My first installment of "Memory Lane" was Blog #11 and covered my start in the pet industry in the early 1980s and American tarantula breeding pioneers like Allan McKee and Ralph Henning. This was the beginning of a serious tarantula hobby in the United States. It is easy for me to recall the timeline as I was an eager young tarantula and reptile keeper and breeder at the time. While managing the reptile department of Noah's Ark I spent equal time on my reptile and tarantula collections and learned a great deal from my two mentors, Scott Michaels for reptiles and Ralph Henning for tarantulas. But apprentice becomes master and my own projects leaped ahead in various incarnations of reptile and tarantula businesses.
The arachnid hobby was still in its infancy, but herpetoculture had already began to explode and my Jacobi Herpetoculture produced various colubrid snakes before progressing to pythons and boas. I left Noah's Ark to sell pet supplies and dog food for Strictly Animals in Wauconda, Illinois. The owner John Mellyn had an interesting reptile collection and became a customer of mine at Noah's Ark. It wasn't long before our friendship led to his asking me to come to work for him. John eventually began to focus more on primates and our Strictly Animals building expanded to include a huge room of macaques and other monkeys. The job was perfect for me as I could keep doing my own "Jacobi Herpetoculture" on the side and I began producing an increased number of snakes. But John shut down Strictly Animals to buy Snake Farm in Texas and move his exotic animal collection south. Left without a job I concentrated on my reptiles and spiders and started work towards opening a specialty reptile store I would call "Chicago Reptile". I began having realtors show me commercial space and started constructing display cages in my mother's basement. Then the first National Breeder's Expo in Orlando, Florida occurred in 1990. I had baby Dumeril's boas and Colombian boas to sell and it launched what has become 25 years of reptile shows all around the country. Chicago Reptile never came to be and years later Brian Potter started his own business called "Chicago Reptile House". He improved over my name and definitely improved on my success.
The following years saw me working a few "straight jobs", but my tarantula and reptile work was always ongoing. I always came back to the pet industry. The tarantulas were the one constant as my reptile projects tended to shift from colubrids to pythons to arboreal vipers to geckos and back to pythons along with geckos. The 1990s are a bit of a blur. I discovered the Internet and created the World of Atheris website, a comprehensive look at the African bush vipers. That website led to a commission by a German publisher to write a monograph on Atherini vipers. Klaus Dieter Schulz had written his own monograph on Elaphe (ratsnakes), many of which are now in other genera. Unfortunately, his Bushmaster Publications folded and the book never came to be. In recent years I took down World of Atheris because a German site had basically duplicated/copied my work and I no longer had time to keep WOA updated.
Jumping ahead to the turn of the century, on New Year weekend 1999/2000 I met my ex-wife. I was 36 and left Chicagoland for the first time. She was not into my spiders at all. She wasn't thrilled about the reptiles, but definitely was arachnophobic. I know, this should have been the "red flag" that should have saved me from 6 years of marriage and a great deal of money lost. But my collection had grown smaller and I sold everything and drove west. We started together on the Washington/Idaho border in Pullman, WA where she was completing a neuroscience Ph.D. at Washington State University. While she was doing that I did some peddling of reptiles and amphibians and got deeper into arboreal vipers. Eventually she graduated and got a post-doctoral fellowship at Vanderbilt University in 2001. That's how I got to Nashville. But I couldn't get a permit for my venomous snakes so once again everything had to be sold. Love makes you do stupid things.
My ex was extremely busy as soon as she arrived at Vanderbilt. I had plenty of time on my hands and had to get a business of my own going again. I found some inexpensive retail space to sublet and built a store called "The Living Terrarium and Spider Shoppe". I had already been selling tarantulas for 20 years, but this was the first time I had called myself "Spider Shoppe". I had used the name here and there, but now it was on the window of a store open for business. The "Living Terrarium" part of the shop was easy. I had a small front showroom and a larger back breeding room. The back became filled with Uroplatus, Rhacodactylus and Phelsuma geckos. My day gecko collection was expanding quickly as Doug Barr was in eastern Tennessee and he was focusing more on cage building. When he finally got completely out of geckos I bought everything. And I hired him to build some custom cages for my front showroom. The showroom had all sorts of reptiles and amphibians with plenty of dart frogs and loads of terrarium plants for sale.
Since the store was separate from our home I had no limitations. I immediately began rebuilding my spider collection and, thankfully, my wife became increasingly intrigued by them. It didn't matter though. The shop was mine and I quickly focused most of my effort on tarantula sales as my gecko projects continued. "The Spider Shoppe" became an online business and the tarantula hobby was beginning to see an influx of new species from Europe. Frank Somma of New York was importing from Denmark's Henrik Wessel Frank who is the original breeder of Poecilotheria. This is also when somebody named Pat Kane popped up on the scene. He began offering a variety of spiderling tarantulas as well. We didn't yet know that he was a thief. Soon it became known that he was working for Regal Reptiles and as he began to rip off people hobby wide it was soon disclosed that he was just a teenager. I can't tell you how many times I spoke to him on the phone - once or twice a week usually - and how much I bought from him before I knew that he was just some spoiled kid. He sounded much older and, to be honest, he never really ripped me off like he did others. Only at the very end did he owe me money and start selling me misidentified tarantulas. "Misidentified" is being too kind. If you wanted, for example, Brachypelma ruhnaui (now albiceps) he'd say he had them and then send you B. smithi slings. Tiny slings are hard to differentiate and he used this to his advantage.
