Wednesday, Feb. 22, 1939: A 21 year-old exotic dancer named “Zorita” takes her snake for a noon-time stroll on busy Flagler Street in downtown Miami. A large crowd gathers to watch the spectacle, spilling into the street. Traffic soon slows to a crawl.
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| Miami Daily News, Feb. 22, 1939. |
The cops are called and Zorita and her snake are on their way to police department.
“The only way we could disperse the crowd and free traffic from a snarl was to bring her and the snake in,” one of the cops told his bosses.
The Miami Daily News quotes a few veteran cops as saying, “The whole thing smacks of a publicity gag.”
Publicity? No way, says Zorita, “We only were taking the morning breeze.”
Two days later, this ad runs in the back pages of the Daily News.
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| Miami Daily News, Feb. 24, 1939. |
That ad in the News was just the first of hundreds of ads for Zorita and her snake that would run in Miami newspapers over the next four decades.
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| Miami Daily News, May 27, 1955. |
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| Miami News, Dec. 14, 1958. |
Zorita died in 2001 at age 85.
(via Random Pixels Blog)
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