Ep. 206: Cobra Scare

Here it is.

It's the last month of summer vacation for all these school children, and they're not allowed to enjoy it because you don't know when you're going to get tacked and bitten by an Indian cobra.

Every corner of this planet has wild animals that are revered, feared, and sensationalized, deadly scorpions, killer bees, piranhas giant crocodiles, to African lions.

However, the cultures.

Of where these beasts exist help the people to know how to deal and live with them. But what if one of them was transplanted to where you lived, maybe even right in Middle America? And what if that beast was one of the world's top wildlife villains, the global bad boy, the Cobra. I want to tell you about the Great Cobra Scare of nineteen fifty three, A story of.

Fear, fangs, and.

Lies, but it all ties back into the unique identity of a quaint Midwestern town. I really doubt that you're going to want to miss this one.

This is the article of the two page article in Life magazine. Here's a postcard new home of Cobra's Hey, the durn Woods is full of them and says exclusive, try our new cobra haircut. It's daring and deadly, but it'll go with the new fall fashions at Hester's Beauty Salon on Saint Louis.

Wow the cobra haircut.

My name is Clay Nukem and this is the Bear Grease Podcast, where we'll explore things forgotten but relevant, search for insight and unlikely places, and where we'll tell the story of Americans who live their lives close to the land. Presented by FHF Gear American Maid, purpose built hunting and fishing gear that's designed to be as rugged.

As the place as we explore. I just pulled over to my neighbor's house, Fred Lowly. He's a He's got a trailer.

In his front yard that says Lollly's oddity show venomous snakes.

Walking up to his door. Hey, mister Fred, how are you doing.

I'm doing good.

I'm doing good. Good to see you.

As the crow flies. I'm less than two miles from my house in the Ozarks of Arkansas. Mister Fred is eighty two years old, wiry, witty, and seemingly imperfect health. He's got shoulder linked white hair and he's been bitten by overt any venomous snakes. He's a real piece of work. I'm here to talk about cobra's What do you got? Well, I'm recording, is that okay?

Oh?

Yeah?

Yeah?

Thing I didn't know exactly. He wanted some information on cobra.

Yeah.

You ever heard of William Hast Bill Hass Miami Serpentarium. No, he did, but he lived to be about one hundred. He's been bitting a couple of hundred times, probably about different things. Even a king cobra lived through it.

Really, you've you've been bit by a cobra.

Yeah, but it was a much It wasn't a king kobra. It was a African band of Egypsian cobra.

And I think that doesn't exactly sound like like a good one to get bit by.

Oh it's not, I too. What it got a good solid grip on me right along and here I'm showing my index finger and held on and was chewing. And that's what they do, is they chew their v elemental They don't know. Yeah, it's not like a rattle snake. They pop and they're gone.

It's done like a rattler was.

Yeah, yeah, cobra's grab a hole, chew it in. They've got shorter things, real starry thing and king cobras have a really big one and they've been known to kill elephants. It's so mad, you know what I mean.

Cobras are no doubt the global bad boys of serpents. The king cobra, native to northern India and southern China, is considered by some to be the most venomous snake in the world, and they can get over fifteen feet long. Mister Fred was bitten by a banded Egyptian cobra, not as venomous as the king cobra, but that was in nineteen ninety two while he was touring with a snake display at a carnival in Clarksville, Tennessee. Cobra was his pet.

What is that way?

I can't hear you.

Cobras are clearly symbols of evil, but they've come by their reputation honestly. The World Health Organization reports as many as two point seven million people are envenomed by snakes each year. Some are bitten by venom of snakes but not envenomed, but up to four hundred thousand people are permanently disabled, like having amputations. In eighty one to one hundred and thirty eight thousand people die globally from snake

But what do cobras have to do with America?

And what do they have to do with the midwestern town of Springfield, Missouri.

Okay, so show me what you got.

