Bob Duerr, Como Zoo reptile keeper who brought snakes to classrooms, children's television and State Fair, dead at 92
Oct. 22—There was the time Bob Duerr used a pitchfork to pry a half-ton bull elk off an artist who had made the mistake of attempting to capture the animal's majesty from inside its cage at St. Paul's Como Zoo. And the time Duerr waded into Lake Phalen and wrestled a crocodile to mutual exhaustion until police officers could net it, almost costing him his arm.
Either exploit alone might make for the stuff of local legend, but Duerr may have topped them both in 1968 when he wrapped a 133-pound, 16-foot python around St. Paul City Council member Victor Tedesco for a promotional weigh-in, only to discover the snake had no intention of letting go. Had the potentially life-threatening incident not been captured in newspaper photos at the time, it might have been chalked up to a tale as tall as Duerr's first-hand knowledge of the animal kingdom.
When the zoo declined to offer its longtime reptile keeper his own snake house exhibit, Duerr took his herpetology skills on the road, opening Bob's Snake Zoo at the Minnesota State Fair and appearing on children's television shows with slithery creatures large and small throughout the 1950s and 1960s.
Duerr, known to some as "Boa Bob," died Thursday while in hospice care in Roseville, according to close friends and younger sister Betty Duerr of Roseville. He was 92.
"He spent his entire life being a personality, and he spent a great deal of his life being an educator," said Burt Dvergsdal, who first sparked up a conversation with Duerr 35 years ago when he walked into his antique shop on St. Clair Avenue in St. Paul. Dvergsdal would later help his friend prep for his State Fair booth and sometimes worked there himself. "He was always ready to engage with people. He walked into my store and we became friends instantly."
As a Como zookeeper, Duerr became well-versed in the needs and interests of many of its animals, but his great love was always snakes.
"It's the best job at the zoo, because most snakes get tame and stop biting after a week or two," said Duerr, in a 2012 video interview with St. Paul artist Mike Hazard celebrating Duerr's 40th year at the Fair. "They wouldn't build me a snake house, so after 15 years of begging, I came here. ... It's pure fun. It really, really is."
After serving as a Navy seaman in the Korean War, Duerr attended the University of Minnesota but quit just shy of graduation with the hope of breaking into professional football. He returned to St. Paul from an East Coast bush league, scanned job openings and found one shoveling manure at the zoo. His love of animals softened his linebacker aggressiveness, and zoo officials drafted him for a television appearance, and then another.
In the 1950s and '60s, Duerr served as a reoccurring guest on the children's show "Lunch with Casey" opposite Roger Awsumb, a television broadcaster who performed as a railroad engineer and hosted skits and cartoons. Mishaps were common. The late Pioneer Press columnist Don Boxmeyer once chronicled how a skunk that got away from Duerr in a Channel 2 studio couldn't be found for two weeks. More than once, landlords showed him the door after catching wind of his slithery pets.
Dvergsdal said some of Duerr's stories could come across fantastical until he met witnesses who had experienced the same events and confirmed the details. When two drinking buddies stole a crocodile from the zoo and released it into Lake Phalen, Duerr sprang into action, wading into the water at a low crouch so as not to startle it. The crocodile pounced anyway, biting his arm and rolling him underwater in an attempt to drown him. The two kept rolling, but Duerr knew he had one shot at survival — outlasting him.
"In addition to seeing the sky in every rotation, he saw the St. Paul Police Department pointing their guns at the crocodile," said Dvergsdal, who said Duerr knew the reptile would run out of energy and fall into a stupor "if you can live long enough."
As police netted the exhausted creature, Duerr struggled back to shore with flesh hanging off his arm, to the delight of an assembled crowd. "All of these people clapped like it happens every Saturday at 1 p.m," Dvergsdal recalled Duerr telling him.
Said Betty Duerr, "He got hurt on that one a little bit. Many children loved to hear the stories he could tell. You have no idea what a fantastic life he had."
In the 1970s, the Science Museum of Minnesota and other educational groups hired Duerr to bring his knowledge of zoo life to schools from Florida to western Montana, where he entertained kids in person.
Duerr will be buried at Fort Snelling National Cemetery in Minneapolis next spring. Details to be arranged.
