Speaker 1: Here it is.
Speaker 2: It's the last month of summer vacation for all these
Speaker 2: school children, and they're not allowed to enjoy it because
Speaker 2: you don't know when you're going to get tacked and
Speaker 2: bitten by an Indian cobra.
Speaker 3: Every corner of this planet has wild animals that are revered, feared,
Speaker 3: and sensationalized, deadly scorpions, killer bees, piranhas giant crocodiles, to
Speaker 3: African lions.
Speaker 4: However, the cultures.
Speaker 3: Of where these beasts exist help the people to know
Speaker 3: how to deal and live with them. But what if
Speaker 3: one of them was transplanted to where you lived, maybe
Speaker 3: even right in Middle America? And what if that beast
Speaker 3: was one of the world's top wildlife villains, the global
Speaker 3: bad boy, the Cobra. I want to tell you about
Speaker 3: the Great Cobra Scare of nineteen fifty three, A story of.
Speaker 4: Fear, fangs, and.
Speaker 3: Lies, but it all ties back into the unique identity
Speaker 3: of a quaint Midwestern town. I really doubt that you're
Speaker 3: going to want to miss this one.
Speaker 5: This is the article of the two page article in
Speaker 5: Life magazine. Here's a postcard new home of Cobra's Hey,
Speaker 5: the durn Woods is full of them and says exclusive,
Speaker 5: try our new cobra haircut. It's daring and deadly, but
Speaker 5: it'll go with the new fall fashions at Hester's Beauty
Speaker 5: Salon on Saint Louis.
Speaker 4: Wow the cobra haircut.
Speaker 3: My name is Clay Nukem and this is the Bear
Speaker 3: Grease Podcast, where we'll explore things forgotten but relevant, search
Speaker 3: for insight and unlikely places, and where we'll tell the
Speaker 3: story of Americans who live their lives close to the land.
Speaker 3: Presented by FHF Gear American Maid, purpose built hunting and
Speaker 3: fishing gear that's designed to be as rugged.
Speaker 4: As the place as we explore. I just pulled over
Speaker 4: to my neighbor's house, Fred Lowly. He's a He's got
Speaker 4: a trailer.
Speaker 3: In his front yard that says Lollly's oddity show venomous snakes.
Speaker 4: Walking up to his door. Hey, mister Fred, how are
Speaker 4: you doing.
Speaker 6: I'm doing good.
Speaker 4: I'm doing good. Good to see you.
Speaker 3: As the crow flies. I'm less than two miles from
Speaker 3: my house in the Ozarks of Arkansas. Mister Fred is
Speaker 3: eighty two years old, wiry, witty, and seemingly imperfect health.
Speaker 3: He's got shoulder linked white hair and he's been bitten
Speaker 3: by overt any venomous snakes. He's a real piece of work.
Speaker 3: I'm here to talk about cobra's What do you got? Well,
Speaker 3: I'm recording, is that okay?
Speaker 1: Oh?
Speaker 5: Yeah?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 6: Thing I didn't know exactly. He wanted some information on cobra.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 6: You ever heard of William Hast Bill Hass Miami Serpentarium. No,
Speaker 6: he did, but he lived to be about one hundred.
Speaker 6: He's been bitting a couple of hundred times, probably about
Speaker 6: different things. Even a king cobra lived through it.
Speaker 4: Really, you've you've been bit by a cobra.
Speaker 6: Yeah, but it was a much It wasn't a king kobra.
Speaker 6: It was a African band of Egypsian cobra.
Speaker 3: And I think that doesn't exactly sound like like a
Speaker 3: good one to get bit by.
Speaker 6: Oh it's not, I too. What it got a good
Speaker 6: solid grip on me right along and here I'm showing
Speaker 6: my index finger and held on and was chewing. And
Speaker 6: that's what they do, is they chew their v elemental
Speaker 6: They don't know. Yeah, it's not like a rattle snake.
Speaker 6: They pop and they're gone.
Speaker 4: It's done like a rattler was.
Speaker 6: Yeah, yeah, cobra's grab a hole, chew it in. They've
Speaker 6: got shorter things, real starry thing and king cobras have
Speaker 6: a really big one and they've been known to kill elephants.
Speaker 6: It's so mad, you know what I mean.
Speaker 3: Cobras are no doubt the global bad boys of serpents.
Speaker 3: The king cobra, native to northern India and southern China,
Speaker 3: is considered by some to be the most venomous snake
Speaker 3: in the world, and they can get over fifteen feet long.
Speaker 3: Mister Fred was bitten by a banded Egyptian cobra, not
Speaker 3: as venomous as the king cobra, but that was in
Speaker 3: nineteen ninety two while he was touring with a snake
Speaker 3: display at a carnival in Clarksville, Tennessee. Cobra was his pet.
Speaker 3: But why are we talking about cobras? I get the
Speaker 3: willies when I see one of those suckers, and I
Speaker 3: love snakes. But then again, in the West, the evil
Speaker 3: nature of cobra's has been marketed to us hard for
Speaker 3: the last fifty years. I'd even say that my generation
Speaker 3: received the brunt of that marketing. Aside from the biological
Speaker 3: fangs and venom, their symbols of villainous evil, and depending
Speaker 3: upon how old you are, you'll remember the terrorist Cobra
Speaker 3: organization of the g I. Joe World, And in nineteen
Speaker 3: eighty one, Indiana Jones faced off with a monocled cobra
Speaker 3: in Raiders of the Lost Arc. In nineteen eighty six,
Speaker 3: Sylvester Stallone wrote and produced a movie called Cobra. But
Speaker 3: the cobra Kidjoe from Karate Kid was the epitome of evil.
Speaker 3: Those guys were bad news.
Speaker 5: What is that way?
Speaker 7: I can't hear you.
