:21):
because that's just the kind of guy that he was.
Exactly he said he was gonna do something, he did,
and if he said he was gonna anything, anything that
he said, he followed through on. And so I knew,
I knew it would happen. In two thousand and eleven,
it did. We're here in Hugo, Oklahoma to begin the

(07:44):
process of moving these animals up to Maine. Uh Rosie
and Opal 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 el Fants in Maine,
which was basically an old folks home and rehab center
for retired circus elephants. Their first two elephants were Rosie

(08:06):
and Opal, who were from the original herd that Tom
and Jim worked within the circus years before. I think
they're gonna be very comfortable. They're gonna 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 Opal both
had a lot of physical ailments. And we're about fourty
years old when they came to Maine, which is pretty

(08:27):
old for elephants. Rosie was very young when Jim first
met her in the circus, and out of the twenty
six 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 severe arthritis, so
she had a real limb. And she was also an

(08:48):
outcast in the herd because she was more interested in
people and 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 her, you couldn't walk her past certain elephants.
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.

(09:09):
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

(09:29):
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 said, to give girl.
This is from a video of Carrie holding Opal's trunk

(09:50):
and walking with her on a sunny day. Good Jimmy
would say she was, you know, she was mischievous, and
he would say she has crazy eyes. It 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

(10:11):
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 just they're you know, comfortable,
they're peaceful. And this one is from a clip of
Jim spraying Rosy down with cold water. Where all your

(10:36):
friends jealous Oh yeah. They didn't even know what to
do with themselves when we brought them over. These are
carrying Jim's two boys, Henry and Lewis. Yeah, and Lewis
m Jim's youngest son, Um Henry Um the oldest. Both
boys are in college, Henry studying zoology just like his dad.
But you guys are like the elephant kids. Yeah, yeah,
I've got some comments about the smell after goat shoveled

(10:58):
down in the morning and aren't eating m classes. 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

(11:21):
around the enclosure. They're like two mischievous old ladies. Yes,
that's exactly what they were. Pretty much. Only thing missing
was a handbag. We'll get back to the story in
a second. First, a word from Express employment professionals. A
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(11:44):
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(12:26):
the production floor to the front office. Express Nose Jobs,
get to No Express, find your location at Express pros
dot com or on the Express Jobs app. And now
back to our story. Hope Elephants was completely open to

(12:47):
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 so
that people who came to Hope Elephants walked away thinking,
oh my god, this is just so amazing and so cool,

(13:07):
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

(13:34):
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. Yeah, for sure, Like
elephants just functioned with the sun. So seven days a week,
just down down at desk, he was, you know, all in.
I mean if they were if one of them was sick,

(13:56):
he'd put a cot up in the barn and you know,
spend the night there making sure that 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. Jim had a great rapport with them,

(14:23):
great rapport. This is Cindy Preventure. I was the other
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 two thousand fourteen, Cindy said that

(14:46):
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, because he
saw my number and he was like, hey girl, because
that's what he all has 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

(15:06):
a little bit and um over the weekend. And my
son had mentioned, while, 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,

(15:28):
I know 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 going to grab a bag, and he's like, no, no,
you know, we'll see you on Wednesday. And the very
next morning, carry called me, Um, could you kind of

(15:53):
bring me back to the day that Um? Okay, okay.
So the racine was he would go out first first,
first thing in the morning, unless he had slept there,
and check the girls, give then their hay, give them
their you know, just the usual morning routine. And we

(16:16):
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

(16:37):
then he said no Rosie, and I thought, well, that's weird.
And I went out there and the doors locked, 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

(16:59):
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 I think that Rosie

(17:20):
tried to help him up, you know the way an
elephant helps another elephant up as they used their foot
to sort of you know, pick them up. And I mean,
I'm sure she didn't try to hurt him, you know,
she tried to help him, but in helping him crushed

(17:41):
his crush. It was my freshman year and then I
just popped blame back. You know. It was like a Tuesday, um,
and I was like, you know, like woke up early
for school and like, um, like heard some stuff going

(18:01):
on through the monitor. You know. It was just like
right in the right in the heat of it. It
was kind of popped underwhere 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.

(18:22):
I 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 as Cindy, the other
elephant trainer. The two elephants were in the outside pasture
when I got there, and you know, I just went out. Now,

(18:44):
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

(19:04):
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,

(19:36):
it was like what are we going to do 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

(19:57):
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 Arc. Within a few days, they sent up a
truck and Rosie and Ople were on the road south. Yeah.
I was sad to see that go, but I don't

(20:22):
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 as Jim did. The memorial

(20:45):
for Jim was a massive event, and 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. His trajectory in his life.

(21:05):
You know, he kind of just had this like magnetism,
magnetism about him. You know, it attracted people and to
help people together. And 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 are doing a lot of
the way I approached the world is a product of
how um he did all of those things. I mean,

(21:29):
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

(21:49):
he was going to 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, m he was living his dream,
which I don't think very many people can see that.

(22:21):
Even with the 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
mains borders. Even National Geographic made a video remembered Jim
and all that he did. In two thousand seventeen, Opal
passed away at the age of forty eight. Rosie is

(22:42):
still living outer years, happily amongst the herd that Jim
first met her in. Jim LaRita was a veterinarian. That
was his job, but his real work was providing a
window into a world that people hadn't owned before. Something
bigger than that. He took a crazy idea and made

(23:04):
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 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

(23:26):
for a living being defined by who we are. That
is how Jim Loreta 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 like a ringmaster exit to Jim, how what would

(23:47):
you How would you do it? Probably something like Ladies
and gentlemen, the man and the legend, Jim Loreta, He'll
be back. There they go, those ponderous pack of darts. Rosie,
Opal and Jim huge thanks to the LaRita family, to

(24:23):
Cindy Preventure, Marty Lorita and Endangered arc. You can find
pictures and videos of Jim, Rosie and Opal on our
website Express pros dot com. Slash podcast for On the Job,
I'm otus Gray. Thanks for listening to On the Job,

(25:00):
brought to you by Express Employment Professionals. Find out more
at Express Pros dot com. This season of On the
Job is produced by Audiation and Red Seat Ventures. Our
executive producer is Sandy Smallens. Our producer is Otis Gray.
The show is mixed by Matt Noble at The Loft
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(25:21):
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