The store was short lived. I was subletting the space from a currency exchange of sorts and the strip mall was sold and being renovated. I would have to get my own space with very expensive rent to stay. One of my store's good customers had a friend that had office space for rent and I was able to move to where I would have two 500 square foot units - one for my spiders and one for my reptiles. Plus he had a house my ex and I could also rent. I couldn't have been luckier. But this new space wasn't "retail frontage" so I stopped being open to the public and focused on the Internet and regional reptile shows. Every month my ex and I did the Kentucky Reptile Expo. I did shows throughout the southeastern U.S. But, like today, most of my sales were through my online store.
There were a number of tarantula dealers I was competing with. Many were "pseudo dealers" or "weekend warrior" like I describe in Blog #10. But the serious competition was Kelly Swift's Swift Inverts, John Hoke's e-spiderworld, Southern Spider Works, Krazy 8s Invertebrates, Bill Stanton, Art Cerda and Golden Phoenix Exotica. Alex Orleans of Tarantulas.com, who I would later work for, was a supplier and buyer, but he's always kept a low profile and focused on his wholesale business. Many of us were buying from Frank Somma. I'd speak to Frank a couple times a week and Swifty and I also chatted at least every week and John Hoke would become a good friend. Competition was friendly and most everyone got along except for Art Cerda. He was an asshat and an outsider. It shouldn't be a surprise that only Swifty and I still survive. We're like roaches ;)
I'll spare you the story, but the marriage ended. I gave up the house we were renting and moved into my business space. My landlord had a shower in the basement of his adjoining shop and I lived with my reptiles and spiders for awhile. This was between the two ArachnoCons. They took place in San Antonio in 2006 and 2007 and were an Arachnoboards event. However, I did a lot of the work with Debby and became responsible for the guest speakers, the ArachnoExpo sales part and the website. In 2007 I asked Alex to speak about his recent trip to Malaysia where he saw the "Singapore Blue". At the time we were calling it "Cyriopagopus sp. Blue". We hadn't yet learned that it was Lampropelma violaceopes. I had yet to meet Alex, but as I wrote above I was buying some of his surplus spiders, primarily arboreals like Avicularia and Poecilotheria. He had taken the "spider guy" at his company with him to Malaysia and he said that he, Dan Ventura, would do the lecture instead. Alex has always preferred to just breed tarantulas and be pretty invisible in the hobby. This was also the year that we flew in Volker von Wirth and Martin Huber from Germany. We got a poker game going and Alex was a player and we hit it off. We began speaking more often after ArachnoCon and I told him that I wasn't sure if I'd stay in Nashville. The split and eventual divorce had hurt me emotionally and financially. I basically kept my animals including our dog and my clothes and she took everything else. Alex offered me a job and I jumped at the change. I had already began to sell off my geckos to keep afloat and make space for me to live in the shop. Alex said he would buy all of my arboreal tarantulas as he and I shared the passion for tree-dwellers. So I sold everything I couldn't fit in a minivan and moved to Seattle. I took over Tarantulas.com. The "Spider Shoppe" went into hiatus in 2007 and wasn't reborn until 2013.
Tarantulas.com was the original arachnid hobbyist Internet forum. However, Arachnoboards had gotten huge and the forum at Tarantulas.com wasn't something I wanted to moderate. There was a situation when some douchebag posted some nonsense about Kelly Swift, and Swifty called me all upset about it. He wanted me to delete it immediately. I had just taken over the site and that division of the much bigger business and didn't even have the power or ability to delete it! My old friend Kelly had a bit of a temper tantrum. I was overwhelmed by my move and my new responsibilities. I realized that I didn't want to moderate a forum and once I got the passwords, etc. I shut down Tarantulas.com as a forum. I eventually redesigned the site completely and that revision still stands today.
Alex had no interest in retail sales, but I told him I would handle all of that and began selling through Tarantulas.com. Today all that is left is my care information as it shut down completely when I eventually quit to return to the Chicago area after the tragic and sudden death of my mother. But from 2007-2012 I managed Northwest Zoological Supply and continued the retail sales of our tarantulas through Tarantulas.com. Our biggest customer was Petco and we also had another 100+ independent pet stores, but I made time to keep selling tarantulas even if Alex and I did run out of time to do much in the way of breeding. Then tragedy ... I lost my mom and decided to move back to be with my sister, her family and my stepfather. We were all devastated. I bought my house in Huntley while driving across Montana. As soon as I moved in I started importing and selling tarantulas. I held back everything of interest and finally by last summer my breeding projects began to take off. And that's where I'll leave you. In the next "trip down memory lane" we will tell the story of the Huntley version of "Michael Jacobi's SPIDERSHOPPE".
Thanks for reading, MJ
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