Speaker 3: Cobras are clearly symbols of evil, but they've come by
Speaker 3: their reputation honestly. The World Health Organization reports as many
Speaker 3: as two point seven million people are envenomed by snakes
Speaker 3: each year. Some are bitten by venom of snakes but
Speaker 3: not envenomed, but up to four hundred thousand people are
Speaker 3: permanently disabled, like having amputations. In eighty one to one
Speaker 3: hundred and thirty eight thousand people die globally from snake
Speaker 3: bites each year. Granted, not all of these are cobras,
Speaker 3: but there's certainly big players in Africa in Asia.
Speaker 4: But what do cobras have to do with America?
Speaker 3: And what do they have to do with the midwestern
Speaker 3: town of Springfield, Missouri.
Speaker 4: Okay, so show me what you got.
Speaker 5: Here, all right? So what I did. I went through
Speaker 5: our archives and just put in the word cobra. And
Speaker 5: this is some of the things that popped up during
Speaker 5: that time of the after the cobras got They actually
Speaker 5: added a cobra's snake to the city of Springfield seal. Wow,
Speaker 5: so it circles around the shield that's in the middle
Speaker 5: of the seal.
Speaker 4: What year did they do that?
Speaker 5: They did it in fifty four. That next year after.
Speaker 3: That, they put a cobra on the seal of a
Speaker 3: town in the Ozark Yeah. Yeah, did he just say
Speaker 3: cobra scare and that his town has a cobra on
Speaker 3: their seal.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: I'm in downtown Springfield, Missouri, at the History Museum on
Speaker 3: the Square, eight thousand miles away from the cobra's native
Speaker 3: home range. This place feels like the Missouri Smithsonian sacred
Speaker 3: ground for the Show Me State. And I'm speaking with
Speaker 3: the president Emeritus, John Steller. He's a good sized man
Speaker 3: wearing a gray sweatshirt with the collar of a polo visible.
Speaker 3: His white mustache is well trimmed, and he's got a
Speaker 3: tidy office. I'm looking over his shoulder onto his computer screen.
Speaker 3: Some thing in this city happened involving cobras.
Speaker 4: That's all I know.
Speaker 5: But here's a here's a postcard from Springfields. There a
Speaker 5: new home of cobras. The Drm Woods is full of
Speaker 5: them and.
Speaker 3: Says this is like a hillbilly Yeah, like Ozark hillbilly.
Speaker 8: Yeah.
Speaker 5: And they and even local businesses got involved. They wanted
Speaker 5: to do ads and so on. So there was advertising
Speaker 5: in the magazines and all sorts of stuff. Here's a
Speaker 5: during that time exclusive, Try our new cobra haircut. It's
Speaker 5: daring and deadly, but it'll go with the new fall fashions.
Speaker 5: That Hester's beauty salon on Saint Louis.
Speaker 8: Wow.
Speaker 4: The cobra haircut here in Springfield. Wow.
Speaker 5: So here's the big time. This is uh. This is
Speaker 5: the article of the two page article in Life magazine about.
Speaker 4: This was in the national Yeah, in the.
Speaker 5: Life magazine, which would be like being on national news.
Speaker 4: Now, okay, here's the scoop.
Speaker 3: In the late summer of nineteen fifty three, multiple Indian
Speaker 3: monocled cobras were killed in the city limits of Springfield.
Speaker 3: The incident became known as the Great Cobra Scare of
Speaker 3: nineteen fifty three. Wild Springfield is a railroad town in
Speaker 3: southwest Missouri. Has a population of one hundred and seventy thousand.
Speaker 3: Wild Bill Hiccock killed a guy named Cut on the
Speaker 3: Springfield Square in eighteen sixty five, and it's the hometown
Speaker 3: of Brad Pitt. It's not entirely relevant, but it's important
Speaker 3: to note that Missouri is officially the Midwest, even though
Speaker 3: the southern one third of Missouri is the Ozarks, and
Speaker 3: where I live in Arkansas, which is also the Ozarks,
Speaker 3: is considered the South. Just some clarity. I'm now headed
Speaker 3: to Mother's Brewery and Springfield to talk with Kyle Jeffreys.
Speaker 3: He's the liaison of the brewery. He's got bushy salt
Speaker 3: and pepper hair and sideburns down to the middle of
Speaker 3: his chi weeks. He's gonna start to tell us what's up.
Speaker 3: We're going back to nineteen fifty three.
Speaker 4: Dwight D.
Speaker 3: Eisenhower has just been sworn as president, the Korean War
Speaker 3: has ended, and Elvis Presley will begin his music career
Speaker 3: A year later in nineteen fifty four.
Speaker 2: Essentially, It is just standard summer in small city, big
Speaker 2: town Springfield, Missouri in the Ozarks. The year is nineteen
Speaker 2: fifty three. Everybody's just doing their regular thing. And there's
Speaker 2: a couple and they're sitting on their porch one August afternoon.
Speaker 8: And they see a snake go past.
Speaker 2: And obviously that's not too much cause for alarm for
Speaker 2: anybody in the Ozarks, except they noticed it was larger
Speaker 2: than the snakes they were used to seeing, and it
Speaker 2: just didn't look like I mean, it wasn't a garter snake,
Speaker 2: it wasn't a black rat snake. And so they got
Speaker 2: curious and they cornered it, and they were really concerned
Speaker 2: because they didn't know it was so they killed it.
Speaker 8: They took a garden hole and they just whacked it.
Speaker 2: And then they got really curious because they were like,
Speaker 2: I don't So they took it to Dickerson Park Zoo,
Speaker 2: the small little zoo here in Springfield, and they were like,
Speaker 2: what is this And the official of the zoo is alarmed.
Speaker 8: They're like, this is an Indian cobra. This is they're
Speaker 8: not native to this continent.
Speaker 2: And too they are deadly, quite venomous, and this is
Speaker 2: an anomaly, and so at this point it's not anything
Speaker 2: that becomes part of like public alarm or public concern,
Speaker 2: but it is puzzling until another one is found and killed.
Speaker 2: And at this point you have two Indian cobras in Springfield, Missouri.
