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U. S. Navy

Key West, Florida – February/March 1965

As I wrote in the account of my misadventures in Officer Candidate School and the aftermath, I arrived in Key West in mid-February in a pouring rain. This set the tone for the rest of the stay. Not that it rained the whole time I was there. There was plenty of sunshine, and lots of opportunities for relaxing by the swimming pool or on the beach. But the weather was fickle. On a perfectly sunny day, without a cloud in the sky, you could go inside for a few minutes, like about 20, and when you came out again, you would find yourself in the midst of a downpour.

But I didn’t mind that. It was the human environment that was most uncomfortable. Watching TV in the BOQ was particularly annoying. This was the era of civil rights demonstrations, and Martin Luther King was leading marches in Selma, Alabama and getting beat up by Sheriff Bull Connor’s cops and dogs. And the officers in the BOQ were cheering them on – Bull Connor’s cops and dogs, that is.

The classroom was no better. The instructor was a sonarman named Green, a PO2 (Petty Officer, Second Class). One day he got on a rant about Martin Luther King in the classroom. He went on and on about how MLK was the incarnation of evil and so forth. I finally interrupted him and told him that I didn’t think the classroom was the right venue for that kind of talk. Next thing I knew I was being called on the carpet by his superior, a lieutenant. Summoning me to his office, the lieutenant told me (a) that as far as he was concerned, the instructor, regardless of rank, was God in the classroom (I was an officer, of course, and outranked Green by several grades, but that didn’t matter in the classroom, nor should it have) and (b) he, the lieutenant, thought that the classroom was the right place for such talk. So I began my naval career with a reprimand right from the start.

There was an interesting sequel to this episode, which I’ll relate here even though it occurred several years later. After I finished my active duty tour in the Navy in January 1968, I moved to Eugene, Oregon, with the aim of attending Russian classes at the University of Oregon in preparation for studying Russian history in graduate school. I also enrolled in a Naval Reserve unit there to earn a little extra money and keep busy. Eugene, being a university town, experienced lots of political activity during the spring and summer of 1968, with the left-leaning students and faculty pitted against a sizeable local population of right-wing rednecks. On April 4, Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee. The next night I went to my reserve unit meeting. One of the enlisted men got on a rant about how Martin Luther King deserved to be assassinated because he was wrecking the country. I told him I thought it was the people like him who were wrecking the country. For this the CO called me on the carpet. To his credit, he did not agree with the views of the man doing the raving; he merely said that it was beneath me to argue with people like that. But it got me another black mark, and it kind of soured me on the Naval Reserve.

Anyway, there were some bright spots during my sojourn in Key West. My classmate from OCS, Jim Davis, destined for NAVFAC Nantucket, was there, and he was good company. He tried to teach me to play golf, which was fun though futile – I managed to hit all my golf balls into sand traps and lakes. I also met Lee Elliott, a mustang officer from Los Alamitos, who had been assigned to the same place as me, NAVFAC Centerville Beach.

But the high point of my sojourn in Florida did not come at Key West. One day I drove back up the Overseas Highway (US 1) to visit the Miami Serpentarium. I had seen it on the way down from Newport -you couldn’t miss it; it was right by the side of US 1, with a huge statue of a cobra rearing up out of the ground. I had previously read about the place in a magazine, so when I saw it I immediately vowed to come back and pay it a visit. I was not disappointed.

The Miami Serpentarium was founded in 1946 by William E. Haast, a native of Patterson, New Jersey, another place to which I have a connection of sorts (see the account of my visit to Paris earlier in 1964). Bill Haast, born in 1910, had an interest in snakes from an early age, and after serving as a flight engineer with Pan American during WWII, he determined to start a snake farm with the aim of producing venom for research and medicinal purposes. Long before then he had started milking poisonous snakes for their venom, and the profits that supported the Serpentarium in its early years came mainly from performing venom extraction in front of paying customers, of which I became one. He did this by using a snake hook to catch the snake and pull it out of its cage. Once the snake was out of the cage, he would grab it by the back of the neck and, with the snake’s mouth open trying to bite him, he would plonk its fangs down onto a rubber membrane stretched over a glass cup, and the snake would inject its venom harmlessly into the glass cup. I personally witnessed him doing this with a cobra.

