20/12/2019
In honor of 20 years of operation and to inaugurate this page, I thought I might tell the story of how I came to love reptiles and start this shop:
I got my first reptile in the sixth grade, a garter snake I saved from my dad’s riding mower. Spotting its yellow stripes in the St. Augustine , I managed to cry out just in time for my father to throw his empty Miller Lite can and scare the little fellow out of the way. I managed to scoop him up as he gave me the first of many little snake-kisses, I little nip on the finger, I’ve received over the years. A slight pain, but much less painful than the aluminum shards which sliced my shins and calfs as my father ran over his can, rendering the blades of his prized John Deere inoperable, twisted threads (no doubt sparing many garter snakes a nasty end!).
When my father and I returned from the emergency room my mother had prepared a home for the snake in the fish tank which had sat empty and foaming with muck and algae since I had found my last goldfish belly-up. It was not two-weeks earlier, in fact, that I had given her a proper send off in the pond behind my middle school.
Not to digress too much, but I think it’s interesting how I sent her off and might add a light color to this story. For all the “millennials” on this website I should preface this by saying, that this was a time back before we coddled your generation into adulthood like babies. I was free to roam after school. If I fell and skinned my knees or cut my hand on rebar dumped at the edge of the woods by the local contractors, I didn’t cry. I rubbed dirt in it and got back on with my life. It was fun and I grew stronger for it.
Anyway, on a raft made from one of my father’s empties, retrofitted with bottle rockets, I sent goldilocks off at terminal speed across the stinking, scum with Roman candles to light the sky and signal goldilocks entrance to fishy-Valhalla.
Goldilocks was the last of maybe four or five goldfish my mother had bought me in my adolescents, trying to to teach me some personal responsibility. All these fish had met a similar end. I didn’t, and to this day, don’t have much affection for fish and would inevitably lose interest in the rituals of feeding them or cleaning the tanks filter.
With Barney though (I named this little garter snake after my favorite character, Barney Fife, from my favorite show, “The Andy Griffith Show”) I found a connection I had never felt before with an animal. It was as if a place in my heart I didn’t know existed had been filled. Oh everyone, to tell you the hours I spent staring at Barney in his enclosure, studying his movments. I look so fondly back on watching his forked-tongue periodically flick from his mouth and smell the air (snakes smell with their tongues!). I loved Barney and I know it might sound crazy to some of you, but I know that Barney loved me too. I looked into his eyes and he’d look back into mine the way you might look into the eyes of a close-friend or lover. I saw a little bit of myself in Barney and identify closely every reptile I’ve encountered since. Sometimes I wonder if I am reptile! (I’m kidding of course. I am not a reptile.)
Barney passed sometime over the next two-weeks. It was then that I knew I had to learn everything I could about snakes and reptiles. I checked out every book I could from my school’s library on the topic. I learned what they ate and what it took to take care of them. I should have been feeding Barney worms and insects instead of trying to feed him clumps of grass, I knew that now. I poured over those books religiously. I wore out their spines and renewed them in a an ever-crumbling state until I had nearly memorized every word.
My love of reptiles has never once faded. My two (human) sons, Walter and Edward, today joke that I love my reptiles more than them. My boys are a quite a handful! (even now that they’re out of the nest!) Everytime I see them, they always crack-wise about how our fridge at home was always full of mice and crickets and never any human food, and how I missed Justine’s funeral (Boys, she was MY wife!), oh just about four years ago, because I had to make it to Repticon (the FOREMOST reptile convention in the United States). Of course it’s absurd, but I do have to admit there is a little truth in there. Not that I love my reptiles more than them, of course, but it is a DIFFERENT kind of love. You can’t pick your family, but you can pick your reptiles!
Look at me rambling on, back to the story:
Fast-forwarding a bit (do you young people know what that means?) I graduated from Southwestern Michigan Community College with a degree in biology and one goal in mind: to own my own reptile store. Moving to the big city of South Bend, I found employment at Mandy’s pet store.
Mandy’s was your typical pet store: gerbils, guinea pigs, fish. Not my ideal place of employment, but it was a local institution and it gave me the opportunity to meet nearly everyone of import and prominence in the city. One time Terry Mcfadden of WNDU 16 news even came in, didn’t buy anything, but we talked about Notre Dame football for 15 or so minutes, something I’ll remember forever. At Mandy’s I felt myself I felt myself becoming a real part of this great community in SouthBend something that would serve me as I set out to start my own establishment.
Mandy Foster, the namesake of Mandy’s, was a wonderful woman to work for and I’ll be forever grateful for the opportunity she gave me. After five years of diligent hard-work and dedication I was able to convince her that we should start carrying reptiles. Starting with geckos (a simple place to start winning over any reptile skeptic) I was able to slowly introduce more and more cold-blooded friends into the store’s offerings.
Now, Mandy was getting up their in age, oh about seventy-five at this time and as the saying goes, you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. Also, her mind had started to go a little bit at this point, to put it lightly. I was not too surprised then when, in her perpetual struggle to properly care for these wonderful creatures, she got a snake-kiss from a baby Western Diamondback and, well, I still miss Mandy, but she really should have been more careful. That beautiful Diamondback though, gosh it was cute little guy, one of the most beautiful snakes I’ve ever had the privilege of looking after. Diamondbacks are probably, in the top-five, not just most handsome snakes, but reptiles overall. Absolutely gorgeous.
I took over Mandy’s shortly after Ms. Foster’s passing. With the money I had squirreled away from working over the past five years and from breeding and selling reptiles from my modest one-bedroom apartment, I was able to purchase the building. For the next couple of years I kept the name Mandy’s (a trusted name in town!) and slowly fazed out those pets I disliked in favor of reptiles. When the time was right, there was only one name I had in mind to grace my storefront:
Here’s to you Barney!!!!!!!
The rest, as they say, is history.
