LOL! Ok, you're right. But first, thanks for your reply - very interesting. As for me, my interest (as with everyone else here, I'm sure) started when I was about 5 or 6 years of age, living in northern Cali. It began with seeing an older kid with a couple of gopher snakes he brought to school to "show and tell". Haha! You all remember "show and tell", right? Anyway, I must have been in the kindergarten or 1st grade. From there, I began checking out books from the local library on snakes and lizards. NO INTERNET back then! LOL! I started spending my summers looking for, and catching them as a kid. At the age of 12 or 13 I began loitering around a local pet store until the manager finally put me to work bagging bird food, after school for store credit. $2.35 /hr - min wage back then! My reptile collection and interest began to grow even more. It wasn't long before I turned 15, and got a work permit, and was put on the payroll, even got a raise and was making serious money - $3.35/hr. LOL!
I then spent the next couple of years working between this pet shop, and another one. I graduated high school, and was 18 and started working for a reptile breeder I had met a few years earlier, by the name of Ed Wylie. He had a reptile shop named "Snakes-N-Things". Bill and Kathy Love, Lloyd Lemke, Bill Gillingham, Tom Crutchfield, and some others were household names back then, although I never got the chance to actually get to know any of them. Ed was a "jack of all trades", and had built homes for the previous 30 years or so, before going into retirement, which allowed him to focus even more, on his beloved hobby-REPTILES. He had about a 1500 sq ft breeding facility, dedicated to colubrids, boids and pythons. He bred a wide variety of kingsnakes, ratsnakes, cornsnakes, hognose, boas, pythons, rosys, milks, leopard geckos, veild chameleons, and more. He also had a "mouse room" and "rat room" that he produced 1000's of rodents in. Although his shop was open for retail, which I primarily ran, he also did a lot of wholesale and made his rounds to all of the reptile shows in Cali, and of course the Phoenix and Orlando Show every year (back in the '90s). He also regularly purchased from Strictly's, stocking the retail store with monitors, iguanas, and all of the rest of the nickel & dime stuff you see for sale in small petstores - pacman frogs, tree frogs, anoles, box turtles and tortoises, uromastyx, and my nemesis - those damn tokay geckos. Man I hated dealing with those things. Anyway, you get the idea.
Well I spent about 4 years working with Ed, and learned SO much and had so much fun. I eventually left and spent 7 years or so driving commercially for a transportation company in Modesto/Stockton, Ca. I went to college for a few years during this time, and continued with my reptiles though. I continued breeding cornsnakes and some kingsnakes. At the most (at that time in the mid '90s) I had around 100 breeding adults. I wholesaled everything I produced each year to local pet stores. Since Kingsnake.com hadn't even really taken off yet, this was the most convenient way to make a little extra $. Eventually, I got away from breeding all together and downsized my collection to a fairly constant 15-20 "pets". An albino colombian redtail, some rosy boas, a zonata, some desert banded geckos, a crotalid or two, and maybe a WC gopher or cal king.
In 2001, I started a career in public safety and have been employed by a local county here in N Cali ever since. In the past couple years I've begun expanding my collection yet again. My focus now, however, is Florida king morphs and western hog morphs. I also still have some breeding groups of splendida, nigritis, thayeri, california, zonata, trivigata, crotalus and some other stuff.
Public safety has been good to me - and comes with a certain, "job security" if you know what I mean, but reptiles are my passion, and have been for over 30 years. Although I have no plans to quit my day job, I do look forward to retirement, when I'll be able to spend my 40 hrs per week doing reptiles full time. For now, I have to be satisfied with the time I DO have to spend on them.
Anyway, there it is. Sorry so long.
Thanks again!
micah
