They took him down to southern Illinois and that was written up in the New York papers where the snakes carpeted the Bluffs of southern Illinois and Raymond Ditmars went down there with the people from St. Louis and collected ’em. And pictures of some of those dens are in his books “Reptiles of the World” which were by the way my first textbooks that I memorized every common Latin name that was in the reptiles of North America and snakes of North America. But anyway, southern Illinois was a famous place and Moody took me down to those dens when I had the pet shop. So when I started workin’ at the zoo, I had had a lotta field trips with Moody that I had learned a great deal from Moody about when snakes come outta hibernation, when they go into hibernation, where they have the babies, how the babies behave, where to look for ’em. And then at the zoo, I learned how to maintain ’em in captivity beyond where I had learned on my own before. I learned a lot both from Moody and from Marlin on how to handle ’em and how to teach other people to handle snakes and how to instill caution that snakebite was an absolute forbidden. In fact, it was an act of carelessness for a reptile keeper to be bit. So we were always told that if we were bitten by a venomous snake, it would be automatic dismissal if we survived.
