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DAVID ISAY: Moscow, Texas. It's a blip on the map, an unincorporated hamlet about ninety miles north of Houston on Highway 59. It's a safe bet that if driving by you would simply miss Moscow, but if you slowed down enough to look at the small welcome to Moscow sign posted on the side of the road, you would see that the town has a motto: "I Thought I Saw a Dinosaur." That is because Moscow is home to Dinosaur Gardens. The theme park is located right across the highway from the town's only other attraction, the Moscow tattoo studio. It sits in the woods behind a white picket fence, which reads "Prehistoric animals in their natural habitat."

DONALD BEAN: I'm trying to keep this, as much as I can, like it would have been back then.

ISAY: Donald Bean is the creator of this roadside attraction. If you journey into Dinosaur Gardens, chances are you'll find Bean all by himself tending to his beloved creatures.

BEAN: This dinosaur here, I pulled a squirrel's nest out of his mouth one day last week.

ISAY: Donald Bean is a retired carpenter. He's a large, lumbering man dressed in blue denim overalls, coke-bottle glasses resting low on his nose.

ISAY: What is it about dinosaurs that appeals to you?

BEAN: Well, first the fact that they are big, and they ruled the world for years, you know, thousands of years, millions of years. I just like 'em, just because they are unusual. Something different, I guess.

ISAY: Donald Bean's Dinosaur Gardens consists of exactly eleven weathered fiberglass dinosaurs laid out along a winding trail cut into the woods behind his house. Bean opened up the Dinosaur Gardens in 1981, the culmination of a life-long fascination with these prehistoric creatures. Bean says that the genesis of the theme park came about in the late 1980's, when he and his wife, on vacation, happened upon a similar roadside attraction in Oregon.

BEAN: I knew what I wanted as soon as I saw that. I said "That's what I want to do," so I did it.

ISAY: It took Bean twenty-five years of planning and saving money from his carpentry work before he was finally ready to unveil his plans for a dinosaur theme park right in the heart of Moscow, Texas.

ISAY: What did your wife think of the idea?

BEAN: She didn't like it at first. She wasn't too fir it because we spent out life savings on it, you know, what we saved all our lives.

ISAY: The park cost the Beans nearly one hundred thousand dollars. Most of that money went to a local east Texas craftsman named Burt Holster, whose fiberglass animal work had, up to that point, primarily been featured on top of fast food restaurants, and as high school mascots. Donald Bean says that collaborating with a man of Holster's artistic temperament was something new for him.

BEAN: Well, if you're talking to him, he may or may not answer you. His mind is working on a dinosaur or something. He may never answer, he may not have heard you, he didn't hear nothing you said, and you're standing as close as we are.

ISAY: When Donald Bean finally opened up Dinosaur Gardens, twelve years ago, it was met with just about the level of enthusiasm one might anticipate for a dinosaur theme park in the middle of nowhere. The masses did not seem to share Bean's fervor for creatures prehistoric. There were no lines at the ticket office.

ISAY: Did it depress you that not as many people came as you had expected?

BEAN: No, it didn't really depress me. It kind of disappointed me.

ISAY: The disappointment remains to this day. For 12 years now, business has been slow at Dinosaur Gardens. There are two ways to look at the situation. There is a downside to be sure. Bean's wife of forty-three years, Yvonne, had to come out of retirement and take a job at a nearby convenient store to help support her husband's dinosaur habit. But there is an up side as well. With visitors scarce, Donald Beam can spend as much time as he wants alone in his theme park, pondering his dinosaurs.

BEAN: In the evening, or the mornings, I just saunter down through here, you know, and not go fast, just go slow and look 'em over. And if you've got a lot of imagination, you just feel like you're back in time, you know. You can think what these things can do, or what they do when you're not here or something. I like this one. I think, in your imagination, he'd move slow and sluggish, unless something scared him, or he was running something for food. In that case he'd be real fast. And if you're walking down here, unless you're a little kid, you know they're not going to bother you, and so you can walk along and imagine all the good things about them. Now this is a Macedon. He's a meat eater, he's vicious, and this fur on his back . . .

ISAY: There is something of an otherworldly quality to Dinosaur Gardens, maybe it's the dinosaurs, maybe it's Donald Bean. Imperfections abound, like the unsightly ring of green pond around the Lazmasaurous, who resides in the Dinosaur Gardens swamp. But, all in all, it's difficult not to get swept up in the charm of this place.

ISAY: That's a beauty.

BEAN: Yeah. These dinosaurs here, see that big one standing out -- he's looking right at us as we come down the trail -- got his egg, like he'd fixing to take off running.

ISAY: If you could do it all over again, would you build the park?

BEAN: Yeah, I really would. It's my home.

ISAY: Starting this coming weekend, dinosaur gardens will be open seven days a week through Labor Day.

BEAN: It costs a dollar fifty for children and two-fifty for adults.

ISAY: A small price to pay, indeed, to take a trip back in time with Donald bean, creator of Dinosaur Gardens in Moscow, Texas.

Producer: David Isay / Supervising engineer: Caryl Wheeler / Funding provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the New York State Council on the Arts and the Corporation. Photograph by Harvey Wang.

"Dinosaur Gardens" premiered May 27, 1993, on Morning Edition. Copyright © 1993 Sound Portraits Productions. All Rights Reserved.

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This piece is available in the following audio formats [6:23 min]:
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		intro
		transcript

		Holding On, a book with an oral history based on this documentary
		Jack Hitt's audio essay on the evolution of dinosaur exhibits, from This American Life (Act 2).
		"Dinosaur-oriented" Web sites from UC Berkeley's Museum of Paleontology.

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