Bear Grease - Ep. 206: Cobra Scare

Episode Date: April 17, 2024

In 1953, the town of Springfield, Missouri was terrorized by the mysterious appearance of 12 Indian Cobras some 8,000 miles from their native home. Though all signs had pointed to a local pet shop owner, the case remained unsolved for decades. Follow along to hear how townsfolk navigated this problem so foreign that they came to employ some highly unorthodox solutions. In this episode of The Bear Grease Podcast, Clay explains how this freak occurrence left quite lasting (bite) marks on the identity of "The Queen City of the Ozarks."  He interviews Fred Lally, Kyle Jeffries, John Stellars, and Kevin Jansen. Come see Clay and the rest of the MeatEater crew on the MeatEater Live Tour starting April 23rd. See www.themeateater.com/events for cities, dates, and tickets. Connect with Clay and MeatEater Clay on Instagram MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube Shop Bear Grease MerchSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. First Lights fieldware collection is made for the work that happens long before opening day and continues when the season ends. Products built for early mornings, full days and real use. Hard wearing where they need to be versatile where it matters. No shortcuts. Just gear designed for the work that earns the season.

Built to perform, built to last. Check out. First Light's new field. Worldware gear at firstlight.com. Here it is. It's the last month of summer vacation for all these schoolchildren, and they're not allowed to enjoy it, because you don't know when you're going to get tacked and bitten by an Indian cobra. Every corner of this planet has wild animals that are revered, feared, feared, and sensationalized.

Deadly scorpions, killer bees, piranhas, giant crocodiles to African lions. However, the cultures of where these beasts exist help the people to know how to deal and live with them. But what if one of them was transplanted to where you lived? Maybe even right in middle America. And what if that beast was one of the world's top wildlife villains, the global bad boy, the cobra? I want to tell you about the great cobra scare of 1953.

A story of fear, fangs, and lies. But it all ties back into the unique identity of a quaint Midwestern town. I really doubt that you're going to want to miss this one. This is the article, the two-page article in Life magazine. Here's a postcard, new home of cobras. The Dernwoods is full of them and says, Exclusive, try our new cobra haircut. It's daring and deadly,

but it'll go with the new fall fashion. at Hester's Beauty Salon on St. Louis Street. Wow, the cobra haircut. My name is Clay Newcomb, and this is the Bear Grease podcast, where we'll explore things forgotten but relevant. Search for insight in unlikely places, and where we'll tell the story of Americans who live their lives close to the land.

Presented by FHF Gear, American-made, purpose-built, hunting, and fishing gear that's designed to be as rugged, as the places we explore. I just pulled up to my neighbor's house, Fred Lally. He's got a trailer in his front yard that says Lally's Oddity Show, venomous snakes, walking up to his door. Hey, Mr. Fred, how are you doing?

I'm doing good. How about you? I'm doing good. Good to see you. As the crow flies, I'm less than two miles from my house in the Ozarks of Arkansas. Mr. Fred is 82 years old, wiery, witty, and seemingly in perfect health. He's got shoulder-length white hair, and he's been bitten by over 20 venomous snakes. He's a real piece of work.

I'm here to talk about cobras. What do you got? Well, I'm recording. Is that okay? Oh, yeah. Yeah, well, I didn't know exactly. You wanted some information on cobra? Yeah.

You ever heard of William Hast, Bill Hath, Miami Serpentarium? No. He's dead. But he lived to be about 100. He's been bitten a couple of hundred times probably by different things. Even a king cobra lived through it. Really? You've been bit by a cobra? Yeah, but it was a much, it wasn't a king cobra. It was an African bandit, a gypsum cobra. And I think... Now, that doesn't exactly sound like a good one to get bit by. Oh, it's not. I'll tell you what, it got a good solid grip on me, right along in here. I'm showing my index finger, and held on and was chewing,

and that's what they do is they chew their venomal. Really? Yeah, it's not like a rattlesnake. They pop you, and they're gone. It's done. Like a rattler would. Yeah. Cobra's grab a hole, chew it in.

They've got shorter fangs, real sturdy fangs. The king cobras have really big ones. And they've been known to kill elephants. That's so bad, you know what I mean? Cobra's are no doubt the global bad boys of serpents. The king cobra native to northern India and southern China is considered by some to be the most venomous snake in the world. And they can get over 15 feet long. Mr. Fred was bitten by a banded Egyptian cobra, not as venomous as the king cobra.

