By the Lake

(4 of 5)

On the Sidewalk. After two years of college, Perkins went to St. Louis. There, one day in the '20s, he turned up at the zoo in Forest Park and asked for a job. He got one—sweeping sidewalks.

After two weeks, he was put in charge of the reptiles, a piddling display of five snakes indigenous to the Midwest and one tired, ten-foot python. Slowly, Perkins began to build up the collection by hunting the snakes himself, first in southern Illinois, then in Arkansas and Florida. To him, catching snakes is one of the easiest things in the world: just grab them behind the heads so they can't bite and stuff them in a sack.

The Show. The St. Louis Zoo was—and still is—under the direction of George Vierheller, who began as a zoo clerk and decided on his real vocation when he stayed up all night with a sick chimpanzee. Until the rise of Vierheller, the preeminent zoo director in the U.S. was The Bronx's late Dr. William Temple Hornaday, who insisted that a zoo's main function was educational and scientific. George Vierheller, who is now the Old Man Noah of U.S. zoos, thought differently. Like the original Old Man Noah, he knew a thing or two, especially about showmanship.

Rival zoo directors say that George Vierheller would allow himself to be impaled by a rhinoceros if he thought it would bring people to his zoo. Vierheller has never gone quite that far. But he did christen a baby elephant with champagne; and once a month he got a big crowd to his menagerie by force-feeding a listless python in public (stuffing 14 pounds of ground rabbit meat through a fire hose and down its gullet). He built a theater for his chimpanzees, dressed them in costumes, and taught them to count, smoke, bicycle, box and play the tympani. He put lions, tigers and leopards together in an animal-training act, and coaxed his baby elephants to do the hula.

He built some of the country's first barless enclosures, and kept his buildings spotlessly clean. He wangled some of the first pandas out of China, and had bamboo shoots flown up weekly from Florida for their fodder. Quite naturally, Perkins worked for the boss and learned. With Vierheller, he built the St. Louis reptile collection into one of great size and variety.

Viper's Fang. On New Year's Eve, 1928, Perkins was removing parasites from the back of a gaboon viper, a small African reptile, when the snake wriggled its head free and sank one fang into Perkins' index finger. The bite "felt like a bee sting magnified 100 times"; according to all known experience with the gaboon viper, Perkins should have died. He slashed an incision in his finger; he and a helper tried to suck out the venom. But in a few minutes he became dizzy. In 20 minutes, his left arm was twice its normal size and turning black.

Rushed to a hospital, he was given injections of antivenom serum and strychnine, but his condition rapidly worsened. An hour and ten minutes after he was bitten, he passed out. More injections and a blood transfusion finally pulled him through. Even so, it was three weeks before he could leave the hospital, several more before he felt entirely normal.