The Story of Clara's Epic Battle with a South American Bushmaster in Order to Save the Lives of Her Trio of Newborn Kittens Still Lives On Almost a Century Later

This Stellar Production First Aired on Radio in 1947

"That mangy, brave alley cat had saved my life."
-- Christopher Warner

For fifteen years Mother Willis had served as a stewardess on the Chancay as it plied the choppy water between New York and La Guaira, the port of Caracas, and then back again. During her fourteenth year of service she met and befriended a homeless gray female named Clara on the mean streets of New York City.

"How could I help it if she came to me and just asked me to take her in last winter?" she explained to engineer Charlie Feeley in Martin Storm's short-story, "A Shipment of Mute Fate" which appeared in the July 1, 1934 edition of Esquire. "I tried to find her a good private home in New York -- you know that."

Not having the heart to abandon her, Mother Willis instead took her aboard the Chancay and for more than a year the happy pair sailed together on the ocean liner without incident. The good times came to an abrupt end in La Guaira when the new chief steward, a Mr. Bowman, ordered Clara off the ship.

"There's no reason for Mr. Bowman to roar out at her. None of the other chief stewards ever used to say a word," she further complained to Feeley. "He's too new, that's all. And it seems so cruel just at this time."

By that cryptic remark she was referring to the readily observable fact that Clara was in a family way. "If I only had her back I'd hide her," she vowed.

Feeley, however, had an alternative explanation for Bowman's unspeakable cruelty. 'I heard that the old man himself (Captain Wood) was bawling out Bowman, so probably that's what killed the cat," he suggested to Mother Willis.

Regardless of the true rationale behind Bowman's action Clara was, as at least as far as everyone knew at the time, left stranded on the quay as the Chancay set sail for New York. Besides, Bowman and Wood had a weightier dilemma on their hands in the form of wealthy Christopher Warner who had successfully captured a South American Bushmaster and had subsequently put his considerable influence to good use by strong-arming Wood into allowing him to bring the snake on board with him.

Found only in South America and on the West Indian islands of Trinidad and Tobago, these poisonous snakes grow to be up to twelve feet in length and weigh between six and ten pounds. Most often they are reddish-brown in color with a series of dark-brown or black dorsal blotches.

The snake's scientific name is Lachesis Muta which in translation means mute fate and hence the title of Storm's short-story. Lachesis was the name of the Greek Fate who assigned the length of a man's life whereas Muta was the Roman goddess of silence.

Although Bushmasters have noisemakers in their tails like rattlesnakes, they do not make a sound when they are shaken and that in turn enables them to strike without warning. Should they be lying in an undergrowth, however, the violent shaking of their rattlers will rustle the surrounding leaves and vines.

Even though special precautions were taken, the snake eventually got loose aboard the cruise ship when it was inundated by a huge wave. Upon learning that the deadly viper was on the prowl, panic broke out among the passengers and crew and that in turn prompted a pair of stokers to jump to their deaths in the Atlantic.

Before continuing with the unraveling of Storm's scintillating plot, it is important to point out at this juncture that his story likely would have remained obscure and eventually forgotten altogether by the literary world if it had not been for CBS Radio which adapted it for inclusion in its long-running adventure series, Escape. The reworking of the script was done by Les Crutchfield who later would go on to even greater acclaim as the author of eighty-one original scripts between 1952 and 1961 for, arguably, old-time radio's best show, Gunsmoke. In addition to all of that, he wrote forty-seven stories for the television show of the same name between 1955 and his premature death at age fifty in 1966.

All totaled, "A Shipment of Mute Fate" was presented four times on Escape with each episode containing a new cast, sound effects, and minor emendations in Crutchfield's script. The initial broadcast occurred on October 15, 1947 and cast Jack Webb (1920-1982) as Christopher Warner. He later would achieve everlasting fame as Sergeant Joe Friday on the ridiculously inauthentic, pro-police propaganda charade known as Dragnet which enjoyed a long life on both radio and television.

A second effort was broadcast a short while later on March 28, 1948 and featured Harry Bartell who is perhaps best remembered for his radio work on Gunsmoke as well as the host of The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Escape's third crack at Storm's short-story occurred on March 13, 1949 and starred Barry Kroeger.

The show's fourth and final effort came on July 7, 1950 and starred William Conrad who at that point of his career was on the threshold of becoming immortalized as Marshall Matt Dillon on Gunsmoke. After the drama died on network radio on September 30, 1962, he went on to become the narrator of the 1960's best television drama, The Fugitive, and he later got his own network shows, Cannon and Jake and the Fat Man.