Here, all right? So what I did. I went through our archives and just put in the word cobra. And this is some of the things that popped up during that time of the after the cobras got They actually added a cobra's snake to the city of Springfield seal. Wow, so it circles around the shield that's in the middle of the seal.

What year did they do that?

They did it in fifty four. That next year after.

That, they put a cobra on the seal of a town in the Ozark Yeah. Yeah, did he just say cobra scare and that his town has a cobra on their seal.

Yeah.

I'm in downtown Springfield, Missouri, at the History Museum on the Square, eight thousand miles away from the cobra's native home range. This place feels like the Missouri Smithsonian sacred ground for the Show Me State. And I'm speaking with the president Emeritus, John Steller. He's a good sized man wearing a gray sweatshirt with the collar of a polo visible. His white mustache is well trimmed, and he's got a tidy office. I'm looking over his shoulder onto his computer screen.

That's all I know.

But here's a here's a postcard from Springfields. There a new home of cobras. The Drm Woods is full of them and.

Says this is like a hillbilly Yeah, like Ozark hillbilly.

Yeah.

And they and even local businesses got involved. They wanted to do ads and so on. So there was advertising in the magazines and all sorts of stuff. Here's a during that time exclusive, Try our new cobra haircut. It's daring and deadly, but it'll go with the new fall fashions. That Hester's beauty salon on Saint Louis.

Wow.

The cobra haircut here in Springfield. Wow.

So here's the big time. This is uh. This is the article of the two page article in Life magazine about.

This was in the national Yeah, in the.

Life magazine, which would be like being on national news.

Now, okay, here's the scoop.

In the late summer of nineteen fifty three, multiple Indian monocled cobras were killed in the city limits of Springfield. The incident became known as the Great Cobra Scare of nineteen fifty three. Wild Springfield is a railroad town in southwest Missouri. Has a population of one hundred and seventy thousand. Wild Bill Hiccock killed a guy named Cut on the Springfield Square in eighteen sixty five, and it's the hometown

Dwight D.

Eisenhower has just been sworn as president, the Korean War has ended, and Elvis Presley will begin his music career A year later in nineteen fifty four.

Essentially, It is just standard summer in small city, big town Springfield, Missouri in the Ozarks. The year is nineteen fifty three. Everybody's just doing their regular thing. And there's a couple and they're sitting on their porch one August afternoon.

And they see a snake go past.

And obviously that's not too much cause for alarm for anybody in the Ozarks, except they noticed it was larger than the snakes they were used to seeing, and it just didn't look like I mean, it wasn't a garter snake, it wasn't a black rat snake. And so they got curious and they cornered it, and they were really concerned because they didn't know it was so they killed it.

They took a garden hole and they just whacked it.

And then they got really curious because they were like, I don't So they took it to Dickerson Park Zoo, the small little zoo here in Springfield, and they were like, what is this And the official of the zoo is alarmed.

They're like, this is an Indian cobra. This is they're not native to this continent.

And too they are deadly, quite venomous, and this is an anomaly, and so at this point it's not anything that becomes part of like public alarm or public concern, but it is puzzling until another one is found and killed. And at this point you have two Indian cobras in Springfield, Missouri. At this point, now it starts to get some public acknowledgement and people start to become except over the course of the next six weeks, they're going to end up killing eleven of these cobras.

Indian cobras in Middle America. And Kyle was right. They killed eleven, but they also caught one alive, making the grand total of twelve of these global bad boys in Springfield.

Here's John.

It actually started in August when the first snakes started to appear, and they were odd snakes. Nobody knew what they were. These snakes would raise up and like raise up high out of the grass and strike at you. And they'd never seen snakes like that before.

And this was probably before the cobra was really famous in America.

Yeah, my goodness, Yeah, I mean and then night did you know you didn't, We didn't. We had just gotten our first TV station that spring, Channel ten came on the air in the spring of fifty three, so we had one TV station and it was only on part of the time, so.

People might have only heard of Cobra as maybe any.

