From the start, Joan's favorite animals were the elephants. On her first day as a Children’s Zoo attendant in 1968, she fell in love with Carol the Asian elephant. One of her duties was to help train Carol. “In some ways, my career was closely tied to an elephant,” Joan says. “Teaching Carol to hold a paintbrush led to our first local news story about the painting elephant, picked up by newspapers all over the country, leading to our first appearance on ‘The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson.’ That led to all the other television show appearances.”