DAILY MAIL (Charleston, W Virginia) 01 June 07 Meet the Snake Man, the Snake Lady and the Snake Baby (Kris Wise)
Grantsville: On the West Virginia funnel cake and carnival freak show circuit, they call him "The Snake Man."
The nickname conjures up images of a burly guy decked out in leather with tattoos on his face, who maybe tries to make money by kissing some slithering animal he keeps draped across his shoulders.
It just doesn't describe Kirk White.
Kirk White and his fiancee Natalie Zellie get their seven-month-old daughter Zia up close to a 4-foot-long ball python, one of the creatures in their traveling exhibit, "The World's Deadliest Snakes." .. The 36-year-old Pittsburgh native has pale skin and red hair, and he wears khaki shorts. He looks like the kind of guy who might collect comic books, enjoy board games and, if you put him in a cargo hat and slathered him with enough sunscreen, might make an excellent nature guide at a national park.
"Yeah, some guys I know like to get drunk and handle their snakes," White says. "I just don't do that."
White's exhibit -- "The World's Deadliest Snakes" -- is parked this week at the Calhoun County Wood Festival in Grantsville.
His exhibit, returning for its second year, has quickly become the big draw.
Inside his trailer is a collection of 15 reptiles, including a 9-foot-long albino Burmese python, a deadly black mamba -- "It has enough poison to kill 10 grown men!" -- and the highlight: a 22-foot-long, 200-pound reticulated python. On Wednesday that snake got a little pre-show snack of nine giant frozen rats.
And Thursday afternoon, curled in a blanket on the floor of the temperature-controlled trailer, about 2 feet from a couple of glass-encased pythons, was White's 7-month-old daughter, Zia. She was taking a nap.
"They call him ‘The Snake Man,' and I'm ‘The Snake Lady,' and now we have ‘The Snake Baby,'" says Natalie Zellie, White's fiancee and partner of three years.
When Zia awoke, White immediately took out his 4-foot-long ball python -- "This was my first snake, too," he says -- and handed it to the baby. She cooed and grabbed for it as if it were a stuffed teddy bear.
The family will spend the next five months on the road, taking their snakes to as many as 30 fairs and festivals around West Virginia and Pennsylvania.
Last year, the little wood festival in Grantsville wound up being White's biggest moneymaker.
His exhibit is cheap. You can tour it for $1 and have a picture taken with a giant python for $5.
It's not uncommon for 150 people a night to pay for digital photos of themselves with a big yellow snake wrapped around their necks.
Business is good enough some summers that White makes enough money to "float on through the rest of the year."
When it isn't, or when gas prices get so high they eat up too much profit, White works winters as a carpenter and breeds snakes, which sell for nice sums.
This has been his life for the better part of a decade.
But he's been The Snake Man for as long as he can remember.
White was just 14 years old, and already an animal lover when a friend gave him his first snake, a relatively harmless ball python.
"I was just hooked," White said. "People have always kept snakes, and it's such a big thing now, but back then it was something really different. It was kind of a new thing, and snakes were kind of hard to come by."
Within a few years White had amassed 300 of the creatures.
He started working in a Pittsburgh pet store right after high school, eventually working his way up to manager.
"Every snake that would come into the store, I would take home with me," White said.
Eventually, the cost to feed all the snakes got so high -- back then it amounted to about $3 to $4 per week per snake -- he needed some extra income. So he started taking his pets on tour.
He would go to Boy Scout meetings, birthday parties and community events, showing off all his different snake species and giving lectures.
"I wanted to go to school for zoology," he said. "But there really wasn't any program close by, and there was nothing really that just focused on snakes.
"So I just started reading every book I could get my hands on and talking to every old guy I could find that knew anything at all about snakes," he said.
His approach wasn't to shock or scare, even when he was toting around a 22-foot python.
"I really, really want to educate people," White says.
