That's what I love about this story.

So you see all these ingenious ways in which individuals and the police try and deal with the snakes throughout the time.

And what is the most successful tool is an Ozarkian with his hoe.

[theme music] [engine rattling] [crickets chirping] [bird cries] [train whistles] In the fall of 1953, Springfield found itself at the center of an extraordinary phenomenon.

10 cobras mysteriously appeared in the city over a span of a few months, sparking widespread panic and unprecedented response from residents and authorities.

Armed with garden tools and makeshift snake-hunting gear, local citizens and police formed a cobra patrol to hunt down the elusive reptiles and even attempted to lure them out of hiding with "snake-charming music," despite the fact that snakes cannot hear.

Eventually, all of the cobras were captured or accounted for, but the origin of these venomous intruders remained an enigma for decades.

Our guest today is Brian Grubbs from the Springfield-Greene County Library, who has done extensive research to piece together the intricate puzzle of the 1953 cobra scare.

Join us as we attempt to separate fact from fiction and explore this peculiar chapter in Springfield's history.

[music playing] ANNOUNCER: Ozarks Public Television and Missouri State University are proud to present "OzarksWatch Video Magazine," a locally produced program committed to increasing the understanding of the richness and complexity of Ozarks culture.

Visit our website for more information.

Hi.

I'm Dale Moore.

Welcome to "OzarksWatch Video Magazine."

As always, it is so nice of you to invite us in.

You know, I'm at that age where I get accused of telling bad dad jokes.

And occasionally, I get accused of making some really groan-worthy puns.

So when I tell you that today's episode of "OzarksWatch Video Magazine" has a very long and scary tale, I stand guilty as charged.

We're going to talk about the 1950s Springfield cobra scare-- horrible pun, I'm sorry.

BRIAN GRUBBS: [laughs] And joining me is Brian Grubbs.

Brian, nice to have you along.

Thank you so much for having me.

I really appreciate being here.

Now, you're in a-- writing a book, and you're in the throes of writing a book, which is not a small task.

So before we get into what you're doing and the research you're doing, reminder our viewers-- they've seen you before here on "OzarksWatch," but remind your viewers what you do and where you work.

Yeah, so I'm the manager of local history and genealogy at the Springfield-Greene County Library District.

I've been there for quite a while now.

My wife and I moved to the Ozarks, planning on being here just two years, and we've been here for 16.

So this place just has a way of capturing your fascination, just like the cobra scare, and made us want to stay.

You know, I'll tell you.

Every time I visit down at the south library, I'm reminded in an age of Kindles and ebooks, that it's so nice to still be able to walk into a library and smell books.

Yeah.

DALE MOORE: That's a nice feeling.

We have a plethora of material.

DALE MOORE: Yeah, you really do.

So the 1953 cobra scare-- now, you've done several talks on this, and I've read the transcripts of what you've done.

In fact, you did a presentation, I think, at the library.

I did, yeah.

I've done presentations at the library.

I've done things at various community centers.

We did an exhibit at the Library Center as well on the cobra scare.

And so you've decided to write a book.

BRIAN GRUBBS: I did, yeah.

Which-- and that's always-- that sounds great, but wow, that's a lot of work.

How long have you been in the research process?

For several years.

The cobra scare is one of those stories that just captured my fascination and my interest.

And so I started doing some research into it to do the programs and the exhibits, and then decided to take that next step and just try and get that whole story fleshed out because we haven't seen that yet in print.

And even in the newspaper articles, as time has gone on, you see little bits and pieces of the whole story, but never the whole story put together.

DALE MOORE: You know, you're absolutely right because I have heard-- I mean, I've lived here my entire life in this region, and every now and then you hear, oh, you remember the 1953 cobra scare?

And then it's kind of like, yeah, it happened.

But as I read the transcript from one of the presentations that you did, I have to admit that I chuckled because it was kind of humorous, the way you tell the story.

But man, in 1953, this was anything but funny.

That's right.

It was frightening.

It's right.