Been a movie or something like that, and not everybody, you know, not everybody was involved in that. They knew about snakes, but they didn't know about cobs. It's from, you know, the far East, and so they couldn't figure out why it was here. But they suspected rail Mauer because of his dealing and all these odd animals, and it was like a block from his house. So it was right there at the corner of National and Saint Louis Street.

John just introduced the man with a smoking gun in his hand, Rao Maur. These snakes were turning up close to this guy's house and business.

Rail Mauer had a pet shop in the sixteen hundred block of Saint Louis Street and in a house, just in a house. But he was he was not very disciplined in how he took care of his animals. They just kind of ran wild. I mean there was chimpanzees running around biting people, and there was two cans flying and there was stuff everywhere. But he did a lot of dealing with the local kids kids would catch garter snakes and stuff like that and bring him to him

On August fifteenth, the first snake was killed, and it was also brought to rail Maur to help identify it and to see if it was his, but he denied that it was a cobra and denied that it was his. He said it was a native snake with abnormal markings, but others I did it as nausea kwafia. The monocled cobra or the Indian cobra. Monocled means that it has

He was taken to the local high.

School science teacher, who confirmed it was an Indian monicle cobra. The second one in a week on August thirty first, Cobra number three is run over by a car. On September third, a city in Florida ships one dose of antivenom to the hospital in Springfield. On September eighth, some kids find cobra number four in their yard. September ninth, Number five is killed. On September tenth, police do a full search of rail Maer's pet shop, and snake graffiti starts to show up around the town as the city

I've met people who lived through it and they talk it. They were like, it ruined my summer vacation because your parents wouldn't let you go outside and play.

Here it is.

It's the last month of summer vacation for all these school children in Springfield, and they're not allowed to enjoy it because you don't know when you're going to get tacked bitten by an Indian cobra.

Wouldn't it be cool to talk to someone who lived through the cobra scare? I may know a guy, Oh I was, I was here.

Yeah, I grew up four blocks from where this all happened. And my parents, my mother especially just knew that the cobras were coming to get her children. And it was the hottest it's the hottest summer on record in Springfield, and it had gotten up to one hundred and thirteen here that year. But we were locked up in the house and no air conditioning, locked up in the house, windows down door shut because we weren't letting snakes get in. So it was Yeah, there's not much that I don't

By the middle of September, things are spinning out of control. A man named LH. Stockton chunked a rock at Cobra number six before it went under his house.

Then police used tear.

Gas to smoke it out, dispatching it with their pistols when it tried to escape in the man's yard. On September eleventh, Vigilantis threatened to burn down the pet shop and Springfield police guard rail Maoer's house. He still claims his innocence, offering to help the city catch the cobras. By now, the Cobra scare is starting to get international attention. On September seventeenth, Cobra number seven is run over on Saint Louis Street and Cobra number eight was killed by bird dog.

The city is spinning out of control. Here's Kyle.

So at that point, Springfield had just instituted in the municipal government a position called city manager. The first guy to hold that. He was the first city manager. Basically everybody turns to him and like, all right, city manager, what are you talking about this? And nobody has any idea what to do about it? What can you do about it? Nobody even knows where it's coming from, nobody knows how many they're going to.

Be, you know, inexperienced. As they were city health head of the health department. They began to try to come up with ways to capture these snakes, and they came up with an idea. They said, well, you know, we've seen movies of snake charmers and they're playing these flutes and there, and the snake comes up out of the basket and the whole thing. So they think those snakes

This isn't a joke, no playing.

So we're looking at a photograph, a black and white photograph of a what make of vehicles?

That's a Ford, that's Afford Sedan, what they called the Sedan Delivery.

It was like a big like a classic old style Nights and he's got these.

Two big, huge speakers on the roof, and they're driving around and there's probably forty guys here behind it, all this big group of people policemen out here, and it's in behind the plumbing place at the corner of Saint Louis and Glenstone. But they had took this car, this truck, and they played snake charmer music while all these people with farm implements followed behind it walking down the street, expecting that the snakes would hear this music and come

It.

