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Meet Fat Albert. Fat Albert is an alligator who used to live in a lake on the grounds of Kennedy Space Center, Florida, which is part of the Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge. I was working on the cable crew at the time (mid 1970s), and we had a repeater station near Fat Albert's lake, so any time we had to visit the repeater station we would be sure to take some bread or marshmallows to feed to Fat Albert (don't ask me why, alligators just seem to love bread and marshmallows). I was also a photographer for the company newspaper, so I had a permit that allowed me to carry a camera wherever I went on KSC.
At the time, it was technically against the rules to feed the alligators at KSC, because it was part of the Wildlife Refuge. It was thought that the alligators would lose their fear of humans and become dangerous (it is now illegal to feed alligators anywhere in the state of Florida). But, in those days, we all did it and no one seemed to mind. There was even a small alligator living in the pond in front of KSC Headquarters that tourists could feed.
But Fat Albert was no small alligator! Fat Albert was the biggest alligator any of us had ever seen. And he did lose his fear of man. Whenever we visited his lake to feed him, we would call and splash the water with our hands to get his attention and he would come, from anywhere in the lake. He would climb right up out of the water onto the shore to get his bread and marshmallows.
One day NASA decided they wanted to use Fat Albert's lake for astronaut rescue training, so they captured Fat Albert and shipped him off to Busch Gardens in Tampa where he became, at fourteen feet two inches long, the largest alligator in captivity (and they changed his name to "Big Al" supposedly because a famous comedian already had a character known as Fat Albert).
To the best of my knowledge, these are the only photos that exist of Fat Albert in the wild:







