At the end of a strip mall, next door to a cheese shop, lives one of the Wisconsin Dells’ most unusual residents. Fatso, a 110-pound monitor lizard, was allegedly once the featured participant in an unusual Southeast Asian ritual. Hoping to release the souls of the deceased loved ones from their bodies, natives fed Fatso human corpses. Then Lou Daddono of Barrington acquired Fatso, and determining an acceptable food substitute for human bodies was the least of his problems.
Daddono, 36, is the founder of Serpent Safari, an indoor reptile zoo in the Dells. Through Serpent Safari, Daddono is living his dreams. He now has an excuse to spend 60 to 80 hours a week with his reptiles and amphibians and is sharing his pets and their fascinating stories with the public. Soon he hopes he’ll be able to make a full-time living doing so.
“I recently heard about something called Wildlife Disease, where people are so into animals that they give up almost everything else,” Daddono says. “I think I’ve got that.”
A casual look at Daddono would not reveal his obsession. He is youthful-looking and a conservative dresser, except for the occasional belt made out of cobra. He has been married for 13 years to Joann and has two children, Christi, 11, and Lisa, 8, whom he clearly adores. He is a manager at his father’s company, Century Trade Show Services, based in Atlanta, and a co-owner of All Pro Auto Insurance Agency in Chicago.
For the last three decades, Daddono has collected, watched, cared for and loved a variety of reptiles. He says he has committed his life savings to his passion, as well as the life savings of everyone he knows who would lend him money. Until last June, he had more than 100 reptiles in the basement of his Barrington home–the collection now numbers about 50–and some of them were quite dangerous. Like Fatso.
“He was really mean,” Daddono says. “When I first had him, he was throwing his tail around, breaking the wall, breaking the heating elements in the (cage). Luckily the glass was bulletproof.”
As if that weren’t enough, Fatso soon figured out how to open the door of his cage. Then one day Daddono went into the basement to find Fatso’s cage opened and the lizard gone.
The stairs are the only way to reach the living portion of Daddono’s home from the basement, and Daddono figured he could protect his family by installing a motion sensor alarm at the top of the stairs. Or so he thought.
What Fatso did was break through the ceiling and find the heating ducts. He was crawling up into them, looking for warmth, when Daddono found him. For more than two hours, Daddono wrestled with the giant lizard, struggling to keep him out of the heating ducts.
Daddono grabbed a knife and started poking Fatso in an effort to force Fatso to release his grip. He succeeded, but as Fatso released his grip, he fell, thrusting his abdomen with full force on Daddono’s blade. Daddono felt sick; he never wanted to hurt the animal. He called his vet, Dr. Steve Barten of Vernon Hills, who made a house call and tended Fatso’s wound.
Daddono grieved throughout the night, finally returning upstairs when it appeared that Fatso would be all right.
Lisa, on the other hand, was not OK. The experience had dramatically demonstrated to her that her father’s hobby, very popular at her school, could be life-threatening. Daddono convinced her this type of danger was very rare. He says he has the innate, silent communication with the reptiles that tells him when a situation is dangerous.
There was no single encounter with reptiles that prompted Daddono’s fascination. Instead, says his mother, Bea Daddono of Inverness, “He was born with a love of reptiles.” Lou Daddono says he pored over dinosaur books and played with dinosaur toys from his earliest recollection, until he could get the next best thing: a real reptile.
When Lou was 3, Bea bought him his first alligator from the local dime store. His addiction soon consumed not only little Lou but his entire household.
“If my daughter got a little plate on a field trip, it would disappear, and soon you would see it in a snake’s cage,” Bea says. “My dishes, Lou’s brother’s toys, even my good comforter; in with the snakes. I would go crazy, but Lou would say, `Mom, I needed it for the snakes.’ “
By the time he was in 8th grade, he had 30 reptiles and amphibians. About this time, Daddono left the lid off the cage for his 6-foot boa constrictor. For a while–Lou says two weeks; Bea recalls that it was months–the family lived in fear as they searched unsuccessfully for the lost boa.
“Someone told us that the snake would seek a dark place to hide, like our beds or our coats,” Bea says. “I’m deathly afraid of animals, and after the kids would go to school, I’d realize that I was all alone in the house with the snake. If I wanted to get away from it, I would have to put on my coat. But the snake might be in my coat. So I would stand in front of the closet and cry.”
On Father’s Day, a carpenter came in to investigate a stench coming from the plaster ceiling and found the deceased snake. “My dad made me get rid of most of my pets,” Daddono says. “I was heartbroken.”
For the next 10 years Daddono had to content himself with window shopping at pet stores and reading about reptiles. He graduated from high school, went to work for his father, and started dating Joann.
Many 18-year-olds living at home have parties when their parents leave town for a weekend. When Daddono’s parents went to Europe, he bought a Burmese python. The snake died about five years later, six months before his 1983 wedding. (He had the snake preserved and currently displays it in his basement.)
