Reptile & Amphibian Forums

This is a PIC from a clipping from a Florida newspaper. I think it is from around 1966.

....Art Bass ran a business called Living Wonders in Titusville Florida where I was a teen in the mid 60s. He did shows on the weekends at living Wonders and there would often be quite a crowd as the facility was co-located with Florida Wonderland which was a busy amusement park at the time. He had an outdoor Gator exhibit and the tourists always wanted to see someone in there with the gators. Art handled gators like they were harmless and would occasionally get bitten by one of them. Art kept a large collection of local and exotic reptiles on display. My brother and I were very interested in reptiles and especially snake hunting and would regularly trade locally caught snakes to Art for Boas and Pythons. A typical trade would be several dozen Watersnakes, Garters and Black Racers or 8 or 10 Corns and Yellow Rats for one Boa or Python. My first Ball Python, Retic, Boa Constrictors and Rainbow Boa all came from Art. Most of the snakes we traded to Art were sold to tourists or shipped to pet stores. Sometimes he would feed a Black Racer we brought in to one of the King Cobras. We also traded some local venomous snakes to Art. Even at that time he seemed especially interested in venomous snakes. He had caught the world record Cottonmouth at Orange Lake a few years before and had a plaster cast of it on display. He was very into snake hunting and gave us a lot of pointers. He seemed frustrated that he had to stay there minding the store while we were out snake hunting every day. We were there at Living Wonders several times when imported shipments arrived and helped unpack them. It was great fun.
.....Art was maried and had a son. His wife was a new school teacher and they had been at the University of Florida where she was getting her degree in teaching and Art was either working with researchers or working on his own post graduate degree. I think he had attended the University of Georgia at some time before that but I am not sure if he had a degree from UGA or not?????
....Art had had polio as a child and walked with a limp. He was very into martial arts and physical fitness and would often include demonstrations of martial arts in his reptile shows. He would have one of the King Cobras out and would maneuver in front of it doing Karate style routines and keep the Cobra alert with hood spread facing him while he danced around. He was quite a show man.
....After leaving Titusville Art either opened or worked at several different reptile attractions around the country. By the late 70s he was divorced and full time snake hunting in the Lake Okeechobee and south Florida area. He caught a bunch of Florida and Brooks Kings and sold so many of them that he was instrumental in them becoming readily available and cheap in pet stores. Many other people followed Arts methods hunting Kingsnakes in the then fairly new cane fields around Lake Okeechobee and a lot of King snakes were captured. Before then Florida Kings were difficult to find in large numbers as they had been somewhat overcollected earlier along the hiway 27 corridor. We very rarely found them in east central Florida. These snakes which suddenly became readily available and cheap in pet stores back then got a lot of hobbyist breeders started. Many people who had experience with Cornsnakes "moved up" to one of the Florida Kings as their next step in herpetoculture.
....The next time I saw Art was in 1992 when I was in the army working Hurrican Andrew relief in South Florida. I stopped in at Strictly Reptiles to see if they had any Rainbow Boas avialable and found Art drinking beer as he cleaned up Gaboon Vipers and their cages. Art stayed with Strictly where he managed the hot animals up until the time of his death in late 2004. He had been bitten numerous times by hot snakes and when bitten would get a case of beer and drive to the local hospital and drink in the parking lot outside the ER to see what the results of the bite would be. He often drove home with no treatment. He had lived a rough but VERY interesting life and was responsible for getting many of us going in herpetoculture back in the good old days. I was talking to some of the really old guys in reptiles at Daytona last year and many of them had funny stories to tell about Art. We miss him.
Jeff Clark
Savannah GA

When I saw the blurb "skinning King Cobra" I thought the worst!