'Zoo Nebraska' dream turned into nightmare

Creative non-fiction has been a strong suit for the creative writing department at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. Books by former graduate students such as Brad Land's "Goat" and Garrard Conley's "Boy, Erased" gained national acclaims and both were adapted as feature films.

Now, Carson Vaughan, who earned his MFA at UNCW, delivers "Zoo Nebraska," a riveting but depressing yarn of good intentions gone bad.

In the 1990s, Zoo Nebraska was a landmark for youngsters in northeastern Nebraska, a roadside zoo somewhat similar to New Hanover County's Tregembo Animal Park, with a near-random collection of exotic animals housed mostly in rustic farm buildings. One New York visitor asked, this is a zoo? Most visitors, though, seemed to find it quaint.

The zoo was the reluctant brainchild of Dick Haskin, a bookish loner from Royal, Neb. (population 81 and dropping). Mesmerized by primates since watching a film about Jane Goodall in high school, Haskin had majored in life sciences at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and had worked in a series of zoos, gaining some notoriety for teaching basic American Sign Language to chimpanzees.

Along the way, Haskin had met Dian Fossey of "Gorillas in the Mist" fame and had planned to work as her assistant before she was murdered in 1985 in Rwanda.

In her memory, Haskin — then all of 25 years old — resolved to found a Primate Research Center. Toward that end, he obtained custody of Reuben, a young chimp, and brought him home to Royal, where he housed the little ape temporarily in a corn crib.

Haskin was passionate, and a bit naive, and nobody seemed to have the heart to tell him no to his face. No one wondered out loud whether it was a good idea, housing tropical primates in a state where winter temperatures regularly dip into the teens and where two-foot snows are routine. No one wondered whether Royal — a prairie farm settlement where the school, the post office and even the church had closed long ago — could provide enough support.

Still, Haskin soldiered on. Funds were always short, and fund-raising was not his forte, but he threw "birthday parties" for Reuben and other nickel-and-dime events, in an effort to scrounge enough money to build a proper ape-proof building and to find Reuben a mate, or at least a friend.

The idea of a scientific primate facility slowly got lost. What was left was Zoo Nebraska, a private, non-profit menagerie with Reuben, a tiger, a camel, two rheumatic cougars, snow monkeys, fainting goats, miscellaneous other livestock, and Haskin as the unpaid full-time director.

Kids loved it. School buses pulled up from miles around. Haskin, however, quickly burned out from his 24/7 work schedule; there was never enough money to hire more than a few assistants. Much of the work was done by a well-meaning but motley assortment of local volunteers who seem to have wandered over from Lake Wobegon.

Nebraska native Johnny Carson donated enough money to buy Reuben a proper enclosed facility and to keep the zoo going, but that generosity may have done more harm than good. Haskin finally quit, his health shot, and the locals — who now ran the board of directors — could seldom get along with the professionals who replaced him.

Eventually, the locals took over entirely. The last director, who went by the name "Junior," ran the local machine shop. Nobody had any training in dealing with adult chimpanzees, who can weigh up to 120 pounds and have enough strength to pull off a human's face if frightened or confronted.

It was a disaster waiting to happen, and it happened on Sept. 10, 2005. Through a misunderstanding among volunteer keepers, a door was left open, and Reuben and three other grown chimps sauntered out, loose, into the little town. There was a tranquilizer dart gun, but no one there knew how to operate it.

As one witness recalled, the result looked like the current adaptation of "Planet of the Apes."

Vaughan — who's written for Smithsonian and The Guardian newspaper in Britain — tells the story well. More subtly, he takes care not to wear down the contradictions in his informants' stories or the contrasts in their points of view. The result is somewhat like "The Alexandria Quartet," where readers are faced with different versions of the same tale. They have to decide which is true, or most likely.

Reporter Ben Steelman can be reached at 910-343-2208 or Ben.Steelman@StarNewsOnline.com.