Owners of the Decatur Balloon Animal Zoo posted a "closed" sign on their front door last Thursday. CEO Fred Kinglsey said that the concept never quite caught on, as the projected target of 50,000 annual zoo-goers fell short by 49,989. Kingsley recalls the short history of the project: "My wife and I were in Vegas, watching this magician create these balloon animals: giraffes and such. And he says, 'I bet you never seen animals like this in a zoo!'. Well, my wife thought that that would be a cute idea, to have a balloon animal zoo. So I just decided, what the heck, let's go for it!"
Kingsley, a school janitor for thirty-five years, dumped his life savings into the project. He leased a 2000 square foot store front, built custom-made cages and paid a professional $500 to blow up his first set of zoo animals -- almost two hundred of them. "But after a few weeks," Kinglsey laments ,"the damn things started to wilt. We had to create a new set of animals every month." After eight months of dismal attendance, the Kingsleys couldn't afford the magician anymore, so they left the animals in their limp state. By the end of the year, they just looked like empty balloons with a few knots in them. "What the hell," says Kingsley. "Nobody came anyways."
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