Jack Webb Starred as Christopher Warner

CBS Radio killed off Escape on September 25, 1954 but its sister show, Suspense, continued to air right up until the bitter end of radio's golden age and, not surprisingly, so too did "A Shipment of Mute Fate." In fact, it found new life and fans with two additional airings.

The first occurred on January 6, 1957 and starred Jack Kelly who is best remembered for his work on the television show, Maverick, which aired on ABC between 1957 and 1962. The second, and final, presentation came on April 3, 1960 and featured Bernard Grant.

Following that final presentation on national radio, "A Shipment of Mute Fate" was once again relegated to the familiar obscurity of its pre-1947 days. It does, however, remain popular today with fans of old-time radio and can be easily found on the web.

Returning to the narrative, both Storm's and Crutchfield's versions are in agreement that the Bushmaster was finally located in the ship's galley but there is a disagreement as to who actually discovered its presence. In Crutchfield's version, it was Warner who accidentally stumbled upon it and that dénouement ties in with the notion that the snake was seeking revenge against him for capturing and taking away its freedom.

In Storm's account it was Bowman, who had cruelly kicked Clara off the boat, who finds and is cornered by the Bushmaster. As only fate would have it, his life was spared when Clara miraculously materialized out of nowhere and killed the snake in order to save the lives of her trio of newly-born kittens.

Inexplicably, Storm does not offer any explanation as to how that Clara was able to have reboarded the ship. In Crutchfield's version, however, she is smuggled aboard by Mother Willis with, ironically, the complicity of Warner who was hardly in any position to rat her out considering that he was contemplating doing likewise with the Bushmaster if Captain Wood had not relented and given his consent for him to bring it on board.

"That mangy, brave alley cat had saved my life," Warner was able to declare at the conclusion of Crutchfield's version but cat-lovers should shy away from reading Storm's original text. That is because although in both versions Clara was able to have saved her kittens, in his story she died in the snake's coils and as a result left behind a trio of orphans.

Much like Shelly of Speedwell, Tennessee, who recently saved her owner, Jimmy Nelson, from a copperhead, Clara was a courageous cat who risked her life in order to save those that meant the most to her. Both cats also shared troubled pasts that saw them subjected to a myriad of abandonments and abuse. (See Cat Defender post of November 26, 2019 entitled "Brave Little Shelly Goes Toe-to-Toe with a Poisonous Copperhead in Order to Save the Life of the Slumbering Octogenarian Who Ransomed Her Off of Death Row at a Shelter.")

Unlike television and the motion picture industry which have largely shunned cats, they were a popular subject matter for the producers of radio drama. Whereas Clara is undoubtably the most famous of the radio cats, she was far from being the only one.

Inexcusably, however, the vast majority of those who wrote and produced radio drama were confirmed cat-haters who went out of their way in order to depict the species as dirty, diabolical, and expendable. C'est-à-dire, cats existed in their minds to be defamed, exploited, abused, and then gotten rid of as quickly and as savagely as possible.

For example, Suzie was duped into unwittingly killing off a number of Broadway starlets residing at a boardinghouse in Tin Pan Alley in "The Lucky Lady" which aired February 14, 1946 on Suspense. Their wholesale abuse and the trafficking of them in the Old West was winked at in an episode of the Frontier Gentleman entitled "The Cat Man" that aired on August 10, 1958.

Others such as author Damon Runyon hated cats with a passion and he demonstrated that antipathy in his short-story "Lillian" which aired October 16, 1949 on the Damon Runyon Theatre. Radio producers were astute enough to realize, however, that even confirmed cat-haters could be magically transformed into lovers of the species if only they were supplied with a large enough monetary incentive and that was amply demonstrated in an October 12, 1952 episode of The Chase on NBC Radio entitled, appropriately enough, "The Cat's Meow."

Finally, it would be comforting to believe that the human race in general and the mass media in particular will one day mend their evil ways and stop demonizing, abusing, and killing cats but that is not about to happen. That sobering thought goes a long way toward explaining the appeal that fiction has over reality.

Sometimes it even gets the better of itself as Crutchfield, long dead all these many years, continues to not only delight but also to outdo Storm. At least, one would like to believe that a mother cat is capable of besting a Bushmaster in mortal combat.

After all, a debilitated Katzen-Mama from the Dortmund suburb of Deusen in Nordrhein Westfalen was able on June 7, 2009 to get the better of a fox intent upon eating her and her newborns. (See Cat Defender post of June 26, 2009 entitled "Emaciated and Suffering from the Flu, Katzen-Mama Fights Off a Vicious Fox in Order to Save Her Four Kittens.")

Photos: YouTube (Bushmaster) and Old Time Radio Downloads (Webb).