Speaker 2: At this point, now it starts to get some public
Speaker 2: acknowledgement and people start to become except over the course
Speaker 2: of the next six weeks, they're going to end up
Speaker 2: killing eleven of these cobras.
Speaker 3: Indian cobras in Middle America. And Kyle was right. They
Speaker 3: killed eleven, but they also caught one alive, making the
Speaker 3: grand total of twelve of these global bad boys in Springfield.
Speaker 4: Here's John.
Speaker 5: It actually started in August when the first snakes started
Speaker 5: to appear, and they were odd snakes. Nobody knew what
Speaker 5: they were. These snakes would raise up and like raise
Speaker 5: up high out of the grass and strike at you.
Speaker 5: And they'd never seen snakes like that before.
Speaker 3: And this was probably before the cobra was really famous
Speaker 3: in America.
Speaker 5: Yeah, my goodness, Yeah, I mean and then night did
Speaker 5: you know you didn't, We didn't. We had just gotten
Speaker 5: our first TV station that spring, Channel ten came on
Speaker 5: the air in the spring of fifty three, so we
Speaker 5: had one TV station and it was only on part
Speaker 5: of the time, so.
Speaker 4: People might have only heard of Cobra as maybe any.
Speaker 5: Been a movie or something like that, and not everybody,
Speaker 5: you know, not everybody was involved in that. They knew
Speaker 5: about snakes, but they didn't know about cobs. It's from,
Speaker 5: you know, the far East, and so they couldn't figure
Speaker 5: out why it was here. But they suspected rail Mauer
Speaker 5: because of his dealing and all these odd animals, and
Speaker 5: it was like a block from his house. So it
Speaker 5: was right there at the corner of National and Saint
Speaker 5: Louis Street.
Speaker 3: John just introduced the man with a smoking gun in
Speaker 3: his hand, Rao Maur. These snakes were turning up close
Speaker 3: to this guy's house and business.
Speaker 5: Rail Mauer had a pet shop in the sixteen hundred
Speaker 5: block of Saint Louis Street and in a house, just
Speaker 5: in a house. But he was he was not very
Speaker 5: disciplined in how he took care of his animals. They
Speaker 5: just kind of ran wild. I mean there was chimpanzees
Speaker 5: running around biting people, and there was two cans flying
Speaker 5: and there was stuff everywhere. But he did a lot
Speaker 5: of dealing with the local kids kids would catch garter
Speaker 5: snakes and stuff like that and bring him to him
Speaker 5: and trade him for tropical fish. He did a lot
Speaker 5: of trading with the little kids around and so he
Speaker 5: was well known in the neighborhood up there, but nobody
Speaker 5: knew that he had anything, you know, really really dangerous.
Speaker 3: On August fifteenth, the first snake was killed, and it
Speaker 3: was also brought to rail Maur to help identify it
Speaker 3: and to see if it was his, but he denied
Speaker 3: that it was a cobra and denied that it was his.
Speaker 3: He said it was a native snake with abnormal markings,
Speaker 3: but others I did it as nausea kwafia. The monocled
Speaker 3: cobra or the Indian cobra. Monocled means that it has
Speaker 3: one circle on the back of its head. A week later,
Speaker 3: on August twenty second, at fourteen twenty one East Olive,
Speaker 3: a four foot cobra was killed with a hoe.
Speaker 4: He was taken to the local high.
Speaker 3: School science teacher, who confirmed it was an Indian monicle cobra.
Speaker 3: The second one in a week on August thirty first,
Speaker 3: Cobra number three is run over by a car. On
Speaker 3: September third, a city in Florida ships one dose of
Speaker 3: antivenom to the hospital in Springfield. On September eighth, some
Speaker 3: kids find cobra number four in their yard. September ninth,
Speaker 3: Number five is killed. On September tenth, police do a
Speaker 3: full search of rail Maer's pet shop, and snake graffiti
Speaker 3: starts to show up around the town as the city
Speaker 3: goes into lockdown. Things have gotten completely out of hand.
Speaker 3: Here's Kyle.
Speaker 2: I've met people who lived through it and they talk it.
Speaker 2: They were like, it ruined my summer vacation because your
Speaker 2: parents wouldn't let you go outside and play.
Speaker 8: Here it is.
Speaker 2: It's the last month of summer vacation for all these
Speaker 2: school children in Springfield, and they're not allowed to enjoy
Speaker 2: it because you don't know when you're going to get
Speaker 2: tacked bitten by an Indian cobra.
Speaker 3: Wouldn't it be cool to talk to someone who lived
Speaker 3: through the cobra scare? I may know a guy, Oh
Speaker 3: I was, I was here.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I grew up four blocks from where this all happened.
Speaker 5: And my parents, my mother especially just knew that the
Speaker 5: cobras were coming to get her children. And it was
Speaker 5: the hottest it's the hottest summer on record in Springfield,
Speaker 5: and it had gotten up to one hundred and thirteen
Speaker 5: here that year. But we were locked up in the
Speaker 5: house and no air conditioning, locked up in the house,
Speaker 5: windows down door shut because we weren't letting snakes get in.
Speaker 5: So it was Yeah, there's not much that I don't
Speaker 5: remember about that summer in nineteen fifty three. I was little,
Speaker 5: but I still, I still. I was born forty nine,
Speaker 5: I was four years old, and I still remembered. It
Speaker 5: was one of my earliest memories.
Speaker 3: By the middle of September, things are spinning out of control.
Speaker 3: A man named LH. Stockton chunked a rock at Cobra
Speaker 3: number six before it went under his house.
Speaker 4: Then police used tear.
Speaker 3: Gas to smoke it out, dispatching it with their pistols
Speaker 3: when it tried to escape in the man's yard. On
Speaker 3: September eleventh, Vigilantis threatened to burn down the pet shop
Speaker 3: and Springfield police guard rail Maoer's house. He still claims
Speaker 3: his innocence, offering to help the city catch the cobras.
Speaker 3: By now, the Cobra scare is starting to get international attention.
