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Grace Wiley
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by Jeanette on December 28, 2008
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Just a note. When I was very young I visited Grace Wiley at her home with her reptiles. She had snakes and tortise's too. It was what my Brother wanted to do on his birtday, Jan. 1948. She died shortly after our visit. Grace tried to get me to pet the snakes, but I would not. It was an unusual outing for young children and one I have always remembered.
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RE: Grace Wiley
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by Cro on December 28, 2008
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Marguerite, it is very interesting that you had a chance to meet Grace Olive Wiley when you were young.
While she was a bit contriversioal to some folks, there are many people here, myself included, who greatly respect her, and what she did to promote respect for venomous reptiles.
I can remember reading about her, and her hand tamed snakes when I was a young kid.
Do you by any chance have any photos of that visit ?
If you do, it would be great to add them to the photo album here.
Best Regards
John Z
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RE: Grace Wiley
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by Rob_Carmichael on December 28, 2008
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I second what John said. She was indeed a bit on the fringe but I admired her and admired what she did. The connection she had with her animals was truly amazing - sort of Steve Irwin-like (and he's another guy I liked a lot despite the bashing he oftentimes took). It was a sad day when she passed - it actually reminded me of an incident that I nearly experienced when doing a TV show.
Rob Carmichael, Curator
The Wildlife Discovery Center
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RE: Grace Wiley
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by FSB on December 29, 2008
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I have always been a huge admirer of Grace Wiley, who represents a bygone era that cannot be judged by our enlightened, present-day standards, but only appreciated for what it was. I believe that she had an innate and unsurpassed understanding of snakes and other reptiles that truly set her apart.
There is a very interesting chapter devoted to her in an old book I loved as a kid called All Creatures Great and Small (it predates the Herriot books by at least 20 years), written by Daniel Pratt Mannix, the wealthy eccentric photographer-adventurer-writer son of a navy admiral who traveled widely and kept all sorts of exotic animals. Mannix also happens to be the photographer who was taking pictures of Grace Wiley on the fateful day she was bitten, and this chapter in his book is the only detailed, eyewitness account of the tragedy. Mannix had been working on a magazine article about Grace, and he and his wife Jule had visited Grace on several occasions and developed a rapport. There are some really interesting stories about her reptiles - the alligators in the yard she could call by name, and her favorite rattlesnake, Miss Kitty, who often lay coiled on Grace's lap while she was knitting.
One day Grace recruited Jule Mannix to help her carry her 15-foot male king cobra, the "King of Kings" outside for a photo. As they crossed the yard, with Grace in front, the snake suddenly reared back over Grace's shouder and gave Jule three quick raps on the top of her head with his mouth closed. Grace said "he's trying to tell you something," and looking down, they saw that one of the alligators had rushed out of the tall grass and seized the end of the king's tail.
(Mannix' book also has a great account of how his next-door neighbor in Malibu, a teenage acting prodigy named Elizabeth Taylor, almost got herself killed by his captive Mojave rattlesnake, but that's another story).
I would love to hear any first hand accounts of Grace Wiley, as I have scoured the internet but have found very little information about her. I found several articles from LIFE documenting her hiring as the first curator of reptiles at the new Brookfield Zoo in Chicago in 1934, and her subsequent discharge for letting an Egyptian cobra and then a bandy-bandy disappear from their cages, causing an attendant uproar in the press (of course).
I truly wish I could have known this remarkable woman who, like snakes themselves, has been so widely misunderstood. Marguerite, if you could recall and write down anything that you remember from visiting her house, I would be most interested. My email address is fred@theprism.org
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RE: Grace Wiley
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by Cro on December 29, 2008
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Fred, I also remember the Daniel P.Mannix story titled "Woman Without Fear." It was included in my 9'th grade English Literature textbook.
You can read one version of the story here:
http://www.cms.acs.ac/tempcol/antho/gracewiley.htm
The unfortunate thing is that Daniel Mannix was greatly responsible for the death of Grace Olive Wiley.
Most of the cobras that she kept were so tame, that they would not hood anymore. It was Mannix's insistance on getting a photo of a hooded cobra that caused Grace to use a newly imported Indian Cobra, that should have not been handled. Mannix was a very egotisitcal and pushy fellow, and he pushed her to work with a snake that she did not want to work with.
His pushing Grace to work with a snake that she was not comfortalble with was confirmed by Mannix's wife, in a TV interview, shortly after his death.