He started making money with his on-the-road snake exhibit, but he still didn't consider it a full-time gig. For six years, starting in his early 20s, he ran his own pet store.
But it wasn't the run-of-the-mill puppy and kitty retailer.
He bred and kept 9-foot crocodiles in cages.
Those weren't for sale. He would take them to local schools as part of his show, which was becoming more successful each year.
"Eventually, I was seeing that I'd work two days with the exhibit and make more money than I would in a week at the store," White said.
He gave the pet shop to his brother and bought his first trailer.
Now, April through October, he's on the road with his snakes.
He has a new trailer now, a $25,000 investment he customized himself with wood paneling, special lights and temperature-controlled glass cases for each snake.
"People might come in expecting it to be like the old snake handlers of the old days," White said.
"My whole point is to educate kids that snakes are not these ferocious creatures to be feared that go around attacking and biting people," he said. "And the only way I can do that and have some credibility is to be safe."
White has never been bitten by a venomous snake.
"Oh, I've had some pretty nasty bites from pythons," he said. "When one of those 200-pound things wants to get you, there's no getting away from them. But I've never had to go to the hospital and I've never had to get stitches."
He knows he's not invincible, though.
He moves all 15 snakes every single day he's on the road, to refill their water dishes and to clean their cages.
Even with a snake like the black mamba, he goes in ungloved with a snake hook and winds up whipping the thing out just a few feet from his body and into a plastic tub.
"As long as you can get some antivenin in you, you probably won't die," White says of such a snake's bite.
So he does keep antivenin stocked somewhere close by, right? Maybe in a mini-fridge underneath one of those glass snake cases?
"No," White scoffs. "It's too expensive. And it has no shelf life."
He seems to have the protocol down pat for what to do if he does get bit. He knows you have to slow the flow of poison with a tight wrap, and he's got all the phone numbers for antivenin banks up and down the East Coast.
He said he has faith that if he can get to a hospital quickly and somebody can fly him in just the right life-saving serum, "you're probably going to get through it."
His fiancee seems just as relaxed standing -- and living -- in the midst of all those snakes.
At their home on the outskirts of Pittsburgh, White and Zellie have another dozen snakes. Half of their basement has been remodeled as an escape-proof serpent den.
Zellie, 24, met White when he was running a T-shirt kiosk in a Washington County, Pa., mall, and she was working retail.
They became friends first, and she began traveling around helping him at the festivals and fairs.
"I wasn't really into snakes, but I wasn't freaked out by them either," Zellie said. "I met him when he had so many (300), and I just thought it was extremely cool.
"You get to know the animals so well, how they react to different things, so it's OK," Zellie says.
The couple is planning to marry either this fall or next, after fair season is over for the year.
On Saturday, after their stint at the Calhoun festival, they're headed to the Rattlesnake Roundup in Sinnemahoning, Pa. It's a catch-and-release competition for snake enthusiasts to see who can bag the biggest reptile. White doesn't participate, but it's a good chance to have his exhibit seen by hundreds or even thousands of people.
In a couple of weeks, when school lets out, White's older daughter, Brooke, 14, will get on board for the rest of the summer exhibit tour. She's been traveling with her father every summer since she was 2. Her first experience with a snake -- also a ball python -- was when he put one in her lap two days after she was born.
The family stays in a camper when they're on the road, and they try to get home at least once a week to check on and feed their other snakes.
Each year, White does some remodeling to his snake trailer and switches up the exhibit so returning customers aren't bored.
He returns each year to festivals throughout West Virginia, from the Buckwheat Festival in Preston County and the Mountain State Forest Festival in Elkins to Nutter Fort's Blackberry Festival and Webster County's Wood Chopping Fest.
"I can't imagine not doing this," White says. "I'll be doing it for as long as I can, until I just can't do it anymore. When I start to slow down and I'm not so quick, maybe we'll move to non-venomous snakes or something."
After that, "the girls will take over."
Meet the Snake Man, the Snake Lady and the Snake Baby