But they tried it continuously.

Wow.

Just driving like four or five miles an hour around downtown with this big mob of people behind it, all at the ready for snakes to come slithering out into the street.

Wow.

I mean they tried, They tried everything.

This is almost unbelievable, but it's true. You ought to see the photos. I'll probably post some of those on my Instagram. But we need to learn first about snake charmers. Modern snake charming most likely originated in India. You know the cobra and the woven baskets with a man sitting cross legged playing a flute in front of it. Snake charmers were historically known as magicians and healers, making a

It's illegal there, but they still do it.

Some Lakistan, Bangladesh Sri Lanka, Malaysia, and I don't fully understand the cultural significance of it. But think about this for a minute. What if an overalled hillbilly imagine someone like a Brent Reeves carrying around a timber rattler in a grain bucket and playing a banjo, will that rascal coiled up and rattled within striking distance.

Bros. I would be into that.

And I'm kind of saying this tongue in cheek, but I'm quite serious too. That would be a compelling cultural image. Now I'm not into this, but perhaps somehow it's in the same family as these American snake handling churches. I can only imagine what it's like for those snake charmers.

It really is dancing with death.

However, there's more to this Springfield snake charming stuff.

Here's Kyle.

But what's interesting is is I was lucky enough to meet the children of that city manager, and they had a scrapbook with every clipping in every news article from when this happened, historical documents, editorial cartoons in the local paper,

So they this goes all the way back to like grassroots city politics and small town America in the nineteen fifties. They were just wanting to show the people that were concerned, we're trying. And I wonder where they would have seen that, because that's the question I have. Nineteen fifty three people would have just started getting televisions. I mean, a Cobra would have been They certainly didn't have the worldwide fame that they now have, right.

I mean, like what they would have seen them in a movie maybe yeah, Tarzan or some kind of you know, action movie that Saturday matinee where you would go plunk down your dime and see two movies and maybe you see a cobra in there, and it was probably a rubber one on a wire that somebody was dragging along.

Nobody had any idea, right.

This idea of an Indian snake charmer was strong enough world wide that they were like, this is how you catch Kobra's right, or at least that's the way the masses thought. And then the city government was like, we got to do something.

Yeah, these the people.

It's now mid September, this has been going on for a month, and we're in the heart of the Great Cobra Scare of nineteen fifty three. Everyone suspects rail Maur, but it's still a mystery how the snakes got there and got out. It would remain a mystery for over thirty five years.

That's right, thirty five years.

I think it's a very interesting scenario where a villainous beast from another continent was transplanted eight thousand miles away to a place where the people were so unequipped to handle it. Most places have dangerous wild animals, but the culture weaves in appropriate awareness, equipping the people so that they're relatively safe and don't live in fear. They have venomous snakes in Missouri, copperheads, water moccasins, and the most nasty of them all, the timber rattlesnake.

But people know how to deal with them.

These people didn't know how to live with Indian cobras, and back to our timeline. In mid September, supposedly a written manifest was found in rail Maer's pet shop that included twelve Indian cobras, so they found evidence that he actually did have cobras, but Mauer claimed that they were accounted for and the snakes crawling around the town weren't his. However, the great Cobra scare climaxes when Cobra number twelve is captured alive on October twenty six by a man named David Kelly.

Here's John.

If it happened today, you'd have satellite trucks parked from here to Rogersville, all of them broadcasting live all over the world. As it was, we had one reporter from a newspaper and one reporter from Life magazine come and they used a local photographer to take the pictures, and that was the sun toad of it. We were we were famous for a day when the Life magazine came out and that was the end of it.

How long did this take place?

It started in August and the last of it ended up in first of November.

Say really about the time, yeah, September October, so three months, and the city was just on lockdown.

