.Surgeons Save Life of Huge Python
BY PERFORMING two operations within two weeks—probably the first attempt to apply surgery on such a scale to the treatment of reptiles— surgeons recently saved the life of a valuable python transported from India to Long Beach, Calif.
The python is 29-1/2 feet long, weighs 280 pounds, and is nearly 100 years old.
.George P. Meade – SUGAR MAGNATE COLLECTS SNAKES
SUGAR, snakes and swimming may seem like rather unrelated subjects—but to 69-year-old George P. Meade of Gramercy, La., they are all fields of major interest, and he is a nationally recognized authority in all three.
As a sugar technologist, Meade is manager of the Colonial Sugars Company’s refinery at Gramercy, a director of the Cuban-American Sugar Company and co-author of the Spencer-Meade “Cane Sugar Handbook,” standard reference on sugar technology. As a snake expert, he is former vice-president of the American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists. As an aquatics enthusiast, he is former vice-president of the Southern AAU and a member of the AAU Committee on swimming.
.New Mexico’s Reptile Wrangler
Launching a curio shop with two baby boas as a come-on, an ex-GI and his wife found snakes a profitable business.
By Weldon D. Woodson
ON May 1, 1946, 26-year-old Texas-born ex-GI Herman Atkinson and his 24-year-old wife Phyllis opened a small curio shop on tourist-packed U. S. Highway 66, a mile and a half west of the pint-size village of Grants, New Mexico.
For bait to lure motorists, they had caged two baby boa constrictors. A gargantuan sign blazened to the world their Lilliputian “den of death.” Despite the limitations of their improvised menagerie, they observed that visitors showed more wide-eyed interest in the duet of boas than the curios.