We had children that were being kept indoors in the heat of the summer and the fall.

They could not go outside.

Some people didn't even have AC.

And so it was kind of a rough go, and especially if you lived up in that East St. Louis Street area, it was not anything to joke about.

What I want to do-- I'd like to maybe-- I'm going to throw some names out that you mentioned.

And there's a bit of a chronology to how this whole thing happened.

It basically was from the second week of August through, what, about the end of October.

That's right, yeah.

So that's not 90 days, but close to it, when-- where the entire city of Springfield was terrified.

Yeah, encapsulated.

And we see this news of the cobra scare actually reach well beyond Springfield.

Yeah.

BRIAN GRUBBS: It became international.

Yeah, we're going to talk about that.

Let's start at the beginning.

So there's a couple of neighbors, Wes Rose and Roland Parrish.

And I guess they lived next door to one another.

BRIAN GRUBBS: Right across the street from one another.

That's right.

And what was the location of that, roughly?

Where did they live?

Yeah, so Roland Parrish, he lived at 1420 East Olive Street.

And so his property butted up to the back of Reo Mowrer's pet shop.

And then his neighbor, Wesley Rose, lived directly across the street from him.

DALE MOORE: Yeah.

And the guy's name is pronounced Reo-- BRIAN GRUBBS: Reo Mowrer.

DALE MOORE: Mow-- yeah.

It's an interesting spelling of the name.

I've never seen that kind of spelling before.

And he was in the he was in the pet shop business.

That's right.

And it was not your average pet shop.

He for sure had dog and cat things, but his specialty was exotic animals.

He had monkeys, anacondas, baboons.

He had birds, tropical fish.

He had rattlesnakes, cottonmouths, and then, obviously, cobras.

DALE MOORE: Yeah.

I wonder-- I wonder-- I'm trying to figure out who in the world wants to buy a 49-inch cobra as a pet.

I mean, where's that market?

Well, exactly.

Well, he traveled all over the United States going to different carnivals and pet shows, and he would trade and buy and sell.

And then he would have, obviously, things delivered directly to his property on East St. Louis.

So Wes worked downtown on the square at Barth's, on the corner.

That's right.

Where I bought my graduation suit when I was in high school, so I know exactly where that was.

Yeah, he's a lifelong janitor there at Barth's Clothing Store.

DALE MOORE: Yeah.

And he's heading home.

Yeah, so on that night, on late August, he heads home, right in the bus.

He gets off on the bus stop.

And he starts walking towards his house.

And so he starts to see a bunch of commotion outside of his property.

And he's wondering what's going on.

And he gets up close, and somebody tells him that a snake has slithered into his front yard.

Now, this is not an uncommon occurrence for Wesley.

He's got snakes that he's killed on his property a couple of weeks ago.

He's killed two.

His neighbor killed another one right next door to him.

So that's not that unusual.

So Wesley, he's got a pit bull.

Her name was Sally.

So he goes and gets Sally-- Sally the bulldog.

That's right.

[laughs] And lets her loose.

So she dives into the shrubs and grabs a hold of this snake and pulls it out and shakes it violently, left to right, left to right, and then throws it to the side.

The snake lands and then rears up, and that's when Wesley realizes that this is not your average Ozark blacksnake.

It is, in fact, a cobra.

It spreads its hood like it wants to strike and fight.

DALE MOORE: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So Wesley's-- grabs Sally, pulls it off of her, and then his wife brings him a hoe, and he strikes it and kills it.

Yeah, I think every farmer in the Midwest has taken a hoe to a copperhead.

My grandmother was legendary with a hoe, killing copperheads on the farm.

That's what I love about this story.

So you see all this ingenious ways in which individuals and the police try and deal with the snakes throughout the time, and what is the most successful tool is an Ozarkian with his hoe.

DALE MOORE: Yeah, yeah.

And I guess it really got exciting because Roland Parrish, the next-door neighbor, had found a snake, what, a couple of weeks earlier.

Yeah.

DALE MOORE: Didn't-- killed it, put it in the trash, and then said, well, maybe I should go look in the trash.