Oh, the city was just beside itself because every time they saw a garter snake, it was a cobra.

So this pet store owner, he's the suspected culprit that he never he never confessed to haven't had those snakes.

Not to my knowledge, he never he never owned up to the fact that they were his snakes. But everybody knew that, they knew, and they pulled his business license. He left here. Oh really, Yeah, he left here and never came back.

So then it's just a mystery. It just kind of ends.

I guess people in the community probably came to their own conclusion.

They came, you know, because he was so loosey goosey with his handling of all of his stuff. It was an easy assumption and that he just let him get away from you. Yeah, yeah, I mean that happened all the time with everything out of the.

So common would it have been in the nineteen fifties to have cobras? That seems pretty.

Far, incredibly uncommon. I mean, how do you get him into the country? I don't know.

I bet I know a guy who could tell you how to get cobras into the United States. You might, of all people, you might have the answer to this. How would somebody in Springfield, Missouri in nineteen fifty three be able to get Indian monocled cobras?

Where would they go?

Probably out a Bangkok tilean friendship trading company.

This is mister Fred again. You could have just shipped them straight to your house.

I mean I dealt with a whole bunch of deal I mean a whole bunch of them, and I couldn't get I was wanting to get twenty five king kobras to do shows with.

So it's not surprising to you that this guy was able to get monocled cobras in Springfield nineteen fifty three.

That's like not a big deal, bit a boy somewhat.

Would it have been illegal? There's nothing illegal about it with her.

No, they didn't have a law of pertaining. You see, you gotta have something, you gotta have. The laws down in the books basically make.

Much regulation, exactly.

I take a lot of pride in having a neighbor like mister Fred. Did you hear him say that he tried to buy twenty five king cobras? But he said in the nineteen fifties there would have been very little regulation on importing reptiles. Today it's different, but not a ton. I looked online and within a few clicks I was at a virtual checkout to buy a cobra, no joke. My buddy, doctor Chris Jenkins of the Snake Talk podcast told me where to find the differing state regulations regarding

But back to our story.

At this point, we still don't know really if the snakes were real maurs from the pet store, and how the heck they got loose, If they were, and it wouldn't be until nineteen eighty eight that the mystery would be completely solved.

Here's Kyle.

Yeah, And I mean if you think about it, like so, by fifty four, I mean it's over by that point. I mean one of the things that certainly probably the people at the zoo who understood the animals were just like, Loo, they're not going to survive the winner. You know, they this isn't where they live naturally, and so you know, by October they killed the last one. And as far as they know, I mean, we've never seen one since.

So by fifty four, I'm sure they were all just like like, well that was wild.

Yeah, absolutely, two dollars cobra haircut, get it.

Yeah, the town survives.

The town, of course, ends up kind of celebrating this quirky piece of history. But it's still a mystery for another thirty five years. Nobody knows why this happens. It's nineteen eighty eight when the person responsible for the cobra scare finally can't live with this any longer, and they're talking to their friends and they're like, I think I

He says, all right, I've got a story for you.

How about we hear the confession straight from Carl Barnett himself. He confessed in nineteen eighty eight and an article was written about it in the local paper. But he did a television interview in nineteen ninety two with Springfield's k Y three station.

Our last new story of the last forty years was one of the first. As we mentioned earlier, Springfield was terrorized in nineteen fifty three by a dozen deadly cobras.

They escaped from.

A pet store in Saint Louis Streets. Were released by a fourteen year old boy who had a special business arrangement with the pet store owner.

He said he'd buy all the snakes I could get our trade meet tropical fish for him.

Sir, this is Carl Barnett.

And one time I went over there and I got this fish. I really had my eye on, you know, I'd been watching it for quite a while. So we'd done some trading and I took it home and it was dead. And he just told me he said, well, kid, that's just tough. He said, in business, that's you used to have to eat. That one didn't like it.

I said, we're out fifteen cents.

