As viable modest homes in our neighborhood are destroyed by developers in order to free up space for the building of profit-maximizing behemoths, I think back to my childhood growing up in Beaumont-Wilshire on 40th Avenue, when “vacant lot” was as common to a kid’s vocabulary as “peanut butter.” Reflecting on the changes in the area over the years, one that makes me chuckle is at the north end of our street at Alberta Court. Presently Joseph Meek School occupies this location, but who remembers what was there previously? Back in the 1950’s this was one of the last remaining large vacant lots as the neighborhood built up. My guess is that construction in the area forced the snake and lizard population to take its last stand on this piece of real estate.
As a ten-year-old, it was not uncommon to find an occasional garter snake or blue tail lizard in the area, but not anything like what was to be found at the north end of 40th. Here, the reptile population was so concentrated that the neighbor kids called it the Snake Pit! One summer, someone suggested making a project out of seeing how many snakes we could catch in one excursion. Our expedition rounded up over 100 specimens! We brought them home in jars and boxes, even threading some into the handlebars of our bikes. Our new pets were placed in large screen-covered cardboard boxes in my backyard. We were quite proud of our accomplishment, but after a few days, it became apparent that feeding them would be next to impossible, and we didn’t want 100 dead snakes on our hands. So the decision was reluctantly made to give them their freedom. The neighbors were furious. You would think a Passover plague had been initiated on our block!
Now it is almost 65 years later and our wildlife population has dramatically shifted—snakes and lizards replaced by squirrels, raccoons, possums, even coyotes. But the new “plague” on the block is manmade: “demolition fever.” More power to BWNA and UNR in fighting the good fight.