Speaker 3: On September seventeenth, Cobra number seven is run over on
Speaker 3: Saint Louis Street and Cobra number eight was killed by
Speaker 3: bird dog.
Speaker 4: The city is spinning out of control. Here's Kyle.
Speaker 2: So at that point, Springfield had just instituted in the
Speaker 2: municipal government a position called city manager. The first guy
Speaker 2: to hold that. He was the first city manager. Basically
Speaker 2: everybody turns to him and like, all right, city manager,
Speaker 2: what are you talking about this? And nobody has any
Speaker 2: idea what to do about it? What can you do
Speaker 2: about it? Nobody even knows where it's coming from, nobody
Speaker 2: knows how many they're going to.
Speaker 5: Be, you know, inexperienced. As they were city health head
Speaker 5: of the health department. They began to try to come
Speaker 5: up with ways to capture these snakes, and they came
Speaker 5: up with an idea. They said, well, you know, we've
Speaker 5: seen movies of snake charmers and they're playing these flutes
Speaker 5: and there, and the snake comes up out of the
Speaker 5: basket and the whole thing. So they think those snakes
Speaker 5: must like that music. So they got a truck with
Speaker 5: a big speaker on the roof wow, and drove it
Speaker 5: slowly around town with a big group of guys with
Speaker 5: hose and shovels and picks and stuff behind it driving.
Speaker 4: This isn't a joke, no playing.
Speaker 3: So we're looking at a photograph, a black and white
Speaker 3: photograph of a what make of vehicles?
Speaker 5: That's a Ford, that's Afford Sedan, what they called the
Speaker 5: Sedan Delivery.
Speaker 3: It was like a big like a classic old style
Speaker 3: Nights and he's got these.
Speaker 5: Two big, huge speakers on the roof, and they're driving
Speaker 5: around and there's probably forty guys here behind it, all
Speaker 5: this big group of people policemen out here, and it's
Speaker 5: in behind the plumbing place at the corner of Saint
Speaker 5: Louis and Glenstone. But they had took this car, this truck,
Speaker 5: and they played snake charmer music while all these people
Speaker 5: with farm implements followed behind it walking down the street,
Speaker 5: expecting that the snakes would hear this music and come
Speaker 5: slithering out to their doom. Snakes don't hear. Snakes sense vibrations,
Speaker 5: sakes sense smell, but snakes do not hear. And the
Speaker 5: music is for the snake charmer because he moves rhythmically
Speaker 5: to the music, and the snake is fascinated by the
Speaker 5: rhythmic movement and has nothing to do with the music.
Speaker 5: It has to do with the movement of the snake charmer.
Speaker 5: That the snakes would hear this music and come slither
Speaker 5: out to their dune.
Speaker 4: It.
Speaker 5: But they tried it continuously.
Speaker 8: Wow.
Speaker 5: Just driving like four or five miles an hour around
Speaker 5: downtown with this big mob of people behind it, all
Speaker 5: at the ready for snakes to come slithering out into
Speaker 5: the street.
Speaker 4: Wow.
Speaker 5: I mean they tried, They tried everything.
Speaker 3: This is almost unbelievable, but it's true. You ought to
Speaker 3: see the photos. I'll probably post some of those on
Speaker 3: my Instagram. But we need to learn first about snake charmers.
Speaker 3: Modern snake charming most likely originated in India. You know
Speaker 3: the cobra and the woven baskets with a man sitting
Speaker 3: cross legged playing a flute in front of it. Snake
Speaker 3: charmers were historically known as magicians and healers, making a
Speaker 3: living with these public exhibitions. It's an ancient tradition that's
Speaker 3: been outlawed in many places, but still practiced across North Africa,
Speaker 3: the backwoods of India.
Speaker 4: It's illegal there, but they still do it.
Speaker 3: Some Lakistan, Bangladesh Sri Lanka, Malaysia, and I don't fully
Speaker 3: understand the cultural significance of it. But think about this
Speaker 3: for a minute. What if an overalled hillbilly imagine someone
Speaker 3: like a Brent Reeves carrying around a timber rattler in
Speaker 3: a grain bucket and playing a banjo, will that rascal
Speaker 3: coiled up and rattled within striking distance.
Speaker 4: Bros. I would be into that.
Speaker 3: And I'm kind of saying this tongue in cheek, but
Speaker 3: I'm quite serious too. That would be a compelling cultural image.
Speaker 3: Now I'm not into this, but perhaps somehow it's in
Speaker 3: the same family as these American snake handling churches. I
Speaker 3: can only imagine what it's like for those snake charmers.
Speaker 4: It really is dancing with death.
Speaker 3: However, there's more to this Springfield snake charming stuff.
Speaker 4: Here's Kyle.
Speaker 2: But what's interesting is is I was lucky enough to
Speaker 2: meet the children of that city manager, and they had
Speaker 2: a scrapbook with every clipping in every news article from
Speaker 2: when this happened, historical documents, editorial cartoons in the local paper,
Speaker 2: the Newsleader that were about the cobra scaring things. And
Speaker 2: one of the things that you find out when you
Speaker 2: go a little deeper into this story, is nobody in
Speaker 2: the city actually believed that playing snake charming music was
Speaker 2: going to bring snakes out and then they were going
Speaker 2: to kill them. But they had to do something to
Speaker 2: show the people that they were trying to deal with this,
Speaker 2: even though nobody knew how to deal with this. So
Speaker 2: you know, the van playing snake charming music. It's easy
Speaker 2: to laugh at now, but less than like, they weren't
Speaker 2: naive and they weren't trying to throw this weird hail
Speaker 2: Mary pass and the snake charming music would bring them out.
Speaker 2: It was really just ab out showing the city that
Speaker 2: they were willing to try anything at all.
Speaker 3: So they this goes all the way back to like
Speaker 3: grassroots city politics and small town America in the nineteen fifties.