But that was in 1992 while he was touring with his snake display at a carnival in Clarksville, Tennessee. The cobra was his pet. But why are we talking about cobras? I get the willies when I see one of those suckers, and I love snakes. But then again, in the West, the evil nature of cobras has been marketed to us hard for the last 50 years. I'd even say that my generation received the brunt of that marketing. Aside from the biological fangs and venom, they're symbols of villainous evil. And depending upon how old you are, you'll remember the terrorist cobra organization of the G.I. Joe world.

And in 1981, Indiana Jones faced off with a monocled cobra in Raiders of the Lost Ark. In 1986, Sylvester Stallone wrote and produced a movie called Cobra. But the Cobra Kai Dojo from Karate Kid was the epitome of evil. Those guys were bad news. Cobra's are clearly symbols of evil, but they've come by their reputation honestly. The World Health Organization reports as many of the people. 2.7 million people are envenomed by snakes each year. Some are bitten by venomous snakes but not envenomed.

But up to 400,000 people are permanently disabled, like having amputations, and 81 to 138,000 people die globally from snake bites each year. Granted, not all of these are cobras, but there are certainly big players in Africa in Asia. But what do cobras have to do with America? And what do they have to do with the Midwestern town of Springfield, Missouri? Okay, so show me what you got here. All right. So what I did, I went through our archives and just put in the word cobra. And this is some of the things that popped up. During that

time after the cobra scare, they actually added a cobra snake to the city of Springfield seal. So it circles around the shield that's in the middle of the seal. What year did they do that? They did it in 54 that next year after the... They put a cobra on the seal of a town in the Ozarks. Yeah, yeah. Did he just say cobra scare? And that his town has a cobra on their seal?

Yeah, I'm in downtown Springfield, Missouri at the History Museum on the Square, 8,000 miles away from the Cobra's native home range. This place feels like the Missouri Smithsonian, sacred ground for the show me state. And I'm speaking with the President Emeritus John Stellar. He's a good-sized man wearing a gray sweatshirt with the collar of a polo visible. His white mustache is well trimmed,

and he's got a tidy office. I'm looking over his shoulder onto his computer screen. Something in this city is. happened involving cobras. That's all I know. But here's a postcard from Springfield, Missouri. New home of Cobras. The Dernwoods is full of them and said. This is like a hillbilly, like an Ozark Hillbilly. Yeah. And even local businesses got involved. They wanted to do ads and so on.

So there was advertising in the magazines and all sorts of stuff. Here's a, during that time, exclusive try our new cobra haircut. It's daring and deadly, but it'll go with the new fall fashions at Hester's Beauty Salon on St. Louis Street. Wow, the cobra haircut here in Springfield. Wow. So here's the big time. This is the article, a two-page article in Life magazine about the... Wow, this was in the National...

Yeah, in the Life magazine, which would be like being on national news now. Okay, here's the scoop. In the late summer of 1953, multiple Indian monocled cobras were killed in the city limits of Springfield. The incident became known as the Great Cobra Scare of 1953. Wild. Springfield is a railroad town in southwest Missouri. Has a population of 170,000. Wild Bill Hickok killed a guy named Tut on the Springfield Square in 1865,

and it's the hometown of Brad Pitt. It's not entirely relevant, but it's important to note that Missouri is officially the Midwest, even though the southern one-third of Missouri is the Ozarks. And where I live in Arkansas, which is also the Ozarks, is considered the South. Just some clarity.

I'm now headed to Mother's Brewery in Springfield to talk with Kyle Jeffreys. He's the liaison of the brewery. He's got bushy salt and pepper hair and side burns down to the middle of his cheeks. He's going to start to tell us what's up. We're going back to 1953. Dwight D. Eisenhower has just been sworn as president. The Korean War has ended, and Elvis Presley will begin his music career a year later in 1954.

Essentially, it is just standard summer in small city, big days. Springfield, Missouri in the Ozarks. The year is 1953. Everybody's just doing their regular thing. And there's a couple. They're sitting on their porch one August afternoon. And they see a snake go past. And obviously, that's not too much cause for alarm for anybody in the Ozarks, except they noticed it was larger than the snakes they were used to seeing. And it just didn't look like, I mean, it It wasn't a garter snake. It wasn't a black rat snake. And so they got curious.