There is an excellent article about Grace Olive Wiley in Herp Review with numerous photos. The article was written by Jim Murphy. A PDF version of it can be found here:
http://zoohistory.co.uk/html/modules/Downloads/files/HRgracewiley.pdf
Best Regards
John Z
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RE: Grace Wiley
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by FSB on January 5, 2009
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John, thanks for the links (and sorry for the belated response). Such a sad story- I hadn’t read it in such a long time.
"The unfortunate thing is that Daniel Mannix was greatly responsible for the death of Grace Olive Wiley"
That's something I have long assumed, surmised or suspected of being true, (it's actually pretty obvious to the sympathetic reader of Mannix's own account), but having nothing better than my own hunches to back me up, I've left unsaid. While I always enjoyed reading this firsthand glimpse, however marred, into Grace’s life and work with snakes, I also deplored Mannix’s hoary and histrionic attitude towards snakes, which he so obviously fears, though he claims to like them: “I was looking at the world’s most deadly creature—the Indian cobra.” Actually, I’d say, and so I’m sure would Grace Wiley, that it was more the other way around – it was the cobra who was looking at the world’s most deadly creature. He also agrees with the unnamed “famous writer” who described a snake as “a running brook of horror.” “Still, I like snakes…” he goes on to say, somewhat apologetically.
I have much the same feeling about a certain well-known television personality who seems to conspire with his audience in being just some regular guy doing his job, fascinated yet still creeped out by, and even afraid of, the reptiles he is paid so well to work with. It almost seems like he’s winking at the audience, as if to say, “Don’t worry…. I’m not one of these nuts who really loves these things! This is just what I ended up getting my Ph.D. in and I get paid a ton of money to do this.”
My greatest respect is for the unapologetically devoted herpetologists who are not afraid to profess unconditional admiration and even love for these creatures, for this tells me that they are able to accept and appreciate these animals on their own terms, unsullied by the common human perception.
As Daniel Mannix even admits, Grace was always very open about sharing her techniques for working with snakes, and she never tried to capitalize on having what most ignorant people would readily accept as some (eminently marketable) supernatural ability. She knew that she had no such powers, only that she perceived a truth most people seem reluctant to even contemplate: that such apparently terrifying animals as venomous snakes, crocodilians, or great white sharks, do not really mean us any harm. They’re merely doing what they’ve always done, for millions and millions of years before we all arrived and suddenly started taking it all personally. If she had a gift, it was the ability to be truly kind, and to every living thing.
She saw and demonstrated that even the most feared of deadly snakes will respond to kind treatment, and not seek to harm a person at any opportunity, out of sheer cunning and malice (as is popularly believed).
Yet she was not believed. It sometimes seems as if people don’t want to believe anything good about reptiles, especially snakes. They don’t want to have their fears allayed. Perhaps there is some sort of deep human need to fear things. Something must account for the popularity of horror movies, and though I hate to admit it, it is for precisely this reason that the venomous snake and crocodilian exhibits at zoos hold any interest at all for nine tenths of the visiting public. They wish to see “death” up close, separated only by a pane of glass.
Whereas I am deeply fascinated by all sorts of venoms: their molecular makeup and phylogeny, and their applications to the studies of medicine, molecular biology and phylogeny, etc. etc., I am not particularly concerned with the question of which snake is most toxic, dangerous or whatever, to humans. Any snake capable of producing a fatality in a human is medically significant. Venom was developed with the primary role of subduing and often predigesting prey, and I am far more interested in the predator-prey relationships and how the prey may actually influence the nature of the venom, than I am in the rather incidental envenoming of humans. Snakes have been seeking and destroying their assigned prey for countless millennia before we came along and started getting ourselves in the way.
While it is no doubt a good thing to have in mind when working with them, the dangerousness of a bushmaster’s bite to a human is of far less interest to me than it’s intrinsic beauty of color and form, or the fact that it is one of the few pit vipers that lays eggs, or its phylogenetic relationship to the rattlesnakes (Crotalus). To my mind, the relative threat to humans posed by inland taipans vs. king cobras vs. black mambas is an almost superfluous, anthropocentric question that has little relevance to the natural niches these animals occupy in their respective ecosystems, continents removed from one another.
To me, snake bites on humans are unnatural occurrences borne of two colliding worlds. As Ramond Ditmars so poignantly asserted, snakes have nothing to do with us…. “they live in little worlds all their own.”
I never saw the interview with Mannix' wife... sounds very interesting, but I'm sure that Grace was indeed one of those very special, gentle souls who could easily be bulldozed by pushy people she is just trying to be nice to. I know the feeling well...
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