Now, it's August, and I'm picturing Roland pulling a two-week-old dead snake in August out of the trash, what that must have-- what that must have smelled like.

That should have set Sally off, if nothing else.

Right?

So yeah, that happened on August 15.

And he pulls it out.

I'm surprised that it hadn't been picked up myself, and especially then, in the Ozarks, we were having an extreme drought, and so it was really dry and hot and-- but yeah, he turned it over to the police, and they confirmed that it was a cobra.

DALE MOORE: Now, did Ro-- "Ro-ee" "Ree" "Ro-ee" "Re-ario"-- Reo.

Yeah, Reo.

Did-- I mean, did he deny that-- because they were all saying probably that's where the snakes come from.

Yeah.

I don't think anybody in the Ozarks questioned at the time that the snakes came from his property.

Now, he admitted to having snakes or cobras on his property, but he was very adamant that he had not lost any in quite a while, and then realized that perhaps what he was saying, and then said, well, we haven't lost any at all.

So-- DALE MOORE: Yeah, yeah.

Well, of course, Springfield in 1953 wouldn't have been a very large town.

It would have been good size, but not very large, so everybody knows everybody.

So the snakes are showing up in that general geographic location, and then Leroy Stockton discovers a snake.

Yeah.

What's Leo's story?

Leroy-- Leo was-- Leroy.

Leroy, yeah, excuse me.

He was right across the street from-- oh, excuse me.

So I jumped ahead here.

So Leroy, he had found a snake, and he was eating dinner with his family.

And so he saw a snake slithering outside-- yeah, through the kitchen window.

And so then he went out, and he threw a rock at it.

And it raised up, and because he-- at that point, we knew that the cobras were around.

And he hit it.

And the snake dropped down to the ground and then crawled into his crawl space.

And so he called-- Now you've got a snake under your house.

BRIAN GRUBBS: Exactly, right?

And who wants to live with a cobra living in their crawl space?

DALE MOORE: I'll pass.

[laughter] So he calls the police.

The police aren't sure what to do.

They end up deciding to release tear gas canisters underneath the house.

And so they try to smoke out this cobra.

And so I think they released two or three different tear gas canisters.

And they waited almost an hour before this droggy snake eventually crawls his way out.

But my question to you is, would you be willing to stick your arm all the way up to the shoulder-- Yeah there were a-- BRIAN GRUBBS: --to release that?

--couple of officers that actually did-- no.

BRIAN GRUBBS: No.

Uh, I-- Me, either.

No.

[laughter] DALE MOORE: And I think in your account, the story you tell-- so when this all happened, there were, like, a hundred spectators that showed up.

That's right, yeah.

Well, so today, that'd be like a thousand people showing up, right?

So yeah, there is just a massive crowd all around.

So finally, this droggy snake comes crawling out of the crawl space.

And they try and shoot it.

There's an officer who clips it-- Jack Strope.

Yeah four or five times with his service revolver.

Doesn't kill it.

It rises up again.

And then Police Chief Frank Pike has a lasso-- A lasso.

--tied to a stick.

It just gets better and better.

I know, right?

And he goes ahead, and he's able to secure it, and then they're able to finish it off.

DALE MOORE: Yeah.

Wow.

so, you know-- and at this-- but at this point, they don't really how many snakes are on the loose.

BRIAN GRUBBS: Yeah, and I think that's the great thing about this story, too, is it's like any good Ozarkian tale, it depends on who you ask.

The story grew and changes over time.

DALE MOORE: Yeah.

So for me, I count 10 cobras in the cobra census.

DALE MOORE: OK. And so I've seen reports of 11 or 12.

And here's where I land.

So I've done-- where I landed on 10 was that there were 10 cobras identified by the group of specialists that they had pulled together, the director from the Springfield zoo, a professor from Drury, and then a science instructor from Jarrett Junior High.

So those are the individuals that were identifying these snakes.

There's two others that came about during this time period.

One was written in by a letter in the middle of the cobra scare.

