Tag: Springfield MO

Cobra Scare

August 15, 2026

August 15, 1953 – A homeowner in Springfield, Missouri killed a 4½ foot long snake with a hoe. The snake was later identified as a deadly hooded cobra. Springfield was soon terrified as one cobra after another turned up. This all happened a year before I was born.

Reo Mowrer, owner of an exotic pet store a block away from where the first snake was found, denied they were his. As the hunt continued, police played snake charmer music through a loudspeaker to lure the snakes out. Cobras are deaf. Music does not draw the snakes through the music except by the vibrations

Frank Pike holding the stick with the cobra. Carl Gustafson is police officer in middle.

The story made national news and was featured in Life Magazine as eleven snakes were eventually killed. Mike O’Brien, a columnist for the News and Leader, reported in the seventies that the mystery had not been solved about the source of the reptiles.

Mister Mowrer had spoken to reporter O’Brien before his death and had admitted that he had a shipment of exotic snakes delivered just before the scare. The cobras were some of this illegal order. This information was not to be released until after his death.

Officers looking for more snakes

Years later, a Springfield man confessed that as a youth he had released the snakes from the pet shop. He was angry that a fish he bought there had died and the owner refused to refund his money. When I managed a pet store, our policy was to give a forty-eight-hour warranty with the return of the dead fish.

Holding another dead snake

If only that had been in effect in nineteen fifty-three this entire adventure would never have taken place. Now you see why enjoy writing non-fiction more than fiction. You just can’t make this stuff up.

Hillbilly at Heart

August 13, 2026

I remember in the 1960s when The Beverly Hillbillies first aired. As Ozarks Hillbillies, we knew that Jed and Granny and the rest of their family were not the same as us. They did not know about doorbells, modern telephones, or television. I remember when Jethro hooked up a phone for Granny and made it a party line.

Silver Dollar City and Branson, Missouri, are where we learned that we were in the hills. Some call it the Ozark Mountains or plateau. When they brought the cast and crew to these hills to film several episodes in the backdrop of SDC, the whole backstory changed. They were no longer from the Bugtussel and Oxford area.

The mayor of the city, Shad Heller, visited them in California on the set there. Of course, the interior scenes were filmed on a sound stage for the Ozarks episodes as well as the other episodes. This is common for most shows. Exteriors are often shot on location, while it is easier to use sound stages for the various interior and other shots.

Around that time, Judge Justin Ruark, a native of Neosho, eloquently defined an Ozarks Hillbilly as “an individual who has learned the real luxury of doing without the entangling complications of things which the dependent and over-pressured city dweller is required to consider as necessities.”

“The hillbilly foregoes the hard grandeur of high buildings and canyon streets in exchange for wooded hills and verdant valleys. In place of creeping traffic, he accepts the rippling flow of the wandering stream.” I have lived most of my life inside Springfield, the third largest city in our state.

In the last sixty years, most of the Queen City of the Ozarks has become more of an urban city and less of what we thought of as a rural community. Do not try to insult us when you say the term Hillbilly. We are proud to be from the Ozarks, where in twenty minutes we can be in the country with fields, forests, and streams or lakes.

The larger cities have parks where some of these amenities are available, but I can walk less than a mile from my home, which is in Greene County, and go for a walk in the woods or beside a creek. The Ozarks have many small communities that are a lot like the ones Jethro and Ellie Mae came from originally. It only takes ten minutes to reach the heart of a big city.

Silver Dollar City is no longer the tiny community it was in the early sixties. On my first visit there as a boy, we parked where the Marketplace now is and walked directly onto Main Street in front of the SDC Hotel. Shad’s blacksmith shop, Copper Kettle Candy Store, Marvel Cave, and one or two rides were all that was there.

When I traveled to Bradford, PA in 1975, I was asked about my hometown. Bradford had a population of 25,000, and Springfield was 135,000 then. I told them it was a small town, and when I stated the population as of the 1970 census, they realized that my hometown was more than these Yankees realized.

We may be hillbillies; we are not small-town hicks. Springfieldians live in the third largest city in Missouri, with the largest school system in this state. We have a lot to be proud of and should tell everyone that our metro area has been counted with a population of over 500,000 residents. Not bad for a bunch of hillbillies.

©Copyright 2026 by Charles Kensinger