My wife and I bought a new 10’ X 50” house trailer during the early months of 1962. It was huge when compared to the 1953 8’ X 35’ Champion house trailer we had been living in. We set the new trailer up on a large front corner lot in Cox’s Trailer Court at 9842 103rd St on the western outskirts of Jacksonville, Florida. 103rd St continued on west and ended near the gate to Cecil Field Naval Air Station where I was attached to VF-174 a Navy Fighter/Training Squadron. At the time NAS Cecil was the largest Navy jet aircraft base on the east coast of the United states. Today it has been abandoned by the Navy and the State of Florida owns it, I believe.
Anyway, at the time we lived at that address there was a small home next door, to the west. It was right next door to our trailer. The couple who lived there, and I do not recall their names, had two young boys, maybe six or eight years old. Each day they came home on a school bus. The parents both worked away from home. The father didn’t arrive for quite some time each day, but the mother would get home about 15 minutes later than the boys. The boys were locked out of their home for that short period each weekday afternoon. Although we had no official status, we had an agreement with the parents to keep and eye on the kids for that brief period each day.
One bright sunny afternoon the kids got off the school bus, as they did every day. They picked up a football and began to toss it around between them. My wife and I were within our home only a short distance from them. Soon I heard one of them say something about a snake. I ran to where the two boys were looking at it from a short distance away, and recognized it as an Eastern Diamondback. I instructed the boys to watch where it went if it moved, but not to go near it. It was coiled in an attack mode, and making no effort to move away. I rushed to my home, grabbed a .22 rifle and some bullets, and returned to the snake’s location. I shot the snake. I had often heard that they traveled in pairs, so I looked around and sure enough a few feet away was another which I also quickly dispatched.
When stretched out they were each about four feet long, not huge, but big enough. It was just luck that the boy had spotted the snake as he played, and not gotten too close to it, or possibly even stepped on it.
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