The cobra scare in Springfield during the late summer and fall of 1953 was a big enough deal that I vaguely recall it even though it happened about the time I turned seven years old. I don't really remember anything about it except that I recall my parents and other people in the Greene County community of Fair Grove, where I grew up, talking about it. I guess it was big enough news that it was the topic of conversation du jour.
The first indication that anything was amiss came on the evening of August 22, 1953, when Wesley Rose killed a snake with a hoe after his dog chased the reptile out of some shrubbery in his front yard in the 1400 block of East Olive. The dead snake was taken to police headquarters, where officers, consulting with a junior high science teacher, tentatively identified it as a cobra. Rose said a neighbor of his had also recently killed a similar snake and that Reo Mowrer, owner of a pet and exotic animal shop located on St. Louis just a block south of Rose's house, had recently retrieved a snake after another neighbor had reported it on the loose.
Mowrer, however, downplayed the situation, explaining that, even though he did have cobras in his shop, he didn't think the snake Rose had killed was a cobra. He explained that he hadn't had any cobras get loose for a long time, and he thought the snake Rose killed might have been a "local species" that just puffed up like a cobra when it got mad. Besides, he added, cobras couldn't last in the terrific drought the Ozarks were experiencing in the summer of 1953.
Two days later, on August 24, the snake killed by Rose was positively identified as a cobra, and a Drury College professor who examined it said the snake, which had been defanged, was starting to regrow fangs and would have been deadly poisonous after a few more days. The snake killed previously by Rose's neighbor was also tentatively identified as a cobra.
Although Mowrer still denied that the snakes that had been killed had come from his shop, he agreed to move his remaining cobras, and they were taken to a sparsely populated but undisclosed location out of the city limits but still in Greene County. Despite Mowrer's denials, most of his neighbors remained convinced that his shop was the source of the escaped snakes. Mowrer admitted that it was possible the snakes came from snake handlers, dealers, or other customers who frequented his store, but he said none of his inventory of snakes was missing.
Within a few days after Mowrer moved the cobras, the new location was revealed to be a sales barn on West Highway 66, and neighbors of the barn started complaining to authorities that they didn't want the snakes in their area.
If Mowrer thought moving his snakes would solve the problem, he was very wrong, and it wasn't just the complaints from folks on West Highway 66 that he had to worry about. Because on August 30, two more cobras were killed in the vicinity of Mowrer's pet shop. News of the latest cobra spottings intensified people's "jitters" almost to the point of hysteria. It surely didn't help when the Drury professor pointed out that, although there existed an antidote that could be administered promptly after a Cobra bite, very little was available in the United States.
The next day, August 31, authorities inspected Mowrer's "snake shack" west of town and found the snakes "pretty well under control," but county prosecutor Douglas Greene nonetheless gave Mowrer an ultimatum to either move the snakes out of the county or else face charges.
Another snake, discovered by a six-year-old girl, was killed on September 3 directly behind Mowrer's pet shop on St. Louis Street. Mowrer asked bystanders not to call police, but someone did. Then, when officers arrived, the pet shop owner reportedly said the dead reptile was "just a little old snake," but the officers were sure it looked just like the other cobras that had been killed in recent days.
The snake scare continued to make front-page news on September 4 when Springfield police announced that they intended to launch a full-fledged "safari" through the streets of the city to track down and kill any other cobras that might be on the loose.
An enterprising Springfield realtor sought to take advantage of the public snake hysteria, advertising at least one of its homes for sale as guaranteed to be "free from cobras."
On the evening of September 8, another large snake was spotted on the loose in the vicinity of Mowrer's pet shop, but Mowrer, assuring onlookers it was a harmless bull snake, scooped it up and drove away with it before officers could be summoned. The next day he told authorities the snake was now out of the county, but he refused to say for sure whether it was a cobra or large bull snake, referring such questions to his attorney. Mowrer also tried to downplay the threat of cobras, saying they were not as dangerous as people were led to believe, as they very rarely tried to bite humans.
