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Upon the passing of Alligator Annie Miller 1915-2004 A Letter to the Editor of the Houma Daily Courier I was extremely saddened to hear of the passing of Alligator Annie Miller. “Miss Annie,” as we always called her, wasn’t simply an interesting local character but a unique American character who was to her generation what people like Daniel Boone were to theirs: fearless and ruggedly independent; a natural-born and gifted naturalist with a generous and inquiring spirit. She also had a restless imagination coupled to a keen entrepreneurial instinct that allowed her to make a life and living off the wild wetlands of South Louisiana that she so truly loved. Annie was always doing something interesting. My family and I had the extreme good fortune of becoming neighbors and friends with Annie back in 1958 when we moved from Houma to Bayou Black after my dad took a job at Southdown Sugars. She’d already by then become a commercial snake collector and about the second time we visited, she took my brothers and me out to her snake pens in her back yard, went in and began draping snakes around her neck, explaining what each one was. I was ten years old at the time and struck literally dumb with glee at this spectacle and realized Annie wasn’t going to be your garden-variety neighbor. And boy, she wasn’t. Pretty soon, Annie had cadged my dad, brothers and me into collecting snakes for her. This association lasted many years and meant we spent a lot of time at Annie’s house. (My older brother and I became best friends with Annie’s youngest son, Jimmy.) And going to Miss Annie’s was always better than a trip to any old zoo because at Annie’s you never knew what you were going encounter. The first summer we got to know her she was training otters for a Walt Disney movie. That same summer we drove up and found a seven-foot alligator chained up in the front yard like a dog (her aging parents, trappers then in their 70s, had caught it alive.) Another time we visited to find her entire living room floor covered with giant boa constrictors she had imported from South America. “It’s feeding time, boys,” she announced, and set free a bunch of baby chicks into the scrum of snakes. We boys watched mesmerized as the snakes had supper. (Later that year, my dad, who was reasonably handy with a wrench, made one of the more unique plumbing calls in history. Annie phoned up to ask his help because one of her ten-foot boas had crawled behind her hot water heater and was wedged in tight. They had to unbolt the heater from the wall to free the monster.) Another time, Miss Annie, knowing I had become a serious student of snakes, called me up to tell me she had something to show me. I went over with my dad. She took down a cigar box from a mantle, opened it, pulled up a clump of Spanish moss—and there was a gorgeous coral snake. (Of course, I knew that the coral snake had venom that made it the most poisonous snake in North America.) Miss Annie stroked it gently with her finger—while telling me that the coral snake was, by temperament, a gentle thing and wouldn’t bite unless harassed. I skipped the stroking but stood there thrilled. And it wasn’t just snakes. Annie collected unusual pets and unusual people. I recall a mynah bird that cussed and a baby chimpanzee that became extremely fond of my mother. Annie once imported a bunch of monkeys and gave us one. No matter that it turned out to be a horribly tempered thing that would hop on the backs of our dogs and ride them like rodeo horses. The gift of a monkey was the most interesting thing that had ever happened to us. Once, we went to visit and found a guy drinking beer in Annie’s living room. He was about seven feet tall, bald and wore a gold earring (this is maybe 1960, long before men routinely wore earrings.) He turned out to be a professional wrestler from California who also dabbled in rattlesnakes. This wasn’t the run-of-the-mill person you ran into in Houma back then. I saw Miss Annie last about a year-and-a-half ago, paying a long overdue visit with a couple of my brothers to her house on Bayou Black. Her husband, Ed, was still alive then but had been rendered unable to walk by a stroke. But, mentally, they were both the Annie and Ed of my childhood; sharp, congenial and as interested in catching up on our lives as we were interested in catching up on theirs. They were, as they had always been, the salt of the earth. Their passing is a great loss, all the more because they represented a link to a vanishing era in South Louisiana, when people saw the gorgeous mosaic of our now disappearing wetlands not as something to be despoiled and exploited but inseparable from the very fabric of their lives. Annie and Ed loved that life and lived it long, well and courageously. —Ken Wells, NYC |
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Alligator Annie Miller, left, with some of her serpentine friends. This picture was taken in the snake pens in her backyard on Bayou Black around 1957. Above, Annie on one of her famous swamp tours a few years before she died. |
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Photo courtesy of C.C. Lockwood © 2002 |