There is a lady who was Reo's neighbor, wrote into the "Newsletter" and said, well, I killed a snake in early August, and so I talked with Reo about it, and we decided not to say anything and just disposed of it.

Everybody wants in.

BRIAN GRUBBS: Yeah.

So we-- he assured me that everything was OK, but nobody saw this snake.

Now, I'm not saying that she's not truthful, but nobody saw it to confirm it, so that's possibly number 11.

And then number 12, there was two girls, ages 10 and 12-- DALE MOORE: I've not heard of 12.

Yeah.

Wow.

So 10 and 9, two girls were playing in the neighborhood.

They went to a vacant lot-- or excuse me, a vacant residence, and they found a snake that was curled up on the back step.

So they screamed in nervous excitement.

And one of their fathers comes running over, grabs a board that's laying on the ground, and pins it to the ground before it can slither away.

Reo Mowrer also shows up, and he grabs the snake, and he secures it.

Now, the reports are that he's handling the snake very carefully, and he's got his hands over the back of the snake's head, where any sort of identifying marks could be discovered.

He then puts it in a box and ushers it away out of the city before anyone can see it.

So the police go to his house later that night.

They can't find him.

They finally catch up with him the next day and ask him, well, why did you usher that snake out of the city?

You issued an order that I couldn't keep any snakes in the town, so that's why I had to get rid of it.

Well, why did you handle it so carefully?

Well, it's because it's a live animal.

I've got to handle everything carefully.

So that's possibly number 12, but again, we have no proof if it was a cobra or if it was a blacksnake, or whatever it was.

But I settle on 10 with two unknowns.

Yeah.

Early on in this story, maybe somewhere between number one and number six, he did get in trouble with the city.

And the city council came up with an ordinance that kind of put him out of business, eventually, or moved him out of-- to the county?

That's right.

So he voluntarily, after he was told to remove his snakes-- there wasn't an official order, but he was told, heavily told, to remove his snakes.

So he took all of his snakes pretty early into that fall out of the city in what he called Operation Removal of Snakes.

DALE MOORE: [laughs] BRIAN GRUBBS: And so the city went to his house with the health department and the police officers several times to inspect his residence.

So I told you some of the animals that he had, but he also had penguins there.

And one of the inspections, he found in the back-- they found in the back a cage full of penguins.

And there was a dead penguin.

There was animal excrement everywhere.

There was rotting vegetables.

So all of that created this really intense odor.

And so the first city order that he received was that he had to clean up all of that to reduce that odor.

And he had 48 hours to do so and did it.

Yeah.

Where was his shop located?

About roughly where was the animal-- his business located?

Yeah, so that was 1421 East St. Louis Street.

So that's about where Steak n Shake is?

BRIAN GRUBBS: It's a little bit east, further east of that, yeah.

OK, OK. Yeah.

But generally right around-- Yeah.

--St. Louis and National, in that general sense.

BRIAN GRUBBS: Exactly.

And so Fremont and-- Fremont and Saint Louis.

Yeah.

Right in there.

Yeah.

So he cleans everything up, and then they develop some city codes and ordinances that restrict the types of animals that you can keep in the city.

And so those are some of the origins of where those codes come from.

So the first six are found roughly in the neighborhood, close by, but then the seventh, H. K. Patton is driving down Chestnut and National and sees a snake go across the road.

BRIAN GRUBBS: So he runs over this snake, and like everybody, every snake in the Ozarks is now a cobra, so he gets out to check it out.

And he finds a couple of sticks and was able to pin it to the ground.

Fortunately for him, a couple of police officers happened to be driving by, and so they stop, and they able to help him out and kill the snake and bring it in.

And that's number seven.

DALE MOORE: Yeah.

And this is really kind of when the national and international press coverage really started to kind of heat up.

I think during one of the-- maybe the second snake hunt, there was a reporter from "Look Magazine" or "Life Magazine"-- BRIAN GRUBBS: From "Life Magazine."