And they cornered it. And they were really concerned because they didn't know what it was. So they killed it. They took a garden hoe. And they just whacked it. And then they got really curious because they were like, I don't. So they took it to Dickerson Park Zoo, the small old zoo here in Springfield. And they were like, what is this?

And the official at the zoo is alarmed. They're like, this is an Indian. cobra. This is, they're not native to this continent. And two, they are deadly, quite venomous. And this is an anomaly. And so at this point, it's not anything that becomes part of like public alarm or public concern, but it is puzzling until another one is found and killed. And at this point, you have two Indian cobras in Springfield, Missouri. At this point, you have two Indian Cobra's in Springfield, Missouri. At this point now, it starts to get some public acknowledgement.

And people start to become concerned, except over the course of the next six weeks, they're going to end up killing 11 of these cobras. Indian cobras in Middle America. And Kyle was right. They killed 11, but they also caught one alive, making the grand total of 12 of these global bad boys in Springfield. Here's John. It actually started in August when the first snakes started to appear.

And they were odd snakes. Nobody knew what they were. These snakes would raise up and, like, raise up high out of the grass and strike at you. And they'd never seen snakes like that before. And this was probably before the cobra was really famous in America. Yeah. My goodness, yeah. I mean, in the night, you know, we didn't, we had just gotten our first TV station that spring.

Channel 10 came on the air in the spring of 53. So we had one TV station, and it was only on part of the time. So people might have only heard of cobras, maybe in a movie or something like that. And not everybody, you know, not everybody was involved in that. They knew about snakes, but they didn't know about cobras. It's from, you know, the Far East. And so they couldn't figure out why it was here. But they suspected Ray O'Mauer because of his dealing in all these audits.

animals and it was like a block from his house. So it was right there at the corner of National and St. Louis Street. John just introduced the man with a smoking gun in his hand, Rayo Mower. These snakes were turning up close to this guy's house and business. Ray O'Mauer had a pet shop in the 1600 block of St. Louis Street and in a house, just in a house. But he was not very disciplined in how he took care of his animals. They just kind of ran wild. I mean, there was chimpanzees running around, biting people, and there was two cans flying, and there was just stuff everywhere. But he did a lot of dealing with the local kids. Kids would catch garter snakes and stuff like that, and bring him to him and trade him for tropical fish. He did a lot of trading with the little kids around. And so he was well-known

in the neighborhood up there, but nobody knew that he had anything, you know, really, really dangerous. On August 15th, the first snake was killed, and it was also brought to Rayo Mower to help identify it and to see if it was his. But he denied that it was a cobra and denied that it was his. He said it was a native snake with abnormal markings, but others IDed it as Naja Coathia, the monocled cobra or the Indian cobra. Monocled means that it has one circle on the back of its head. A week later on August 22nd at 1421 East Olive of four-foot cobra was killed with a hoe. He was taken to the local high school science teacher who confirmed it was an Indian monocled cobra, the second one in a week. On August 31st, cobra number three is run over by a car.

On September 3rd, a city in Florida ships one dose of antivenom to the hospital in Springfield. On September 8th, some kids find cobra number four in their yard. September 9th, number 5 is killed. On September 10th, police do a full search of Ray O'Mower's pet shop, and snake graffiti starts to show up around the town as the city goes into lockdown. Things have gotten completely out of hand. Here's Kyle. I've met people who lived through it, and they were like,

it ruined my summer vacation because your parents wouldn't let you go outside and play. Here it is. It's the last month of summer vacation for all these school children in Springfield and they're not allowed to enjoy it because you don't know when you're going to get tacked and bitten by an Indian cobra. Wouldn't it be cool to talk to someone who lived through the cobra scare? I may know a guy. Oh, I was here. Yeah.

I grew up four blocks from where this all happened. And my parents, my mother especially, just knew that the cobras were coming to get her children. And it was the hottest, it's the hottest summer on record in Springfield. And it had gotten up to 113 here that year. But we were locked up in the house and no air conditioning. Locked up in the house, wind is down, door shut, because we weren't going to let the snakes get in. So it was, yeah, there's not much that I don't remember about that summer in 1953. I was little, but I still...

So what year were you born? I was born 49. I was four years old, and I still remembered. It was one of my earliest memories. By the middle of September, things are spinning out of control. A man named L.H. Stockton chunked a rock at Cobra No. 6 before it went under his house. Then police used tear gas to smoke it out, dispatching it with their pistols when it tried to escape in the man's yard. On September 11th, vigilantes threatened to burn down the pet shop and Springfield police guard Ray O'Mower's house.