Speaker 3: They were just wanting to show the people that were concerned,
Speaker 3: we're trying. And I wonder where they would have seen that,
Speaker 3: because that's the question I have. Nineteen fifty three people
Speaker 3: would have just started getting televisions. I mean, a Cobra
Speaker 3: would have been They certainly didn't have the worldwide fame
Speaker 3: that they now have, right.
Speaker 2: I mean, like what they would have seen them in
Speaker 2: a movie maybe yeah, Tarzan or some kind of you know,
Speaker 2: action movie that Saturday matinee where you would go plunk
Speaker 2: down your dime and see two movies and maybe you
Speaker 2: see a cobra in there, and it was probably a
Speaker 2: rubber one on a wire that somebody was dragging along.
Speaker 8: Nobody had any idea, right.
Speaker 3: This idea of an Indian snake charmer was strong enough
Speaker 3: world wide that they were like, this is how you
Speaker 3: catch Kobra's right, or at least that's the way the
Speaker 3: masses thought. And then the city government was like, we
Speaker 3: got to do something.
Speaker 4: Yeah, these the people.
Speaker 3: It's now mid September, this has been going on for
Speaker 3: a month, and we're in the heart of the Great
Speaker 3: Cobra Scare of nineteen fifty three. Everyone suspects rail Maur,
Speaker 3: but it's still a mystery how the snakes got there
Speaker 3: and got out. It would remain a mystery for over
Speaker 3: thirty five years.
Speaker 4: That's right, thirty five years.
Speaker 3: I think it's a very interesting scenario where a villainous
Speaker 3: beast from another continent was transplanted eight thousand miles away
Speaker 3: to a place where the people were so unequipped to
Speaker 3: handle it. Most places have dangerous wild animals, but the
Speaker 3: culture weaves in appropriate awareness, equipping the people so that
Speaker 3: they're relatively safe and don't live in fear. They have
Speaker 3: venomous snakes in Missouri, copperheads, water moccasins, and the most
Speaker 3: nasty of them all, the timber rattlesnake.
Speaker 4: But people know how to deal with them.
Speaker 3: These people didn't know how to live with Indian cobras,
Speaker 3: and back to our timeline. In mid September, supposedly a
Speaker 3: written manifest was found in rail Maer's pet shop that
Speaker 3: included twelve Indian cobras, so they found evidence that he
Speaker 3: actually did have cobras, but Mauer claimed that they were
Speaker 3: accounted for and the snakes crawling around the town weren't his. However,
Speaker 3: the great Cobra scare climaxes when Cobra number twelve is
Speaker 3: captured alive on October twenty six by a man named
Speaker 3: David Kelly.
Speaker 4: Here's John.
Speaker 5: If it happened today, you'd have satellite trucks parked from
Speaker 5: here to Rogersville, all of them broadcasting live all over
Speaker 5: the world. As it was, we had one reporter from
Speaker 5: a newspaper and one reporter from Life magazine come and
Speaker 5: they used a local photographer to take the pictures, and
Speaker 5: that was the sun toad of it. We were we
Speaker 5: were famous for a day when the Life magazine came
Speaker 5: out and that was the end of it.
Speaker 4: How long did this take place?
Speaker 5: It started in August and the last of it ended
Speaker 5: up in first of November.
Speaker 3: Say really about the time, yeah, September October, so three months,
Speaker 3: and the city was just on lockdown.
Speaker 5: Oh, the city was just beside itself because every time
Speaker 5: they saw a garter snake, it was a cobra.
Speaker 3: So this pet store owner, he's the suspected culprit that
Speaker 3: he never he never confessed to haven't had those snakes.
Speaker 5: Not to my knowledge, he never he never owned up
Speaker 5: to the fact that they were his snakes. But everybody
Speaker 5: knew that, they knew, and they pulled his business license.
Speaker 5: He left here. Oh really, Yeah, he left here and
Speaker 5: never came back.
Speaker 4: So then it's just a mystery. It just kind of ends.
Speaker 3: I guess people in the community probably came to their
Speaker 3: own conclusion.
Speaker 5: They came, you know, because he was so loosey goosey
Speaker 5: with his handling of all of his stuff. It was
Speaker 5: an easy assumption and that he just let him get
Speaker 5: away from you. Yeah, yeah, I mean that happened all
Speaker 5: the time with everything out of the.
Speaker 4: So common would it have been in the nineteen fifties
Speaker 4: to have cobras? That seems pretty.
Speaker 5: Far, incredibly uncommon. I mean, how do you get him
Speaker 5: into the country? I don't know.
Speaker 3: I bet I know a guy who could tell you
Speaker 3: how to get cobras into the United States. You might,
Speaker 3: of all people, you might have the answer to this.
Speaker 3: How would somebody in Springfield, Missouri in nineteen fifty three
Speaker 3: be able to get Indian monocled cobras?
Speaker 4: Where would they go?
Speaker 6: Probably out a Bangkok tilean friendship trading company.
Speaker 4: This is mister Fred again. You could have just shipped
Speaker 4: them straight to your house.
Speaker 6: I mean I dealt with a whole bunch of deal
Speaker 6: I mean a whole bunch of them, and I couldn't
Speaker 6: get I was wanting to get twenty five king kobras
Speaker 6: to do shows with.
Speaker 3: So it's not surprising to you that this guy was
Speaker 3: able to get monocled cobras in Springfield nineteen fifty three.
Speaker 6: That's like not a big deal, bit a boy somewhat.
Speaker 4: Would it have been illegal? There's nothing illegal about it
Speaker 4: with her.
Speaker 6: No, they didn't have a law of pertaining. You see,
Speaker 6: you gotta have something, you gotta have. The laws down
Speaker 6: in the books basically make.
Speaker 4: Much regulation, exactly.
Speaker 3: I take a lot of pride in having a neighbor
Speaker 3: like mister Fred. Did you hear him say that he
Speaker 3: tried to buy twenty five king cobras? But he said
Speaker 3: in the nineteen fifties there would have been very little
Speaker 3: regulation on importing reptiles. Today it's different, but not a ton.
Speaker 3: I looked online and within a few clicks I was
Speaker 3: at a virtual checkout to buy a cobra, no joke.