Yeah, plus you know whatever time I'd spent hunting up snakes to do the trading with. I thought, well, I go out back. So I got back there and here was several crates of snakes. I thought, well, mine are in there someplace. And since that's why he feels about it, I allays turned mind loose. I thought they were just a black end to go snake that he came in. I thought, well that's good enough, that's a fair trade. So I just left the box open, got on my bicycle and

Mystery solved. Old Carl did it? Rael Maherd did have those dang kobra's in his shop.

Here's Kyle, the.

Guy who on the pet store had a hobby of raising cobras.

He didn't sell them.

That absolutely wouldn't have been legal. He didn't actually sell them. They were his personal cobras. Why why does this guy raise cobras? But he does, and he has this create of imported cobras.

I bet he was kind of a hero. I'm talking about Carl. I mean, you know.

How like just just even if it's kind of villainous or even if you're wrong, but still you've unlocked a mystery right of a small town. I would I bet he was. People were, like, you know, somehow celebrated him.

I don't know, I know, like in like small town tradition. You got to imagine maybe he was like the grand marshal at a parade or something.

He should have bet you know that's yeah.

But actually if I don't know if this is still true. So Jerry University just a mile north of here, I don't know if they still do, but they used to have the last existent cobra from the cobra scare in from aldehyde in a jar in one of those cases you get see it. I saw it and I stopped and I was like, that's it. There's one line and it still exists, and at least as of twenty eighteen. So if you have a little time and you should say, hey, is that cobra still there?

You better believe that's exactly what I'm about to do. I'm headed to Drury University with my buddy Isaac Neil, a Springfield native.

With some fun city facts.

We're at Drury University in Springfield, Missouri.

I'm with Isaac Neil.

Here.

We're walking into the Trustee Science Center.

Ye.

Tell me who went to school at Dreury.

The one and only Bob Barker.

Bob of the Prices, Right, the price is right. We're to school here. Yeah, we're on Bob Barker Boulevard. Incredible.

And while right before we got out of a car, Isaac points to a what is clearly a large black panther statue.

Yeah, and tell me what the mascot of Druid University is.

It's the panthers.

They're not claiming to be black panthers, but in every logo, every statue, it's a black panther.

It's true.

So we're walking into this Trustee Science building and we're going to see the one and only cobra. We're met at the door by herpetologist, doctor Kevin Jansen. He's leading us back to his office. He knew we were coming, but I didn't entirely tell him our motivation. All right, great, yeah, I guess I didn't formally ask you, do you mind being on our podcast?

Just your voice?

I don't mind, I guess.

Okay, great, Yeah.

We walk into his book filled office and there's a huge glass jar filled with green liquid.

In it is.

A coiled, pale white cobra. I wasn't expecting this so fast.

The climax happened quickly.

This is it?

Is it?

Holy cat?

There's a little tag here that says the last of its kind. This is the only cobra known to exist from the Frightful Summer of nineteen fifty three. It was donated to Jury in nineteen eighty by Sheriff Mickey Owen. A bullet wound is visible about four inches behind the hood. The event was featured in Life magazine.

Wow, and you can see the bullet wound home.

Mark bullet wound.

I am, I'm surprised at I mean, this is seventy years old. From nineteen fifty three seventy one years. I'm surprised at how well it's preserved. So it's in this like glass jar. What what's an end for maladanised? Tell me about this is an Indian cobra.

It is it's a monocled cobra. Monocled.

Let's see there's single circle as another circle in the back. Yeah, there's a it's it's part of a larger spectacled cobra group. This is a pretty good sized individual for that species. It's not like the king cobra that can get up to you know, multiple meters long.

How long?

How big do you think that snake is.

It's a little over a meter.

It would have had some ish, Yeah, it would have had some decent venom in it.

So where would this snake be?

Native to India? India? India. They're active hunters for the most part.