He still claims his innocence offering to help the city catch the cobras. By now, the cobra scare is starting to get international attention. On September 17th, cobra number 7 is run over on St. Louis Street. And cobra number 8 was killed by bird dog. The city is spinning out of control. Here's Kyle. So at that point, Springfield had just instituted in the municipal government, a position called city manager. The first guy to hold that, he was the first city manager.

Basically, everybody turns to him and like, all right, city manager, what are you going to do about this? And nobody has any idea what to do about it. What can you do about it? Nobody even knows where it's coming from. Nobody knows how many there are going to be. you know, inexperienced as they were, city health, head of the health department, they began to try to come up with ways to capture these snakes. And they came up with an idea.

They said, well, you know, we've seen movies of snake charmers, and they're playing these flutes, and the snake comes up out of the basket and the whole thing. So they think, those snakes must like that music. So they got a truck with a big speaker on the roof. Wow. and drove it slowly around town with a big group of guys with hose and shovels and picks and stuff behind it, driving it around. This isn't a joke. No.

So we're looking at a photograph, a black and white photograph of a, what make of vehicle is that? That's a Ford. That's a Ford sedan, what they called a sedan delivery. It was like a big stationway. It's like a classic old style 1950s Ford. It's got these two big, huge speakers on the roof. and they're driving around and there's probably 40 guys here behind it, all this big group of people, policemen out here and it's in behind a plumbing place at the corner of St. Louis and Glentstone.

But they took this car, this truck, and they played snake charmer music while all these people with farm implements followed behind it walking down the street, expecting that the snakes would hear this music and come slithering out to their doom. Snakes don't hear. snakes sense vibration, snakes sense smell, but snakes do not hear. And the music is for the snake charmer because he moves rhythmically to the music, and the snake is fascinated by the rhythmic movement. And it kind of mimics it.

It has nothing to do with the music. It has to do with the movement of the snake charmer, that the snakes would hear this music and come slithering out to their doom. It never worked, but they tried it continuously. Wow. Just driving like four or five miles an hour around. downtown with this big mob of people behind it all at the ready for snakes to come slithering out into the street. I mean, they tried, they tried everything. This is almost unbelievable, but it's true.

You ought to see the photos. I'll probably post some of those on my Instagram. But we need to learn first about snake charmers. Modern snake charming most likely originated in India. You know, the cobra in the woven baskets with a man sitting cross-legged playing a flute in front of it. Snake charmers were historically known as magicians and healers, making a living with these public exhibitions. It's an ancient tradition that's been outlawed in many places, but still practiced across North Africa, the backwoods of India, it's illegal there, but they still do it some. Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Malaysia. And I don't fully understand the cultural significance of it. But think about this for a minute. What if an overall hillbilly, imagine someone

like a Brent Reeves, carrying around a timber rattler in a grain bucket, and playing a banjo while that rascal coiled up and rattled within striking distance. Bros, I would be into that. And I'm kind of saying this tongue and cheek, but I'm quite serious too. That would be a compelling cultural image. Now, I'm not into this, but perhaps somehow it's in the same family as these American snake handling churches. I can only imagine what it's like for those snake charmers. It really is dancing with death. However, there's more to this Springfield snake charming stuff. Here's Kyle. But what's interesting is, is I was lucky enough to meet the children of of that city manager and they had a scrapbook with every clipping and every news article from when

this happened historical documents editorial cartoons in the local paper the newsletter that were about the cobra scare and things and one of the things that you find out when you go a little deeper into this story is nobody in the city actually believed that playing snake charming music was going to bring snakes out and then they were going to kill them but they had to do something to show the people that they were trying to deal with this, even though nobody knew how to deal with this. So, you know, the van playing snake charming music, it's easy to laugh at now,

but less than, like, they weren't naive, and they weren't trying to throw this weird Hail Mary pass, and the snake charming music would bring them out. It was really just about showing the city that they were willing to try anything at all. So this goes all the way back to like grassroots city politics and small town America in the 1950s. They were just wanting to show the people that were concerned,

we're trying, and I wonder where they would have seen that because that's the question I have, 1953, people would have just started getting televisions. I mean, a cobra would have been, they certainly didn't have the worldwide fame that they now have. Right. I mean, like what? They would have seen them in a movie, maybe. Yeah.

