10am Update: The Lizard Guy

“This house is like Jerassic Park North,” kids Gordon Hyssong, a 65 year old self-proclaimed herpetologist who shares his Parkville home with almost 40 reptiles, a fish tank full of hissing cockroaches and an ornery parrot names Caesar.

This guy was intense! I met him back in November, 2004, while I was an intern at the Patuxent Publishing Co. Legally blind when I met him, half the stuff we talked about was how he was in this horrible health care infinity loop. Retired from a security job at Johns Hopkins Hosptital, he was living off Social Security and he needed eye surgery. How frustrating must that be? He’s has all these cool looking animals, yet can

barely see them. But, he sounded hopeful. The medical stuff looked like it was panning out. He told me he would have his surgery in the next few weeks. What a great feeling it must be to regain his eye sight so he can see all his creepy crawly friends again. I never followed up with him, though. That’s one of the spikes of this job, our encounters are so brief and almost always limited to no more than an hour. He’s one of those subjects I’d love to revisit. Here‘s the story we did for the Northeast Reporter.

“I tell people and they think I must be lying that I have all these animals in my house,” claims Gordon Hyssong, a 65 year old self proclaimed herpetologist who shares his Parkville home with almost 40 reptiles. His bedroom houses a few large spiders, one scorpion, and some boa-constrictors, one of which is a rubber boa, seen above, native to North American Pine Forests.

The 10am Update is a regular feature on my blog (I try to make it a daily thing) where I showcase some of the best work from my archives.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 24th, 2010 at 10:00 am. It is filed under 10AM Update, community journalism, Photojournalism, PORTRAITS, The Patuxent Publishing Co. and tagged with 10AM Update, animals, Baltimore, community journalism, Photos, PORTRAITS, The Patuxent Publishing Co.. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.