DALE MOORE: --that actually participated-- BRIAN GRUBBS: Yeah, they followed around and documented.

They burned all the tall grass in the vacant lots.

They moved boards and-- hoping to find a cobra.

They found some box turtles and some field mice, but no cobras.

DALE MOORE: That's amazing, yeah.

So I mean-- so how big a story-- I mean, there was a six-column spread in-- what, was the "Chicago Tribune" or the-- BRIAN GRUBBS: The "LA Times," yeah.

"LA Times," maybe?

Yeah, and then Chicago had some, New York had some.

There was articles in London and in Paris.

And it made international news.

DALE MOORE: Electronic media obviously would have been in the very, very early stages and not a lot of it, so when you're talking-- I mean, it was press-- hard press coverage, from the old, traditional press that covered this, which is pretty remarkable.

And you see the predecessor to the AP Photos being shared.

And so the LA paper ran a photo along with this massive story that they did.

DALE MOORE: And really, I-- I don't know where the Chamber of Commerce weighed in, but this is not great for business.

And I think you talked some about some transcontinental buses stopping and mom saying to the kids, don't get too far off the bus.

Yeah, this is the city with cobras.

[laughter] I mean, imagine in the Midwest, becoming known as the city of cobras.

I mean, how extraordinary is that kind of crazy story?

It's unreal, and I think it just adds to the fascination and the grandeur of this story.

And so you would see local businesses start to drum up into this.

There was a plumbing shop that comes up later that says we're on the fringe of the cobra district, but we'll guarantee your protection if you come into our showroom.

I think-- yeah.

[laughs] Now there's an ad for you, right?

BRIAN GRUBBS: Right.

Now one of my favorite stories though, is Daniel Funkhouser's birddog.

Exactly.

All right.

Let it happen.

So Daniel is the guy that owned that plumbing shop.

And so it was not too far off of St. Louis, or it was on St. Louis Street, and-- DALE MOORE: And this is October 1.

Yeah.

And so he starts to hear his dogs that are in the cage start barking up a storm.

And so he looks out the back window, and he sees a cobra that's swaying back and forth between his big pup-- DALE MOORE: 18 inches up, right?

Yeah.

DALE MOORE: Yeah.

And the pups.

So he and one of his coworkers, they run out there.

And they start to try and pin that snake to the ground.

Daniel grabs a hoe and tries to swing at it, misses, and breaks the hoe.

[laughter] DALE MOORE: Yeah.

And so the snake drops to the ground, tries to go through the fence, and they able to secure it, and they hit it again.

Well, he thinks that he's killed the snake, but he hasn't.

So he grabs a toilet plunger and some gloves, and he picks it up and he holds the toilet plunger to his mouth like he's playing a snake charming flute.

And he poses for the photo, but what he doesn't realize is the snake is still alive, and it starts to move on him.

Yeah, yeah.

And so it's a pretty comical event.

And that's a great segue.

October 1, the Funkhouser dogs go crazy.

October the 2nd, the city gather-- city officials gather, and they come up with a scheme.

They listen to snake charmer music.

I'm trying not to laugh while I tell this story.

BRIAN GRUBBS: [laughs] I think you should.

It's-- DALE MOORE: It's really hard not to, but I picture the third floor of city hall, the council listening to a horrible recording of snake charmer music.

And they put it into action.

That's right, yeah.

Well, the thing is, is snakes don't hear like you and I do, so they respond to the movement of the snake charmer, rather than the music itself.

And so they concoct this idea in which they're going to broadcast this snake-charming music on a radio truck and go around the neighborhood to try and drum up the snakes out of the grass.

And so they have zero success, as one might expect.

And I think they catch a lot of heat for it, too, because people say, well, the snakes can't hear the music.

And so I think that's probably some of the flack that they catch because they're trying to drum up the story and make it a little bit more fantastical.

But lo and behold, well beyond the range of the music, a snake comes up at a mechanic shop just, I think, five blocks down the road.

DALE MOORE: Is this David Kelly, or is this-- BRIAN GRUBBS: No, this is at the Reynolds Manufacturing Company.