Tarzan or some kind of, you know, action movie, that Saturday matinee where you would go plunk down your dime and see two movies and maybe you see a cobra in there. And it was probably a rubber one on a wire that somebody was dragging along. Nobody had any idea, right? But this idea of an Indian snake charmer was. strong enough worldwide that they were like, this is how you catch cobras. Right. Or at least that's the way the masses thought. And then the city government was like, we got to do something.

Just to appease the people. On Blood Trails, the stories don't end when the hunt is over. They just get darker. I've seen something in the road. I instantly thought it was a sleeping bag. And there was a full of blood. Oh, my God. He doesn't have a hit.

Blood Trails is a true crime podcast born in the outdoors. Where the terrain is unforgiving, the evidence is scarce, and the truth gets buried under brush and silence. Indications were he should be right there, but he wasn't. This season, we're going deeper. From cold case files to whispered suspicions, from remote mountains to frozen backwards. Each story begins in the wilderness and ends in darkness. Because out here, there are no witnesses, no cameras, just fragments and the people left behind trying to piece them back together.

He's not an honest person. He's incapable of being honest. Somebody somewhere knows something. I'm Jordan Sillers. Season 2 of Blood Trails premieres April 16th. Follow now on Apple, Iheart, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's now mid-September. This has been going on for a month.

And we're in the heart of the great cobra scare of 1953. Everyone suspects Ray O'Mauer, but it's still a mystery how the snakes got there and got out. It would remain a mystery for over 35 years. That's right, 35 years. I think it's a very interesting scenario where a villainous beast from another continent was transplanted 8,000 miles away

to a place where the people were so unequipped to handle it. Most places have dangerous wild animals, but the culture weaves in appropriate awareness equipping the people so that they're relatively safe, and don't live in fear. They have venomous snakes in Missouri, copperheads, water moccasins, and the most nasty of them all,

the timber rattlesnake, but people know how to deal with them. These people didn't know how to live with Indian cobras. Back to our timeline, in mid-September, supposedly a written manifest was found in Rayo Maurer's pet shop that included 12 Indian cobras.

So they found evidence that he actually did have cobras, but Maur claimed that they were accounted for and the snakes crawling around the town weren't his. However, the great cobra scare climaxes when cobra number 12 is captured alive on October 26 by a man named David Kelly. Here's John. If it happened today,

you'd have satellite trucks parked from here to Rogersville, all of them broadcasting live all over the world. As it was, we had one reporter from a newspaper and one reporter from Life magazine come, and they used a local photographer to take pictures, and that was the sum total of it. We were famous for a day when the Life magazine came out, and that was the end of it. How long did this take place? It started in August, and the last of it ended up in 1st of November, say. Really? About the time the first frost came. Yeah, so August, September, October, so three months. And the city was just on lockdown. Oh, the city was

just beside itself, because every time they saw a garter snake, it was a carter snake. It was a So this pet store owner, he's the suspected culprit. And he never, he never confessed to having had those snakes? Not to my knowledge. He never owned up to the fact that they were his snakes. But everybody kind of knew they were. They knew and they pulled his business license. He left here.

Oh, really? Yeah, he left here and never came back. So then it's just a mystery. It just kind of ends. I guess people in the community probably came to their own conclusions. Yeah, they came there. You know, because he was so loosey-goosey with his handling of all. all of his stuff, it was an easy assumption that he just let him get away from him.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, that happened all the time with everything out of the sun. How common would it have been in the 1950s to have cobras? That seems pretty far-fetched. Incredibly uncommon. I mean, how do you get them into the country? I don't know. I bet I know a guy who could tell you how to get cobras into the United States.

You might, of all people, you might have the answer to this. How would somebody in Springfield, Missouri, in 1953, be able to be able to. to get Indian monocled cobras. Where would they have gotten? Probably out of Bangkok, Thailand, friendship trading company. This is Mr. Fred again. You could have just shipped them straight to your house. I mean, I dealt with a whole bunch of deals.

I mean, a whole bunch of them. And I couldn't get. I was wanting to get 25 king cobras to do shows with. So it's not surprising to you that this guy was able to get monocled cobras in Springfield in 1953? That's like not a big deal. Yeah, a bit of a somewhat. Would it have been illegal?