“I thought I was in the clear,” Joann says. “I’m not a true reptile lover. All of these animals were not in my plan.” She laughs. “I kept hoping it was a phase he was going through.”
After their first year of marriage, a friend called to say his pregnant wife had insisted he get rid of his 4-foot Savannah monitor. Daddono adopted it and soon started expanding his collection.
But purchasing unusual reptiles from importers and pet shops and at reptile swaps is very expensive. One Nile crocodile that Daddono owns, for example, cost “between $34,000 and $37,000” plus $6,000 in shipping, he says.
So Daddono came up with a plan to obtain more reptiles at a minimal cost. “I put an ad in several magazines that I would adopt reptiles that people no longer wanted,” he says. As a result, he became the owner of numerous new animals.
Certain tools are necessary when you go to a stranger’s home to put a crocodile or anaconda in a bag and bring it home in the back seat of your Corvette. Daddono puts the animals in large canvas bags, uses a garbage can lid as a shield, holds heads of snakes at arm’s length with tongs, and sprays attacking animals with bleach, which makes the animals back off.
To capture the larger animals, like Baby, his 400-pound python that now lives at Serpent Safari, he uses a small dumpster attached to a wheelbarrow base.
By 1992, Daddono’s collection had reached close to 100, and it started attracting a lot of attention, with a constant stream of visitors coming to the house to see his menagerie. Lou would come home from work and stay up until 2 or 3 a.m., caring for the animals, cleaning tanks, giving tours or just hanging out with his pets.
Joann sometimes helped with the cage cleaning or the medical procedures. She says she understands Lou’s love for the animals, and she wants him to be happy. “But it got to be too much with people in the house all of the time,” she says. “They’d come to see the animals and wouldn’t leave until midnight. Or they’d call at 10 p.m. and ask if they could bring somebody by to see the snakes.”
The neighbors have enjoyed Daddono’s obsession. When Lou takes the larger lizards out on a leash, it literally stops traffic on Long Grove Road.
“Whenever we’ve had friends and family over, we’ve said, `You can’t believe what’s next door,’ ” says next-door neighbor Elaine Ezsak. “They always want to see Lou’s basement, and Lou and Joann have been very accommodating.”
Last summer, Ezsak had a direct encounter with Daddono’s pets that she recalls was “kind of neat.”
“I was drinking iced tea in the yard when Lou’s beautiful blonde snake wrapped itself around my leg,” Ezsak recalls. “I’ve had people ask me how I can live next door, but it doesn’t bother me. You would never know the animals are in the basement unless they told you. The neighbors’ reaction is more fascination than fear.”
It’s not simply the collection but the display that inspires people who have seen it to bring their friends and family. Daddono, who has special permits for his in-home collection, started the basement exhibit as a habitat bar that would exhibit one Savannah monitor in his 1,800-square-foot basement. The finished design housed 30 reptiles, included a water sculpture and cost about $175,000, exclusive of animals and carpeting.
For years, Daddono had been formulating a plan to share his love of the reptiles, while allowing him to spend more time with them. “I had been thinking of some kind of reptile zoo for as long as I could remember,” Daddono says, “but I wasn’t sure how it would work out.”
His large basement collection, and the interest of visitors who constantly paraded through his house, convinced Daddono that a reptile zoo could be a successful business.
By 1993, Daddono had developed a plan for a herpetological museum. He set his sights on Palatine, but he was unable to get local government approval for the location he had selected. He was disappointed but continued to look for possible locations.
In the summer of 1995, Daddono scouted potential sites while vacationing in the Wisconsin Dells. In February 1996, the owner of a strip mall, learning of Daddono’s inquiries, approached Daddono with an offer. Within a month, Daddono started renovating the three T-shirt shops in a strip mall across the street from Noah’s Ark. On June 15, Serpent Safari opened its doors. The three massive reptile balloons attached to the storefront helped attract 30,000 customers last summer.
He has begun rebuilding his basement menagerie in the hopes of collecting enough reptiles to populate another Serpent Safari. Possible locations include Rosemont and Las Vegas.
His basement menagerie includes Bighead, a reticulated python that can eat a 46-pound pig. Both Joann and Lou have had nightmares about Bighead. Still, Daddono is grooming Bighead, who currently weighs about 240 pounds, to surpass Baby as the largest snake in captivity.
Daddono is eager to share his pets with the public. “My research showed that reptile houses are the most visited exhibits at zoos,” he says. “People will watch a snake lying on the floor longer than they will watch monkeys play. At Serpent Safari, they can see animals they don’t see at most zoos, and they can get a better look at them.”
Daddono says he hopes to educate the public about these often-feared reptiles. Maybe, deep in his heart, he’s also looking for people who understand and share his deep passion for snakes and other such creatures.
