Bamberger

from a WSJ obituary of J. David Bamberger, conservationist and shareholder in Church’s Chicken.

He learned, for example, to place new locations in middle-class neighborhoods, but right on the border of lower-income ones; the real estate was cheaper, and you doubled your clientele. “Black people would come over to the white neighborhood to buy chicken. But if you put a store in a predominantly black neighborhood, white people wouldn’t come over and buy there,” Bamberger lamented in LeBlanc’s book.

There’s a Church’s Chicken in the Inland Empire on the way back from Joshua Tree, it’s not quality. But Bamberger retired in 1988. More:

In addition to his restoration of the land now known as “Selah, Bamberger Ranch Preserve,” Bamberger was instrumental in the preservation of nearby Bracken Cave in the early 1990s, home to more than 15 million Mexican free-tailed bats—a colony believed to be the largest concentration of nonhuman mammals on the planet. Bamberger gained the trust of the family that owned the cave and brokered a sale to the nonprofit Bat Conservation International, then paid to build a trail system and other infrastructure to make the site accessible to visitors.

Suddenly enchanted by bats, Bamberger next hired biologists and geologists to hunt for a spot at Selah where he could establish a bat population of his own. They couldn’t find a single suitable site. 

“Most people would have said, ‘Oh well, that’s too bad. I guess we’re not going to have a big bat colony here,’ ” explained April Sansom, executive director of Selah, Bamberger Ranch Preserve. “But not J. David. What he said was, ‘Oh, guess we better try to build one.’ ”

Construction of a system of underground caves was completed in 1997—a mammoth project which Bamberger conceded was “eccentric” even for him, and which was mocked locally as “Bamberger’s Folly.” It took several years, and some iterative modifications to the structure, but wild bats eventually moved in and established a colony there. The population is now half-a-million strong.