Speaker 3: My buddy, doctor Chris Jenkins of the Snake Talk podcast
Speaker 3: told me where to find the differing state regulations regarding
Speaker 3: venomous snakes. Some states are very strict and some are lacks.
Speaker 3: Some cobras are Internet regulated by Sighte's laws regulating their
Speaker 3: capturing transport. But the bottom line is that without much
Speaker 3: trouble in twenty twenty four, I could legally own a cobra.
Speaker 4: But back to our story.
Speaker 3: At this point, we still don't know really if the
Speaker 3: snakes were real maurs from the pet store, and how
Speaker 3: the heck they got loose, If they were, and it
Speaker 3: wouldn't be until nineteen eighty eight that the mystery would
Speaker 3: be completely solved.
Speaker 4: Here's Kyle.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And I mean if you think about it, like so,
Speaker 2: by fifty four, I mean it's over by that point.
Speaker 2: I mean one of the things that certainly probably the
Speaker 2: people at the zoo who understood the animals were just like, Loo,
Speaker 2: they're not going to survive the winner. You know, they
Speaker 2: this isn't where they live naturally, and so you know,
Speaker 2: by October they killed the last one. And as far
Speaker 2: as they know, I mean, we've never seen one since.
Speaker 8: So by fifty four, I'm sure they were all just
Speaker 8: like like, well that was wild.
Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely, two dollars cobra haircut, get it.
Speaker 8: Yeah, the town survives.
Speaker 2: The town, of course, ends up kind of celebrating this
Speaker 2: quirky piece of history. But it's still a mystery for
Speaker 2: another thirty five years. Nobody knows why this happens. It's
Speaker 2: nineteen eighty eight when the person responsible for the cobra
Speaker 2: scare finally can't live with this any longer, and they're
Speaker 2: talking to their friends and they're like, I think I
Speaker 2: gotta come clean. And that's when I'm looking right here
Speaker 2: so Carl Barnett, the gentleman's name, Carl Barnett, contacts the
Speaker 2: local newspaper, the Newsleader.
Speaker 8: He says, all right, I've got a story for you.
Speaker 3: How about we hear the confession straight from Carl Barnett himself.
Speaker 3: He confessed in nineteen eighty eight and an article was
Speaker 3: written about it in the local paper. But he did
Speaker 3: a television interview in nineteen ninety two with Springfield's k
Speaker 3: Y three station.
Speaker 9: Our last new story of the last forty years was
Speaker 9: one of the first. As we mentioned earlier, Springfield was
Speaker 9: terrorized in nineteen fifty three by a dozen deadly cobras.
Speaker 8: They escaped from.
Speaker 9: A pet store in Saint Louis Streets. Were released by
Speaker 9: a fourteen year old boy who had a special business
Speaker 9: arrangement with the pet store owner.
Speaker 1: He said he'd buy all the snakes I could get
Speaker 1: our trade meet tropical fish for him.
Speaker 4: Sir, this is Carl Barnett.
Speaker 1: And one time I went over there and I got
Speaker 1: this fish. I really had my eye on, you know,
Speaker 1: I'd been watching it for quite a while. So we'd
Speaker 1: done some trading and I took it home and it
Speaker 1: was dead. And he just told me he said, well, kid,
Speaker 1: that's just tough. He said, in business, that's you used
Speaker 1: to have to eat. That one didn't like it.
Speaker 7: I said, we're out fifteen cents.
Speaker 1: Yeah, plus you know whatever time I'd spent hunting up
Speaker 1: snakes to do the trading with. I thought, well, I
Speaker 1: go out back. So I got back there and here
Speaker 1: was several crates of snakes. I thought, well, mine are
Speaker 1: in there someplace. And since that's why he feels about it,
Speaker 1: I allays turned mind loose. I thought they were just a
Speaker 1: black end to go snake that he came in. I thought,
Speaker 1: well that's good enough, that's a fair trade. So I
Speaker 1: just left the box open, got on my bicycle and
Speaker 1: went back home. Next thing you knew, here was TV
Speaker 1: and people running around shot guns, and police shooting garden
Speaker 1: hoses all the pieces and chopping up blizzards and people
Speaker 1: afraid to go home. And I thought, boy, any day
Speaker 1: they're going to come out here at the house and
Speaker 1: arrest me for this. But I never saw anything. Say Anderson,
Speaker 1: so to speak, gets the four out of hand.
Speaker 3: Mystery solved. Old Carl did it? Rael Maherd did have
Speaker 3: those dang kobra's in his shop.
Speaker 4: Here's Kyle, the.
Speaker 2: Guy who on the pet store had a hobby of
Speaker 2: raising cobras.
Speaker 4: He didn't sell them.
Speaker 2: That absolutely wouldn't have been legal. He didn't actually sell them.
Speaker 2: They were his personal cobras. Why why does this guy
Speaker 2: raise cobras? But he does, and he has this create
Speaker 2: of imported cobras.
Speaker 4: I bet he was kind of a hero. I'm talking
Speaker 4: about Carl. I mean, you know.
Speaker 3: How like just just even if it's kind of villainous
Speaker 3: or even if you're wrong, but still you've unlocked a
Speaker 3: mystery right of a small town. I would I bet
Speaker 3: he was. People were, like, you know, somehow celebrated him.
Speaker 2: I don't know, I know, like in like small town tradition.
Speaker 2: You got to imagine maybe he was like the grand
Speaker 2: marshal at a parade or something.
Speaker 4: He should have bet you know that's yeah.
Speaker 2: But actually if I don't know if this is still true.
Speaker 2: So Jerry University just a mile north of here, I
Speaker 2: don't know if they still do, but they used to
Speaker 2: have the last existent cobra from the cobra scare in
Speaker 2: from aldehyde in a jar in one of those cases
Speaker 2: you get see it. I saw it and I stopped
Speaker 2: and I was like, that's it. There's one line and
Speaker 2: it still exists, and at least as of twenty eighteen.
