THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, October 22, 1995 TAG: 9510200207
SECTION: CHESAPEAKE CLIPPER PAGE: 10 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: Eric Feber
LENGTH: Medium: 62 lines
When it comes to going all out for Halloween, Chesapeake residents could learn a thing or two from George Blick.
The retired firefighter, who moved to the city during the summer of '94, used to decorate his former home every Halloween.
``I did this in Rutherford, N.J., for 15 years,'' Blick said. ``It even made the papers.''
But now that he's in Chesapeake, Blick said he has enough elaborate Halloween decorations around his Albemarle Acres West home to make any horror fan proud.
The front yard of his house features several horrific Halloween tableaux, featuring eight life-size mannequins and two caskets.
Some of the scenes include Dracula in his casket, a witch holding a pumpkin, the devil, an old crone holding snakes and spiders, another clutching her own severed head and a guillotine busy removing the noggin from some poor, unfortunate soul.
And does George Blick stop at Halloween? Not on your life.
``I lit up the block last year during Christmas,'' he said. ``You could see our house from the highway.''
For a fun Halloween treat, grab the kids and head out to Blick's devilish displays at 1301 Winfall Drive, on the corner of Winfall and Corapeake drives. Snakes alive
One of the guests on Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt's tour of Naval Security Group Activity Northwest was a young mature female canebrake rattlesnake.
The endangered snake was about to be let loose back into the wild by biologist Alan Savitzky of Old Dominion University. The rattler had a surgically implanted electronic tracking device inside her so field scientists could track her movements and study her habits.
While Babbitt, comfortable in casual sport shirt and tan slacks, stood by, Savitzky tried to coax the annoyed rattler into a plexiglass handling tube, now used by scientists to safely allow them to handle and show off poisonous snakes.
The canebrake is a placid and very non-aggressive creature that only bites ``when someone is literally stepping on one,'' Savitzky said. But in spite of using a snake handler's pole and plastic tube, the ODU professor treated the reptile with the utmost respect.
Everyone, including Babbitt, looked on with apprehension.
Luckily for Babbitt, Savitzky had no trouble handling the rather docile rattler.
Finally, after showing off its surgical implants and offering a few more tidbits about its habits, the ODU scientist gently lowered the snake back into the wild.
``You handled that snake as calmly as any Hopi,'' Babbitt said, referring to the Hopi tribe's expert handling, knowledge and reverence of desert rattlesnakes. by CNB