DALE MOORE: Reynolds, yeah.

BRIAN GRUBBS: Yeah.

So they're working in the manufacturing company, and they see a snake, and it turns out to be a cobra.

And so they throw 4 by 4s and brake cylinders at it, and they eventually kill it.

And the city says, well, we should get some credit for it.

It happened at the same time as our snake charming.

DALE MOORE: Yeah, yeah.

I don't know who the real hero is in this story because when we look at David Kelley, he decides to, along with the assistance of a neighbor James Boyd, to try to catch, what, number seven or eight and put it in a jar?

Yeah, so this is-- Pickled-- pickled-- typical Ozarks fashion, a pickled snake.

And I think if I remember correctly, it was a half-gallon jar, which is not very big.

DALE MOORE: Not very big.

And so he sees a cobra in the middle of the street, and so he stops.

His wife runs on to call the police at their house.

They're on their way home.

So he tries to get a 4 by-- or a 2 by 4 and pin it to the ground.

Well, he misses, and the snake lunges at him.

Well, he does-- he tries it again.

He misses again.

But he's able to get his boot on the cobra's head.

So now he's standing in the middle of the road-- DALE MOORE: What do you do?

BRIAN GRUBBS: --with a live cobra underfoot.

And so eventually, some-- a police officer comes and helps them.

They trade places.

And then they concoct this idea of, well, let's take this hold of the snake with our hands and put the jar up right next to and try and, as their words are, thread the snake as a-- thread through a needle into the jar.

Well, as you can imagine, it didn't go according to plan.

DALE MOORE: An unhappy cobra, undoubtedly.

BRIAN GRUBBS: Yes.

Yeah.

And so they provided a little too much slack, and the cobra had a little bit too much movement and was able to try and strike at them.

Fortunately, missed, but that didn't deter them.

They decided to try it again.

They regained control of the snake.

And they somehow were able to do it.

So the 10th and last known cobra was secured in this jar, taken to the police station, and put on exhibit.

DALE MOORE: Yeah, yeah.

Well, eventually, the question who did it or how did they get released became kind of a known quantity.

And tell us about Mr. Barnett.

Yeah, so it took us until 1988 to finally figure out what was going on.

And it broke Thanks to the excellent research work in the interview that Mike O'Brien did at the "News-Leader" with Carl Barnett.

So Carl was 14 years old in 1953, and he had an eye on tropical fish and wanted to raise tropical fish, so he worked out a deal with Reo Mowrer to trade snakes that he would find and gather throughout the Ozarks for money.

And then he would also do other side jobs, trying to skimp and save throughout the entire summer to save up for this one tropical fish.

Well, he finally did it, and then the next-- that night, the fish died.

So the next day he goes back to Reo Mowrer's property, but instead of finding Reo, he finds one of his assistants.

And so according to Carl, the assistant says, well, that's tough, kid.

Get lost.

So Carl is pretty upset.

He goes into the back.

He's very familiar with Reo's operation, and he sees a crate.

According to his confession, he opens up the crate and sees that it's full of blacksnakes.

And he says, well, these are not the exact same snakes that I traded in, but pretty close, so I'll just let these loose, and we'll call it even, but not knowing that those were not harmless blacksnakes.

Those were, in fact, cobras.

DALE MOORE: Wow.

Well, the 1953 cobra scare lives in infamy and beyond.

I cannot wait to read the book.

Brian Grubbs, thank you for sharing the story.

Thanks for being on the show today.

My pleasure.

Thank you for having me.

This was awesome.

This was absolutely awesome.

You stay tuned.

I'll be right back.

[music playing] ANNOUNCER: Ozarks Public Television and Missouri State University are proud to present "OzarksWatch Video Magazine," a locally produced program committed to increasing the understanding of the richness and complexity of Ozarks culture.

Visit our website for more information.

I'd like to thank Brian Grubbs for talking with us today.

And we'll see you again real soon on another "OzarksWatch Video Magazine."

[music playing]