Speaker 2: So if you have a little time and you should say, hey,
Speaker 2: is that cobra still there?
Speaker 3: You better believe that's exactly what I'm about to do.
Speaker 3: I'm headed to Drury University with my buddy Isaac Neil,
Speaker 3: a Springfield native.
Speaker 4: With some fun city facts.
Speaker 3: We're at Drury University in Springfield, Missouri.
Speaker 4: I'm with Isaac Neil.
Speaker 1: Here.
Speaker 4: We're walking into the Trustee Science Center.
Speaker 7: Ye.
Speaker 4: Tell me who went to school at Dreury.
Speaker 8: The one and only Bob Barker.
Speaker 4: Bob of the Prices, Right, the price is right. We're
Speaker 4: to school here. Yeah, we're on Bob Barker Boulevard. Incredible.
Speaker 3: And while right before we got out of a car,
Speaker 3: Isaac points to a what is clearly a large black
Speaker 3: panther statue.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and tell me what the mascot of Druid University is.
Speaker 8: It's the panthers.
Speaker 2: They're not claiming to be black panthers, but in every logo,
Speaker 2: every statue, it's a black panther.
Speaker 4: It's true.
Speaker 3: So we're walking into this Trustee Science building and we're
Speaker 3: going to see the one and only cobra. We're met
Speaker 3: at the door by herpetologist, doctor Kevin Jansen. He's leading
Speaker 3: us back to his office. He knew we were coming,
Speaker 3: but I didn't entirely tell him our motivation. All right, great, yeah,
Speaker 3: I guess I didn't formally ask you, do you mind
Speaker 3: being on our podcast?
Speaker 4: Just your voice?
Speaker 7: I don't mind, I guess.
Speaker 4: Okay, great, Yeah.
Speaker 3: We walk into his book filled office and there's a
Speaker 3: huge glass jar filled with green liquid.
Speaker 4: In it is.
Speaker 3: A coiled, pale white cobra. I wasn't expecting this so fast.
Speaker 4: The climax happened quickly.
Speaker 7: This is it?
Speaker 1: Is it?
Speaker 4: Holy cat?
Speaker 3: There's a little tag here that says the last of
Speaker 3: its kind. This is the only cobra known to exist
Speaker 3: from the Frightful Summer of nineteen fifty three. It was
Speaker 3: donated to Jury in nineteen eighty by Sheriff Mickey Owen.
Speaker 3: A bullet wound is visible about four inches behind the hood.
Speaker 3: The event was featured in Life magazine.
Speaker 10: Wow, and you can see the bullet wound home.
Speaker 4: Mark bullet wound.
Speaker 3: I am, I'm surprised at I mean, this is seventy
Speaker 3: years old. From nineteen fifty three seventy one years. I'm
Speaker 3: surprised at how well it's preserved. So it's in this
Speaker 3: like glass jar. What what's an end for maladanised? Tell
Speaker 3: me about this is an Indian cobra.
Speaker 7: It is it's a monocled cobra. Monocled.
Speaker 10: Let's see there's single circle as another circle in the back. Yeah,
Speaker 10: there's a it's it's part of a larger spectacled cobra group.
Speaker 10: This is a pretty good sized individual for that species.
Speaker 10: It's not like the king cobra that can get up
Speaker 10: to you know, multiple meters long.
Speaker 7: How long?
Speaker 4: How big do you think that snake is.
Speaker 7: It's a little over a meter.
Speaker 10: It would have had some ish, Yeah, it would have
Speaker 10: had some decent venom in it.
Speaker 4: So where would this snake be?
Speaker 7: Native to India? India? India. They're active hunters for the
Speaker 7: most part.
Speaker 10: They they're moving their daytime and so we think in
Speaker 10: the US we think of venomous snakes as having that
Speaker 10: sweet pupil eyes. That's just a nocturnal trait, right, So
Speaker 10: when you see a snake with round pupils, that generally
Speaker 10: means their daytime hunters. So you'll see racers and coach
Speaker 10: whips and rat.
Speaker 7: Snakes out of that.
Speaker 4: Does it mean that it's venomous?
Speaker 7: Not at all.
Speaker 3: But it just happens that our venomous snakes are nighttime hunters,
Speaker 3: so we have we can.
Speaker 4: Teach our kids. If it's got slats.
Speaker 11: In his eyes, it's venoms here in many states, yes,
Speaker 11: but you get further south, even in the US, and
Speaker 11: you can you can get round pupiled venomous snakes right absolutely.
Speaker 4: And my whole world was just a house of cards.
Speaker 4: So one of my children are alive today after all
Speaker 4: that I've taught.
Speaker 7: Them well, and you I apologize for insulting your parenting skills.
Speaker 3: That's some good info on Cobra's doctor Jansen, did you
Speaker 3: hear that round eyes don't always mean non venomous and
Speaker 3: slit eyes don't always mean venomous.
Speaker 4: That's news to me.
Speaker 3: But I want to get into a more philosophical question
Speaker 3: of why any of this matters?
Speaker 4: Why do we remember unique and wild.
Speaker 3: Stories and this whole Cobra scarre nobody was bitten, yet
Speaker 3: seventy years later, we're still talking about it. In Springfield
Speaker 3: seems to be pretty proud of the great Cobra Scare.
Speaker 3: Here's Kyle and I talking it over. I'm still searching
Speaker 3: for the real concrete answer of why this stuff is important,
Speaker 3: because me and you both agree that it is. But
Speaker 3: I feel like people are always looking for identity, and
Speaker 3: identity comes from differentiation, Like in this mass of people,
Speaker 3: really it's our differences and in some way, and that
Speaker 3: might sound divisive, but in this way, I think it's
Speaker 3: a positive thing. It's not divisive, But it's the things
Speaker 3: that make us different that sometimes are like, hey, this
Speaker 3: is who we are because nobody else has this thing.
