Lynn Waddell said it best during our Tuesday afternoon talk: “It was kind of weird, I was shocked to see it.”
The St. Petersburg-based, award-winning journalist and author of “Fringe Florida” was talking about seeing her March 1999 Weekly Planet story about the disappearance of Don Lewis appear in “Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness.”
"People were taking pictures of the TV screen and sending them to me," Waddell told Creative Loafing Tampa Bay. "Then my publisher contacted me said we were gonna run a 'Tiger King' promotion on my book."
The Netflix docuseries put a spotlight on Tampa’s Big Cat Rescue, and you’re probably just as shocked to see a 21-year-old story about Lewis—who co-owned Big Cat Rescue with his wife Carole at the time of his disappearance, which remains unsolved today—on the cover of this week’s Creative Loafing Tampa Bay.
Putting an old story on a new issue is an odd move, but what about our daily lives isn’t weird these days? The longer I thought about it, the more it made sense to bring this one back from the archives for a throwback cover. If you don’t try something new or off the wall right now, then are you really trying at all?
Plus, so much of the country is obsessed with “Tiger King,” and it shows in our web traffic. The cover—designed in ‘99 by Scott Allison and recaptured this week by Todd Bates and Orlando Weekly designer Daniel Rodriguez—screams “alt-weekly.” The story itself speaks to what an alt-weekly was two decades ago and what it is now (side note: visit cltampa.com to see the old adverts).
“I don’t remember the Times covering it the way the Planet did,” Waddell said. “And that’s what was great about working at an alt-weekly. We were allowed and encouraged to explore stories in a way the mainstream paper wouldn’t.”
And while both CL and the Times are adjusting to the realities of a post-coronavirus news ecosystem, there will always be stark differences between our publications (CL’s role as an ombudsman to the vaunted daily being one of the most important; the fact that they still have 100 journalists in their newsroom to our two full-time editorial staffers is a big one, too.) I, for a plethora of reasons, can’t imagine life in a city without an alt-weekly—but those are for another day.
The 1999 story in the following pages is a fun long read. And anyone who’s watched the entire “Tiger King” series can see how its producers used Waddell’s piece as a guide for the timeline of their series, which Waddell said sadly sensationalizes the storyline and trades the real issue—the overabundance of wild animals in captivity by private owners—in for the drama between Oklahoma zookeeper Joe Exotic and Carole Baskin from Big Cat Rescue (Baskin more or less agrees).
“Frankly, I don't know what happened to him. Nobody knows what happened to him, so it is unfair to try to make somebody look like they committed a crime when there's no real evidence,” Waddell said.
In ‘99, the Weekly Planet staff consisted of no less than a dozen editorial staffers, more than half a dozen art & production team members, seven administrative employees and close to two dozen bodies working on advertising on classifieds (by comparison, CL’s post-coronavirus skeleton crew has five people on it, including two editorial staffers). Our publisher James Howard, who was an account executive back then, said, “The operation is so much different, it really is like comparing apples to tennis balls.”
That support meant Waddell had time to write her cover stories, and the Cat Man piece was no different—in fact, she spent at least “a couple months” on it.. She chased people around Easy Street and found several sources there, but she was virtually stonewalled by any of Don Lewis’ family. The sheriff couldn’t speak on the record about the still-open investigation, but did help where it could. She spoke to Carole Lewis several times during her research, but Waddell isn’t quite sure what happened to one of Carole’s diaries, which was given to her by an Easy Street employee. The piece was edited over and again, and even checked by the Planet’s lawyers.
“We worked really hard to make the story balanced,” Waddell said. But she still wouldn’t have done it differently if she knew how the “Tiger King” docuseries would bring all of this to popular culture.
“I did the best job that I could do at that time,” Waddell said. “This guy, Joe Exotic, wasn’t even in the picture at this time, and Carol was already having disagreements with Don about selling cats, but she hadn't made you know the full transformation into being an animal rights activist yet.”
So for now, she’s working on different short stories and gathering material for a project that still doesn’t have a home. She’s also got an online business selling vintage items.
And don’t hold your breath for a follow up.
“I don’t wanna do a book on Carole,” Waddell told CL. “I would rather be doing a book on something more serious.”
So now we all get to escape reality, revisit this story and be reminded of how weird Florida really is.
“[Don] was just a very colorful character,” Waddell said. “At the time, I had not lived in Florida that long. The idea of people having these kinds of animals was very new to me and very shocking.”
Two decades later, the Cat Man story still kind of shocks just the same.
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This article appears in Apr 23-29, 2020.