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There are archives and then there are archives. The first kind comprises dusty cabinets and digital drawers. The second kind comprises living memory. This is a story about the latter kind.
On Oct. 12, 1993, Palo Alto’s Animal Services Department got a call about a missing 7-foot-long black mamba – a venomous snake of sub-Saharan origin – that was spotted somewhere around Ross Road. Jean McCown, mayor at the time, interrupted a city council meeting to deliver a talk, televised on local cable, to tell residents to exercise caution.
Wagging tongues fanned the fire and mayhem ensued. Door-to-door police check-ins followed. Anti-venom professionals were mobilized. Posters were made. The police created a special task force to find the snake and fielded over 1,000 phone calls from people claiming to have information about it.
So-called snake hunters and snake bite experts came forward. School was canceled. Social events were postponed. Locals tiptoed for days, anxious they might encounter the gigantic reptile.
“Mambaphobia” became a word. In the weeks that followed, a youth soccer team was named after the black mamba and T-shirts with slogans about surviving the snake were sported. The snake was never found and the authorities were divided about whether it was a hoax after all.
Cut to the present: This week marks the 30th anniversary of this outlandish incident. Stories about it live on – part urban legend, part transgenerational folklore, part myth – in the collective memory of Palo Altans. Surely there’ve been dozens of prank calls since. Yet the black mamba episode holds a special place in the city’s aging consciousness.
Fond recollections
Vernon Schabert, who was a 24-year-old Stanford graduate student at the time, covering Palo Alto City Council meetings for KZSU, recalls the incident vividly. Back then, he was responsible for monitoring the remote broadcast equipment, recapping the proceedings and providing public announcements during meeting breaks. His commentary was simulcast on the local access cable station.
“That night, information about a possible snake on the loose worked its way to council chambers and I was asked to announce the little we knew during the break,” Schabert said.
“This wasn’t interrupt-network-programming-worthy news. I doubt that we routinely had a large audience, but our broadcast was one of the few ways that people could get any real-time updates that night,” he opined. “The story seemed to capture unusual interest among the council members, or at least the staff who were passing along new information.
“But as the developing story interrupted the usual citizen complaints about noise from Shoreline Amphitheater and zoning variances on Professorville remodels, I kept thinking to myself about the snake’s oddly specific breed,” he said. “If the news was real – we had no way of knowing at the time – wasn’t it exponentially rarer to lose a black mamba than a more popular exotic pet like a python or a baby tiger? If this were a hoax, why choose such an obscure variety of snake that would require people to look up the breed to know whether it was even dangerous?”
Kobe Bryant, who later popularized this snake as his nickname, hadn’t even been drafted yet, Schabert pointed out.
Carol Rogers, who was about 34 years old in 1993, with an almost-5-year-old daughter, remembers it too.
“At the time of the scare, my daughter was in kindergarten at Palo Verde school. The back of the school opens onto Rorke Way, and at that time the school buses used Rorke for dropping off and picking up students, which scared the school,” she wrote in an email.
With the kindergarten classrooms and playground at that end of school, along with lots of trees and bushes, the kindergartners were not allowed to play outside at recess and lunchtime, she said.
That’s not all Rogers recalls. “Also, there was caution tape put around the shady playground area and none of the older children were allowed to play under the trees,” she said.
As the days rolled by, the school started letting children play in those areas again.
“As for the caution tape, I can remember it flapping in the wind, broken and not removed for a couple of weeks,” she said.
Sylvia Gartner, who was around 50 at the time, said, “I don’t know if this is correct, but I think the mamba was ‘seen’ on Louis Road. That’s a wild guess on my part. There was local news coverage about it. I also think there might have been one or two local herpetologists looking for our venomous friend.
“I was not at all worried about it. I think I sort of knew that this serpent was not a very large creature, despite punching over its weight in the venom category. I thought that looking around would be a waste of time, and I’d be better served spending my time ignoring the whole thing. It was funny though.”
William Warrior weighs in
In 1993, William Warrior was in his 14th year serving as field officer for Palo Alto’s Police Department Animal Control Division. Recently retired, he recalled that an office volunteer fielded the phone call about the missing snake.
In the days and weeks that followed, Warrior responded to multiple calls reporting mamba sightings: “The mamba in the median strip of Highway 101” – this turned out to be tire retreads in the roadway. “The mamba rearing its head from the playing fields at Greer Park” – this was the park’s automated sprinkler system. “The mamba in a neighborhood backyard” – this was a black garden hose.
“In the midst of this series of events the animal shelter received a second call from the alleged owner of the mamba. The caller expressed remorse for the escape of his pet snake and the ensuing hysteria caused,” Warrior said.
“The last mamba call I received came from a gentleman on the East Coast requesting that animal control pay a visit to his father’s home on a dead-end street in Midtown. The caller said that for some weeks his father was convinced the mamba had entered his home because it was the last house at the bottom of his street and that the mamba would have been unable to navigate its way out of his residence,” he said.
When Warrior arrived at the house to make an interior perimeter search, he was met by “an otherwise sane person of refined sensibilities with two Rolls Royce Silver Shadows in the garage sharing space with a life-size cardboard cutout of Marilyn Monroe.”
About the bizarre event, he said, “During the room-to-room search I noticed the homeowner had set up camp in his living room, using his Ottoman sofa for a bed. Towels were stuffed beneath every bedroom, closet and bathroom door frame to prevent the snake from entering the living room.
“At the conclusion of the search the resident was relieved by my official report that reconnaissance of his dwelling for the vagabond snake was with negative result. The resident lifted the self-imposed blockade of his rooms and resumed living a normal life,” he said.
That the Monroe cutout was part of his normal life is a whole different story.
What makes the black mamba episode special?
The episode took place 30 years ago, but the mythical black mamba is still with Palo Altans in spirit – and from the looks of it will continue to live on through the generations. Why so?
Warrior has a simple theory: “1993 was a simpler time of limited social media technology, few network-connected home computers and no smartphones. Community sharing of news was by and large the newspapers, radio, cable television and word of mouth gossip fences,” he said.
He added, “It was a pre-9/11 world spent living in the extended era of peace and prosperity that some folks called the ‘Pax Palo Alto,’ or the ‘Palo Alto Bubble,’ born out of the dreams and desires of mid to late 1980s young urban professionals – ‘YUPPIES’ – with their MBAs and BMWs.
“That a non-indigenous snake would, in a desperate attempt to break free of its confines and return to its sub-Saharan African slithering grounds, become the cause of the bursting of that bubble will forever mark the end of that halcyon era in the history of our fair city,” he said.
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