Speaker 3: So maybe these little obscure stories which probably could be
Speaker 3: scaled down from like nations to states, to cities, to
Speaker 3: neighborhoods to families, we all have these unique stories that,
Speaker 3: like you said, are truly yours and no one else
Speaker 3: has it. Like no one else in America has a
Speaker 3: regional Cobra scare it.
Speaker 8: It's absolutely that.
Speaker 2: But again, like it's not really like the visit, it's
Speaker 2: just yeah, neatness, right, It's just like, oh, this is ours. Hi,
Speaker 2: we're Springfield, Missouri, and I mean we don't have something
Speaker 2: like Niagara Falls.
Speaker 3: Kyle and Mother's Brewery did something special in twenty seventeen
Speaker 3: when they were naming one of their brews. I'll give
Speaker 3: you one guess what they named it.
Speaker 2: When you're a brewery in the Ozarks and you want
Speaker 2: to claim Erosark heritage, the natural choice is we love
Speaker 2: our mountains, we love our streams, our lakes, we like hiking,
Speaker 2: we like canoeing, floating, all of these things. But we
Speaker 2: wanted something a little different. It was just kind of
Speaker 2: like this deep dive into who we were as a
Speaker 2: Springfield brewery and who Springfield is. And I remember us
Speaker 2: just all sitting around and brainstorming on it, and we
Speaker 2: were just like, what's something that's just so Springfield that
Speaker 2: nobody else can claim it? And I think it was David,
Speaker 2: our head brewer at the time, who was like the
Speaker 2: Cobra scare man, and it just hit us. We were like,
Speaker 2: nobody else can claim this, this is purely Springfield. And
Speaker 2: part of the thinking on our end is every town
Speaker 2: has something like this that's uniquely their own. Anywhere you go,
Speaker 2: you talk to somebody from this small town, they've got
Speaker 2: something that belongs to that town and nobody else.
Speaker 8: And so this idea of like lore, this kind.
Speaker 2: Of like common history, where your town's story is unique.
Speaker 2: But we all have those stories to.
Speaker 8: Share with each other.
Speaker 2: That's why we chose the Cobra Scare. That's what we
Speaker 2: wanted to like.
Speaker 3: Honor Kyle and the brewery have tapped into this idea
Speaker 3: of regional identity. I think this stuff is pretty important,
Speaker 3: especially for people who are prone to be connected to place.
Speaker 3: I find that some people are and some people aren't
Speaker 3: as much. What happened that's unique in your town? Tell
Speaker 3: me about it. I think that's a pretty unique name
Speaker 3: for a drink, too, Cobra scare.
Speaker 4: That just has a ring to it.
Speaker 3: It's hard to deny, but you know what, Springfield is
Speaker 3: a pretty unique town.
Speaker 4: But just in the.
Speaker 3: Last three years, I've come to learn that Springfield is
Speaker 3: known as the Queen City of the Ozarks, which came
Speaker 3: to me as a complete shock. As you know, I'm
Speaker 3: from the southern Ozarks. I mean, how is this even regulated?
Speaker 3: Who approved this name being in Missouri? Maybe I'm just
Speaker 3: a little jealous. I need some help understanding this from John.
Speaker 3: Can you tell me why it's the Queen city and
Speaker 3: quantify that for me?
Speaker 5: Sure, calling something the Queen city of wherever was aggrandizing appellation,
Speaker 5: something that you added to the name there's queen cities
Speaker 5: all over the country. There's Queen City of the Ohio Valley,
Speaker 5: and there's a Queen City of New England. There's a
Speaker 5: Queen City of this and the Queen City of that
Speaker 5: Queen city. These all started in the late eighteen hundreds,
Speaker 5: and ours came about at a speech celebrating the centennial
Speaker 5: of our country in eighteen seventy six given man man
Speaker 5: named Simpronius Boyd Pony Boyd. He was actually the judge
Speaker 5: at the trial when wild Bolt Hiccock was tried for
Speaker 5: the shooting on the squad. But Simpronius Boyds was speaking
Speaker 5: at Dry University Dury College at that time about the
Speaker 5: centennial at a big celebration, and he called it the
Speaker 5: Queen City of the Ozarks. He just dubbed it, just
Speaker 5: dubbed it that, and so from that point forward it
Speaker 5: was used from time to time and time to time
Speaker 5: until finally, by the turn of the twentieth century it
Speaker 5: was pretty much a given that.
Speaker 3: So it just was adopted rightly nationally. Springfield is the
Speaker 3: queen city.
Speaker 5: We were, as I said, we were a transportation hub.
Speaker 5: The Butterfield stage line came through here, the railroads came
Speaker 5: through here. This was the crossroads of five different Native
Speaker 5: American trails. We were the stepping off point into the
Speaker 5: Old West.
Speaker 4: Okay, I'm still trying to understand a little bit about this.
Speaker 4: Very interested in cities getting these wonderful, wonderful accolades. Yeah,
Speaker 4: are there king cities?
Speaker 5: No, I've never seen a king city like Cincinnati's Queen
Speaker 5: City of the Ohio Valley.
Speaker 4: Okay, they're king cities.
Speaker 3: So you think I could if I made a public
Speaker 3: speech like down where I'm from, if I just said
Speaker 3: I dub such and such Arkansas the king City of
Speaker 3: the Ozarks, that potentially it would stick.
Speaker 5: Somebody will look at you and go, you've hit your head.
Speaker 3: I think it's clear that regionalalied did D is earned
Speaker 3: and not just the fruit of self serving ambitions. I
Speaker 3: think the Cobra Scare validates the queen's city name of Springfield,
Speaker 3: though it happened seventy five years after mister Simpronius Boyd
Speaker 3: called it the queen city. Think this validates Springfield's queenship.
Speaker 3: But hey, long live the remembrance of the Great Cobra
Speaker 3: Scare of nineteen fifty three. I can't thank you enough
Speaker 3: for listening to Bear Grease, Please leave us a review
Speaker 3: on iTunes and tell your friends about the wild stories
Speaker 3: you're hearing on Bear Grease in this country life