They they're moving their daytime and so we think in the US we think of venomous snakes as having that sweet pupil eyes. That's just a nocturnal trait, right, So when you see a snake with round pupils, that generally means their daytime hunters. So you'll see racers and coach whips and rat.

Snakes out of that.

Does it mean that it's venomous?

Not at all.

But it just happens that our venomous snakes are nighttime hunters, so we have we can.

Teach our kids. If it's got slats.

In his eyes, it's venoms here in many states, yes, but you get further south, even in the US, and you can you can get round pupiled venomous snakes right absolutely.

And my whole world was just a house of cards. So one of my children are alive today after all that I've taught.

Them well, and you I apologize for insulting your parenting skills.

That's some good info on Cobra's doctor Jansen, did you hear that round eyes don't always mean non venomous and slit eyes don't always mean venomous.

That's news to me.

But I want to get into a more philosophical question of why any of this matters?

Why do we remember unique and wild.

Stories and this whole Cobra scarre nobody was bitten, yet seventy years later, we're still talking about it. In Springfield seems to be pretty proud of the great Cobra Scare. Here's Kyle and I talking it over. I'm still searching for the real concrete answer of why this stuff is important,

It's absolutely that.

But again, like it's not really like the visit, it's just yeah, neatness, right, It's just like, oh, this is ours. Hi, we're Springfield, Missouri, and I mean we don't have something like Niagara Falls.

Kyle and Mother's Brewery did something special in twenty seventeen when they were naming one of their brews. I'll give you one guess what they named it.

When you're a brewery in the Ozarks and you want to claim Erosark heritage, the natural choice is we love our mountains, we love our streams, our lakes, we like hiking, we like canoeing, floating, all of these things. But we wanted something a little different. It was just kind of like this deep dive into who we were as a

And so this idea of like lore, this kind.

Of like common history, where your town's story is unique. But we all have those stories to.

Share with each other.

That's why we chose the Cobra Scare. That's what we wanted to like.

Honor Kyle and the brewery have tapped into this idea of regional identity. I think this stuff is pretty important, especially for people who are prone to be connected to place. I find that some people are and some people aren't as much. What happened that's unique in your town? Tell me about it. I think that's a pretty unique name for a drink, too, Cobra scare.

That just has a ring to it.

It's hard to deny, but you know what, Springfield is a pretty unique town.

But just in the.

Last three years, I've come to learn that Springfield is known as the Queen City of the Ozarks, which came to me as a complete shock. As you know, I'm from the southern Ozarks. I mean, how is this even regulated? Who approved this name being in Missouri? Maybe I'm just a little jealous. I need some help understanding this from John. Can you tell me why it's the Queen city and quantify that for me?

Sure, calling something the Queen city of wherever was aggrandizing appellation, something that you added to the name there's queen cities all over the country. There's Queen City of the Ohio Valley, and there's a Queen City of New England. There's a Queen City of this and the Queen City of that Queen city. These all started in the late eighteen hundreds, and ours came about at a speech celebrating the centennial of our country in eighteen seventy six given man man

So it just was adopted rightly nationally. Springfield is the queen city.

We were, as I said, we were a transportation hub. The Butterfield stage line came through here, the railroads came through here. This was the crossroads of five different Native American trails. We were the stepping off point into the Old West.

Okay, I'm still trying to understand a little bit about this. Very interested in cities getting these wonderful, wonderful accolades. Yeah, are there king cities?

No, I've never seen a king city like Cincinnati's Queen City of the Ohio Valley.

Okay, they're king cities.

So you think I could if I made a public speech like down where I'm from, if I just said I dub such and such Arkansas the king City of the Ozarks, that potentially it would stick.

Somebody will look at you and go, you've hit your head.

I think it's clear that regionalalied did D is earned and not just the fruit of self serving ambitions. I think the Cobra Scare validates the queen's city name of Springfield, though it happened seventy five years after mister Simpronius Boyd called it the queen city. Think this validates Springfield's queenship. But hey, long live the remembrance of the Great Cobra