As many of you know, my work week is from 6:00 a.m. – 1:00 p.m. Monday through Friday. It used to be from 6:00 – 6:00 but when Sandy retired from her gift store in 2018, I cut back on my hours. I’m strictly a freelance writer. If I don’t write it, it doesn’t get sold. If I don’t submit it, it doesn’t get sold. If I don’t find an editor who wants it, it doesn’t get sold. That’s how the system works. I tried an agent for about a year in 1984, a second one in 2017, and a third in 2019. All three left me eventually because they weren’t selling enough of my stories and poems. Among the three of them, they placed a total of two of my things. Otherwise I’ve represented myself from my first submissions in 1959 and have, so far, placed 111 books on my own.
My average for books sold per year since the first one was published in 1969 is 2 (113 titles divided by 57). Some years are better than others. Four titles came out in 2024, none in 2025, two will be out this year. The market changes over time to reflect societal trends. The writer changes too. I was 32 when The Boy with a Drum made me an author. When Pumpkin on the Vine is released this September, I’ll be 89. I am a very different man and writer than I was at 32. Then I lived in Kansas and worked for Hallmark Cards. Sandy and I had two children, Robin (9) and Jeff (5). Now our children are grown and lead their own lives. Soon my youngest grandson will be 32. Sandy and I have lived in Springfield for 53 years. I’ve been my own boss since 1973.
One of these days something will happen and my writing will go silent. For now, I have no plans beyond the next idea, the next submission, and, hopefully, the next acceptance. To all of you who follow me on this blog or elsewhere, thank you for coming along. I am now of a vintage when I can say, and mean it, I love you.
One of my oldest friends, RICHARD WAKEFIELD, just sent me a link to a retelling of Springfield’s famous cobra story and suggested that I might want to add my perspective. I think I will. In 1953, an Indian cobra was found and killed in a yard on St. Louis Street near a pet shop owned by a man named Reo Mower. Over the next few months, a total of eleven cobras were found. Neighbors blamed Mr. Mower, who was known to keep cobras at his shop. He denied it. It caused a huge ruckus. Life Magazine eventually came to town to cover it. A cobra was added to the city seal. This all happened more than 72 years ago but the story has been retold again and again since then.
In 1988, a man I knew when we were in high school stepped forward to confess that it was he, CARL BARNETT, who let the snakes loose. He had caught some local snakes to trade for a tropical fish he wanted. When he got home, the fish was dead. Mower would not replace it. To seek revenge, Carl sneaked onto the property one night, found a cage of snakes, assumed they were the ones he had caught, and released them.
No one has ever interviewed me for one of those stories because why would they? What possible connection could I have to that famous Springfield story? In 1952, the summer before the cobra scare, Richard Wakefield’s brother LARRY and I were taking a correspondence course in taxidermy. We needed animals to stuff but living in town, we could only find an occasional deceased bird to practice on. Our first effort, a pigeon, wound up with a stretched, giraffe-like neck. We needed more practice.
I decided to apply for a job at REO MOWER’S pet shop on St. Louis Street. Surely things died from time to time. I would work for free if he would give me his dead things. I was 15 that summer. Mr. Mower hired me and I was soon cleaning monkey cages, feeding white mice to snakes, and handling pythons at local fairs. A monkey died and Larry and I had the experience of stuffing it. It fared somewhere better than the pigeon. One afternoon I was in the back yard cleaning Helen the baboon’s cage, when a woman and her little girl came down the back steps from the store and approached me to say that Mr. Mower told her I would show them the monkeys in the garage where they were kept in cages. “I didn’t know you could tame snakes,” she mentioned, pointing back to the top step. A cobra was lying there. The woman and her child were dressed for summer – shorts, sandals — and they had just stepped over a cobra coming down to the yard.
I walked over to examine the motionless snake. Perhaps it was dead. I poked at it. It hooded, hissed, slithered down the steps, and headed across the yard. I started yelling for Mr. Mower. The cobra turned the corner of the shop and headed toward St. Louis Street with me in hot pursuit, still yelling for help. At the last moment, Mr. Mower appeared carrying a snake stick, which he used to capture the runaway snake and retreat quickly with it back behind the house and into the garage. That’s where the cobras were kept, in a four-sided, locked glass cage that opened on top. I don’t remember what happened to the woman but assume that she lost interest in seeing the monkeys and beat a hasty retreat.
Next summer my high school baseball team went to the state finals in St. Louis. The night before we left I bumped into Reo Mower in a restaurant around the corner from where we lived. He was not happy. He said that when he raised the garage door that morning to feed the animals, the monkeys were loose. He figured that one had reached through its cage door, managed to raise the clothespin that held the door shut, escaped, and released others. The cobra crate lid was up. Snakes started crawling out on both sides of him. Said he caught all he saw but wasn’t sure he got them all. Truth was, he didn’t know how many cobras he had. I went on my trip next day and on vacation with my parents after that. By the time I got back home, all hell had broken loose and the cobra scare was off and running.
It was hard to think that monkeys could do all that but I was only 15. Not until Carl Barnett confessed thirty-five years later what he had done did I consider that there might be an alternative story. But he said he found a crate of snakes in the yard. Mower only kept the cobras in the garage. Maybe Carl released some other kind(s) of snakes and went to his grave in 2009 believing he had let the cobras out. Or the crate he talked about really was in the garage and he let the monkeys loose for good measure.
I don’t know. No one ever will. But whoever tells the story, it remains to this day one of the most compelling tales in Springfield’s long history of good stories.
We’re running short of January. I hope to see a few more poems posted for Word of the Month. Remember, the word this month is “crown” or “crowned”. I thought I’d write a second poem for the month. This one is inspired by the weather. Take a look.
The Morning After Snow
Across last night’s snow a line of small tracks zip my lawn’s new sweater tight against the chill. The winged fairy outside the kitchen window offers her half-shell mounded with crystals sparkling like magic dust and the boy who is older than our house holds his flute ready, both snow-crowned in the pureness of their station.
After a subdued night on the ice, geese leave in threes and fours, wordless in their departure. Squirrels are sleeping in. Full feeders are not enough to entice sparrows tucked puffed up under eaves.
The morning after snow is a still life of winter. No one can think of anything to say.
I’ve received copies of A Tree is a Community in paperback. I knew it was coming out soon but now I have proof. The back cover has been put to good use to promote two other HARRISON/COSGROVE titles, And the Bullfrogs Sing,A Life Cycle Begins and The Dirt Book, Poems About, Poems About Animals that Live Beneath Our Feet.
I apologize for the sloppy post of the back cover. WordPress has made some change in how I must post pictures and it’s driving me crazy. No idea what to do. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. Hopefully, I’ll get it figured out soon. Thanks for your patience until then.
Back to the Amazon. Here’s another poem from Sounds of Rain, the book I wrote in 2006 after SANDY and I took a trip up the Amazon River.
Passage
Roots slither around the boat, heavy-bellied vines stare with invisible eyes.
Dark as an alley, this narrow-throated channel tunnels through silence.
Mud sucks at poles, swirls up shafts like murky serpents.
Dense shadows take shapes, unseen doves sigh warnings.
Then comes light, the tunnel ends, we squint across a wide lake, welcome reassuring heat, move to open water glad to leave the possibility of anacondas behind.
Children's Author David L. Harrison's Blog 