Zoo Nebraska
The Dismantling of an American Dream
Little A, April 2019
A resonant true story of small-town politics and community perseverance and of decent people and questionable choices, Zoo Nebraska is a timely requiem for a rural America in the throes of extinction.
Royal, Nebraska, population eighty-one—where the church, high school, and post office each stand abandoned, monuments to a Great Plains town that never flourished. But for nearly twenty years, they had a zoo, seven acres that rose from local peculiarity to key tourist attraction to devastating tragedy. And it all began with one man’s outsize vision.
When Dick Haskin’s plans to assist primatologist Dian Fossey in Rwanda were cut short by her murder, Dick’s devotion to primates didn’t die with her. He returned to his hometown with Reuben, an adolescent chimp, in the bed of a pickup truck and transformed a trailer home into the Midwest Primate Center. As the tourist trade multiplied, so did the inhabitants of what would become Zoo Nebraska, the unlikeliest boon to Royal’s economy in generations and, eventually, the source of a power struggle that would lead to the tragic implosion of Dick Haskin’s dream.
“Journalist Vaughan skillfully narrates a resonant, at times heart-wrenching tale of small-town Americana…What could have been rote reporting in lesser hands springs to life as Vaughan dramatically revisits that grim day and the series of bad decisions that led up to it, giving a white-knuckle retelling of the rampage and the sad, even cruel, aftermath…Vaughan’s nuanced, poignant storytelling provides a sobering take on what happens when the best intentions go awry.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Reading like a sustained segment of This American Life, in a tone at once dryly comic and doleful, this account of bizarre events in northeastern Nebraska paints a portrait of the entire region and suggests a metaphor for mankind in general. Well observed and crisply written.”
—Alexander Payne, Academy Award–winning director of Nebraska and The Descendants