There's nothing illegal about it, would there? No. They didn't have laws pertaining, you see. You've got to have the laws down in the books, basically. So there was not much regulation. Exactly. I take a lot of pride in having a neighbor like Mr. Fred. Did you hear him say that he tried to buy 25 king cobras?

But he said in the 1950s there would have been very little regulation on importing reptiles. Today it's different, but not a ton. I looked online and within a few clicks, I was at a virtual checkout to buy a cobra. No joke. My buddy, Dr. Chris Jenkins of the Snake Talk podcast, told me where to find the differing state regulations regarding venomous snakes. Some states are very strict and some are lax. Some cobras are internationally regulated by CITES laws, regulating their capture and transport.

But the bottom line is that without much trouble in 2024, I could legally own a cobra. But back to our story. At this point, we still don't know really if the snakes were Ray O'Mowers from the pet store, and how the heck they got loose if they were. And it wouldn't be until 1988 that the mystery would be completely solved. here's Kyle. Yeah, and I mean, if you think about it, like, so by 54, I mean, it's over by that point. I mean, one of the things that certainly probably the people at the zoo who understood the

animals were just like, lo, they're not going to survive the winter. You know, this isn't where they live naturally. And so, you know, by October, they kill the last one. And as far as they know, I mean, we've never seen one since. So by 54, I'm sure they were all just like, well, that was wild. Yeah. Absolutely. $2.

Cobra haircut. Come get it. Yeah, yeah. The town survives. The town, of course, ends up kind of celebrating this quirky piece of history. But it's still a mystery. For another 35 years, nobody knows why this happens. It's 1988 when the person responsible.

for the cobra scare. Finally, can't live with this any longer. And they're talking to their friends and they're like, I think I got to come clean. And that's when, I'm looking right here. So, Carl Barnett, the gentleman's name. Carl Barnett contacts the local newspaper, the newsleader. He says, all right, I've got a story for you. How about we hear the confession straight from Carl Barnett himself. He confessed in 1988 and an article was written about it in the local paper, but he did a television interview in 1992 with Springfield's K-Y-3 station. Our last news story of the last 40 years was one of the first. As we mentioned earlier, Springfield was terrorized in 1953 by a dozen deadly cobras. They escaped from a pet store

in St. Louis Street and were released by a 14-year-old boy who had a special business arrangement with the pet store owner. He said he'd buy all the snakes I could get or trade me tropical fish for him, say. This is Carl Barnett. And one time I went over there and I got this fish I really had my eye on, you know, I'd been watching it for quite a while, so we'd done some trading. And I took it home and it was dead. And he just told me, he said, well, kid, that's just tough.

He said, in business, that used to have to eat that one and like it. I said, you're out 15 cents. Yeah. Plus, you know, whatever time I'd spent hunting up snakes to do the trading with. I thought, well, I go out back. So I got back there and here was several crates of snakes. I thought, well, mine are in there someplace. And since that's the way he feels about it, I'll just turn mine loose.

I thought they were just a black indigo snake that he came in. I thought, well, that's good enough. That's a fair trade. So I just left the box open. Got on my bicycle. went back home. Next thing you knew here was TV and people running around shotguns, police shooting garden hoses all the pieces,

and chopping up lizards, people afraid to go home. And I thought, boy, any day they're going to come out here at the house and arrest me for this. But I never saw anything, so anything, so to speak, gets the four out of hand. Mystery solved.

Old Carl did it. Ray O'Mauer did have those dang cobras in his shop. Here's Kyle. The guy who owned the pet store had a hobby of raising cobras. He didn't sell him. That absolutely wouldn't have been legal. He didn't actually sell them. They were his personal cobras? Why? Why does this guy raise cobras? But he does. And he has this crate of imported cobras. I bet he was kind of a hero. I'm talking about Carl. I mean, you know how, like just even if it's kind of villainous or even if you're wrong, but still you've unlocked a mystery of a small town. I would have, I bet he was, people were like, you know, somehow celebrated him. I don't

know. I know. Like in like small town tradition, you got to imagine maybe he was like the grand marshal at a parade or something. He should have been. Yeah. Yeah. But actually if I don't know if this is still true. So jury university, just a mile north of here, I don't know if they still. I don't know if they still do, but they used to have the last existing cobra from the cobra scare in formaldehyde in a jar in one of those cases. You could see it. I saw it. And I stopped and I was like, that's it. There's one left and it still exists. And at least as of 2018, so if you have a little time, and you should say, hey, is that cobra still there? You better believe that's exactly what I'm about to do. I'm headed to Drury University with my buddy Isaac Neal, a special.

