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1963–1965
Lead: Two entries in the zoo's published timeline carry the mid-century zoo's small fame. In 1963 a capuchin monkey was born at the zoo — the first South American primate born there, a modest milestone that measures how the collection was growing beyond the hardy hoofstock of the 1947 list into species that bred in South Bend. In 1965 the zoo made national news. Vandals stole Toro, the zoo's ocelot, and the small spotted cat was found by South Bend city police in the trunk of a car. The theft and recovery were carried on Paul Harvey's newscast — the most widely heard radio news voice in America — and the zoo's own timeline preserves the episode as the moment the Potawatomi Zoo's name was spoken, once, to the whole country. Toro is the only individual animal of the zoo's first six decades whose name and story the published record keeps whole, and he is printed here at exactly that size: one ocelot, one theft, one police recovery, one national broadcast. The rest of the mid-century collection passes in the aggregate — births and arrivals the timeline does not itemize — and this history does not invent names the record did not keep.
Sources:
- Potawatomi Zoo, earlier published history timeline (the capuchin birth, 1963; the theft and recovery of Toro the ocelot, 1965, and the Paul Harvey newscast).