More about the cobra story of 1953

Hi everyone,

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.