Of course he got bitten – at least 172 times during his life (a Guinnes world’s record). To immunize himself against cobra bites, Haast began by injecting small amounts of venom, eventually building up to what would ordinarily be a lethal dose. He did this for many years and became the first person ever known to survive a king cobra bite – or so I read, though I don’t believe this is accurate. (King Cobras, the longest venomous snake in the world, are shy and slow by comparison with other cobras, but they secrete a lot of venom.) The gotcha here was that the cobra venom immunity was only effective against cobras and other neurotoxic snakes, and not even all of those, because the toxic components of snake venom vary according to species; it didn’t work for haemotoxic venoms at all. So he also injected himself with venom from other species of snakes – cottonmouths and rattlesnakes, which have haemotoxic venom, and kraits and mambas, which are neurotoxic but different from cobras. (In 1954 he barely survived a bite from a krait.) Even so, his immunity wasn’t complete, and sometimes he had to be hospitalized. In 2003 he was bitten by a Malaysian pit viper and lost a finger in consequence.

Haast was an outspoken exponent of the medicinal potential of snake venom, and he was convinced that it could be useful in the treatment of such diseases as arthritis and multiple sclerosis. In the early years of the Serpentarium there was some promise that it might help in the treatment of polio victims, but the advent of the Salk vaccine in the ’50s put the kibosh on that idea. I don’t know to what extent Haast’s beliefs were borne out in other areas, but the Miami Serpentarium did become a major world center for the production of snake antivenins, a considerable achievement in itself. And Haast’s own immunized blood was used a number of times during his life to rescue snake bite victims from the brink of death.

Visiting the Miami Serpentarium was an unforgettable experience, but unfortunately one that is not available to later generations. It wasn’t a snake bite that brought about its demise. Haast also kept other reptiles, including crocodiles, in a pit in the Serpentarium. In 1977 a 6-year old boy fell into the pit and was killed by a crocodile. According to a newspaper report in the St. Petersburg Times (Sept. 5, 1977), the boy was sitting on the wall of the pit, which was only 5 feet high, and he and his father, who had helped him climb onto the wall, were throwing sea grapes (fruit from a tree that grows in the Caribbean area, including south Florida) at the crocodile, whose name was Cookie, trying to provoke a reaction from it. The boy did indeed provoke a reaction, but not the way he had hoped; he lost his balance and fell into the pit, and the 12-foot crocodile instantly lunged and caught him. To my way of thinking the boy’s father was at fault for letting him sit on the wall. (If I remember correctly, in 1964 there were all kinds of signs posted with dire warnings against sitting on the wall or climbing into the pit.) But Haast was devastated and lost interest in running the Serpentarium. He closed it in 1984, and the cobra statue was removed, which I thought was a shame. In 1990 he opened a new establishment, the Miami Serpentarium Laboratories, in Punta Gorda, Florida. But this facility, as far as I can tell, is dedicated solely to research and production of venom for medical purposes and is not open to the public. Haast himself lived to be 100 years old and died in 2011. He ascribed his long life to his practice of injecting himself with snake venom.

I completed the course at Fleet Sonar School in March and embarked upon the drive across the North American continent to California. My first stop was for the 12-hour sports car race at Sebring, Florida, which by coincidence was held just as I was driving through the area. The winner of the race was the Chevy-powered Chaparral driven by Jim Hall and Hap Sharp. The day after the race, I resumed my northward progress. It was a beautiful sunny day, and I had the top down on the Spitfire. Before I knew it, one of those sudden Florida squalls had come up, and soon it was pouring rain, and before long I found that I was driving along the highway in a bathtub.

After draining the car, I continued on to Tallahassee, where I turned westward. I drove through southern Alabama, where I found to my surprise (I was pretty naive on the subject of race in those days) that segregation was alive and well, or at least well-supported, in the Deep South. I stopped at a gas station and headed for the rest room. As I was about to go into the men’s room, a little black boy stopped me and gestured to a sign I had missed. It said “Colored.” I was about to go into the black men’s rest room.

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