Meanwhile, Springfield's "cobra census" made national news when it became the subject of a three-minute story broadcast on NBC radio on the evening of September 8, the same day as the latest snake spotting. A couple of days later, the Springfield snake scare made international news when a story about it appeared in a London newspaper.
On September 9, yet another cobra was killed after being "gassed out" from beneath a house across St. Louis Street from Mowrer's pet shop. This was the sixth snake killed in the vicinity during the past couple of weeks that was confirmed as definitely being a cobra. Mowrer's troubles continued to grow when, on the same day, the Webster County Fair board refused his request to set up an exhibit on the fair grounds because of complaints from nervous fairgoers.
On the night of September 10, police had to guard Mowrer's pet shop against arson after learning of threats to burn the place down. On September 11, another thorough search of the city, concentrated in the neighborhood of Mowrer's shop, turned up no additional cobras.
After a lull of a couple of weeks, another cobra was killed on October 1 in the 1200 block of St. Louis, a little over a block away from Mowrer's pet store. It was announced at the time that this marked the 9th cobra killed in Springfield. This does not seem to jibe with the fact that the previous snake killed was identified as the 6th, but apparently two snakes that had been killed in late August or early September were not positively identified as cobras until the latter part of September.
City officials announced at the time of the 9th cobra killing that they were considering employing Hindu snake-charming music to try to get shed of the snakes. "Anything to rid the city of the cobras," the city health director was quoted as saying. Over the next couple of days, officials auditioned the music and announced definite plans to give it a try. The "concert" took place on the morning of October 5, as officials piped the snake-charming music over a PA system set up near the site of the most recent cobra killing. While the music was playing, another cobra was, indeed, killed about four blocks away, but some people questioned whether the music played a part in flushing the serpent out. The men who killed the snake said they couldn't hear the music playing four blocks away, but it was suggested that maybe the cobra had better ears than they did.
Springfield's experiment with snake charming again made headlines across the country, and the "cobra hunt" made the city the butt of jokes in some quarters, as folks not directly threatened by the reptilian menace began to see the humor in the situation. However, to most people in "the cobra capital of the United States, as Springfield was jokingly called, it was no laughing matter.
In late October, a cobra was captured alive on East Olive and taken to Dickerson Zoo, where about 5,000 people came by to view it several days later.
In mid-November a boa constrictor was killed in the neighborhood of Mowrer's pet shop, and the store owner again became the target of city authorities, who talked of passing an ordinance making it illegal to keep dangerous snakes inside the city limits. Mowrer, for his part, denied that the boa came from his shop, just as he had with the cobras. He said he'd sold several of the boas in Springfield and that one of those snakes might have gotten away from its owner. Never mind that the boa was found not far from Mowrer's shop.
The Dickerson Zoo cobra died in captivity in late December, and in early January 1954, Springfield did, indeed, pass an ordinance banning dangerous snakes from the city. Mowrer was given 20 days to get all of his highly poisonous or otherwise dangerous snakes removed from the city. Springfield's snake scare gradually died down after this, as no new sightings of cobras or boas were reported. It was presumed that the cold winter weather had killed off any snakes that remained at large after the October snake hunt.
Life Magazine and Newsweek were among the national magazines that did stories about Springfield and its cobra scare, but Springfield tried to make the best of its nationwide notoriety as the cobra capital of the country, even enhancing the picture of a snake that adorned its city seal to make it look like a cobra.
Mowrer died in the early 1970s, having never admitted fault in the escape of the snakes, and it was assumed the whole truth about the cobra scare would never be learned. In 1988, however, a Springfield man named Carl Burnett came forward to solve the 35-year-old mystery of where the cobras had come from and how they'd gotten loose. He said he was 14 years old at the time and that he turned them loose as a prank to get back at Mowrer because he felt the shopkeeper had cheated him on the purchase of a tropical fish. He simply opened a crate containing the snakes that sat behind the pet shop. He said he didn't realize at the time how dangerous the snakes were, or he never would have set them free. Burnett had agreed to share his story only after an attorney assured him that he was unlikely to face charges after such a long time, and he was, in fact, not charged with any crime. People were just glad to finally know the details of what had happened 35 years earlier.
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