Springfield Native with some fun city facts. We're at Drury University in Springfield, Missouri. I'm with Isaac Neal here. We're walking into the trustee science center. Yep. Tell me who went to school at Drury? The one and only Bob Barker. Bob of the Price is Right.

The Price is Right. He went to school here. Yeah, we're on Bob Barker Boulevard. Incredible. And while, right before we got out of the car, Isaac points to a what is clearly a law. black panther statue. Yeah.

And tell me what the mascot of Drury University is. It's the Panthers. They're not claiming to be black panthers, but in every logo, every statue, it's a black panther. It's true. So we're walking into this trustee science building, and we're going to see the one and only cobra. We're met at the door by herpetologist Dr. Kevin Jansen.

He's leading us back to his office. office. He knew we were coming, but I didn't entirely tell him our motivation. All right. Great. Yeah, I guess I didn't formally ask you. Do you mind being on our podcast, just your voice? I don't mind, I guess. Okay, great. We walk into his book-filled office, and there's a huge glass jar filled with green liquid. In it is a coiled, pale white cobra. I wasn't expecting this so fast. The climax happened quickly. This is it.

This is it. Holy cow. There's a little tag here that says the last of its kind. This is the only cobra known to exist from the frightful summer of 1953. It was donated to jury in 1980 by Sheriff Mickey Owen. A bullet wound is visible about four inches behind the hood. The event was featured in Life magazine. Wow.

And you can see the bullet wound. That looks like a ho-mark bullet wound. I am surprised at, I mean, this is 70 years old. From 1953, 71 years. I'm surprised at how well it's preserved. So it's in this glass jar. What's it in formaldehy?

Isopropanol. Tell me about, this is an Indian cobra. It is. It's a monocled cobra. Monocled cobra. It's a single circle with another little circle in the back. Yeah, it's part of a larger spectacled cobra group. This is a pretty good-sized individual for that species.

It's not like the king cobra that can get up to, you know, multiple meters long. How big do you think that snake is? It's a little over a meter. It would have had some... Four foot. Eish, yeah. Yeah. It would have had some decent venom in it.

So where would this snake be native to? India. India. They're active hunters, for the most part. They're moving. They're moving. They're daytime. And so we think in the U.S., we think of venomous snakes as having that slit pupil eyes.

That's just a nocturnal trait, right? So when you see a snake with round pupils, that generally means they're daytime hunters. So you'll see racers and coachwhips and rat snakes out of the daytime. It doesn't just mean that it's venomous? Not at all. But it just happens that our venomous snakes are nighttime hunters. So we can teach our kids if it's got slats in his eyes, it's venomous here. In many states, yes.

But you get further south even in the U.S., and you can get round-pupiled venomous snakes. Really? Absolutely. My whole world was just a house of cards. So one of my children are alive today after all that I've taught them. Well, and you've, I apologize for insulting your parenting skills. That's some good info on Cobra's Dr. Jansen. Did you hear that round eyes don't always mean non-venomous and slit eyes don't always mean venomous?

That's news to me. But I want to get into a more philosophical question of why any of this matters. Why do we remember unique and wild stories? In this whole Cobra scare, nobody was. bitten, yet 70 years later we're still talking about it, and Springfield seems to be pretty proud of the great cobra scare. Here's Kyle and I talking it over. I'm still searching for the real concrete answer of why this stuff is important, because me and you both agree that it is, but I feel like people are always looking for identity, and identity comes from differentiation,

like in this mass of people. Really, it's our differences. And in some way, and that might sound divisive, but in this way, I think it's a positive thing. It's not divisive, but it's the things that make us different that sometimes are like, hey, this is who we are because nobody else has this thing. So maybe these little obscure stories,

which probably could be scaled down from, like, nations to states, to cities, to neighborhoods, to families. We all have these unique stories that, like you said, are truly yours and no one else has it. Like, no one else in America has a regional cobra scare. I mean, I think it's absolutely that. But again, like, it's not really, like, divisive. It's just uniqueness, right?

