He lived to be 100, this strange, odd man who "mesmerized generations of paying customers from 1947 to 1983 by extracting venom from deadly snakes at his Miami Serpentarium as a spine-tingling Florida attraction".
The quotation marks are from the Miami Herald's front page story this morning reporting that legendary Bill Haast had died of natural causes in his home on Florida's west coast. I finished reading the article and picked up the phone to call my friend Marilyn to reminisce. We handled publicity for Bill Haast and his Serpentarium in the early '60s. It was an unforgettable experience,ranging from trying to secure a prosthetic leg for a three-legged Galapagos turtle so it could mate, to sitting gingerly in auditoriums with a straw basket full of non-poisonous (I prayed!) snakes on my lap at speaking engagements with Haast's wife Clarita.
When I started writing this blog in 2009, I wrote a short piece about one of my favorite memories of Marilyn's and my efforts for the Serp as we referred to it. The fact that both of us were scared to death of snakes and not too crazy about large lizzards and other crawly creatures, did not keep us from enjoying the more than one year we worked for this one-of-a-kind man who truly believed in the curative properties of snake venom. According to the paper today, he was bitten a total of 172 times in his efforts to prove it.
Herewith, one of my favorite Haast memories, from my blog written in April 2009. . .
Like the time when I represented the Miami Serpentarium and we discovered that the markings on the hood of the very dangerous King Cobra looked exactly like the “eye” of the CBS logo. My colleague Marilyn and I decided to dub it the “Cronkite Cobra” after the venerable CBS newscaster, Walter Cronkite. A quick call to the news department at the local CBS TV station and we were off and running. One small problem. The cobra only flared his hood when he was angry or when Bill Haast, the famed snake man and owner of the Serp, was attempting to extract venom from the deadly creature. Actually, that made the creature pretty angry also.
When the TV cameraman sent by the station realized he would have to lie on his stomach to get a good view of the cobra as he reared up towards Haast’s outstretched hand, he panicked and admitted he was deathly afraid of snakes. We assured him that so were we, but that Haast had it totally under control. Then we stepped back. . far back. . and prayed that things would go well. Fortunately, the snake obliged and we got national coverage, including an on-air comment from Cronkite himself. That was a real winner and the client loved us..
PR is a different game these days, a lot more serious, and not half as much fun. Bill Haast was just one of a long list of quirky clients over the past fifty years.
But it did make me sad to hear of his passing.
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