It's just like, oh, this is ours. All right. We're Springfield, Missouri. I mean, we don't have something like Niagara Falls. Kyle and Mother's Brewery did something special in 2017 when they were naming one of their brews. I'll give you one guess what they named it. When you're a brewery in the Ozarks

and you want to claim your Ozark Heritage, the natural choice is we love our mountains, we love our streams, our lakes, we like hiking, we like canoeing, floating, all of these things. But we wanted something a little different It was just kind of like this deep dive into who we were as a Springfield brewery and who Springfield is. And I remember us just all sitting around and brainstorming on it. And we were just like, what's something that's just so Springfield that nobody else can claim it?

And I think it was David, our head brewer at the time, who was like, the cobra scare, man. And it just hit us. We were like, nobody else can claim this. This is purely Springfield. And part of the thinking on our end is every town has something like this. That's uniquely their own. Anywhere you go, you talk to somebody from this small town. They've got something that belongs to that town and nobody else.

And so this idea of lore, this kind of like common history where your town's story is unique, but we all have those stories to share with each other. That's why we chose the Cobra Scare. That's what we wanted to, like, honor. Kyle and the brewery have tapped into this idea of regional identity. I think this stuff is pretty important, especially for people who are prone to be connected to place. I find that some people are and some people aren't as much.

What happened that's unique in your town? Tell me about it. I think that's a pretty unique name for a drink, too. Cobra Scare. That just has a ring to it that's hard to deny. But you know what? Springfield is a pretty unique town. But just in the last three years,

I've come to learn that Springfield is known as the Queen City of the Ozarks, which came to me as a complete shock. As you know, I'm from the Southern Ozarks. I mean, how is this even regular? regulated. Who approved this name? And being in Missouri, maybe I'm just a little jealous. I need some help understanding this from John. Can you tell me why it's the Queen City and quantify that for me? Sure. Calling something the Queen City of wherever was a grandizing appellation, something that you added to the name of. There's Queen Cities all over the country. There's Queen City of the Ohio Valley. And there's Queen City of New England. There's Queen City of this and Queen City of that.

Queen City of something. These all started in the late 1800s. And ours came about at a speech celebrating the centennial of our country in 1876. man named Sampronius Boyd, Pony Boyd. He was actually the judge at the trial when Wilde Will Hickok was tried for the shooting on the squad. But Sampronius Boyd was speaking at Drury University, Drury College at that time, about the centennial at a big celebration, and he called it the Queen City of Ozarks. He just dubbed it that. Just dubbed it that. And so from that point forward, it was used from time to time and time to time until finally, by the turn of the 20th century, it was pretty much a given. So it just was adopted,

regionally, nationally. Springfield is the Queen City of the... We were, as I said, we were a transportation hub. The Butterfield Stage Line came through here. The railroads came through here. This was the crossroads of five different Native American trails. We were the stepping off point into the old west. Okay.

I'm still trying to understand a little bit about this. Very interested in cities getting these wonderful wonderful accolades. Are there King cities? No, I've never seen a King City. Like Cincinnati's Queen City of Ohio Valley. Okay. No King Cities.

No King City. So you think I could, if I made a public speech like down where I'm from, if I just said, I dub such and such Arkansas, the King City of the Ozarks, that potentially it would stick. Somebody will look at you and go, you've hit your head. I think it's clear that regional. identity is earned and not just the fruit of self-serving ambitions. I think the Cobra Scare validates the Queen City name of Springfield. Though it happened 75 years after Mr. Cimpronius Boyd called it to Queen City,

I think this validates Springfield's queenship. But hey, long-lived the remembrance of the great Cobra Scare of 1953. I can't thank you enough for listening to Bear Grease. please leave us a review on iTunes and tell your friends about the wild stories you're hearing on Bear Greece in this country life.

Last spring, Clay Newcomb and I collaborated with Jason Phelps at Phelps game calls in building each of our own favorite turkey diaphragms called Prime Cuts. Now, I'm going to tell you, I love mine because it's easy to use. I'm not going to go, I'm not going to win a turkey calling contest. It's just not going to happen. But when I run this call, I get the sound,

that gobblers are looking for. I have a great turkey hunting track record. If you go listen to real turkeys out in the woods, they're not going to win calling contests, right? That's who I listen to. I can make those sounds on my cut. I also hunt with Phelps' cut, and I hunt with Clay's cut because they're all three great cuts.

Check out prime cuts at phelpsgamecalls.com. I think you'll be glad you did, and you'll find out that the Steve Rinella cut is an easy-to-use cut for beginning callers who just want to start making good turkey noises and getting action. This is an I-Heart podcast, guaranteed human.