Skeleton of gator to go on display

WAYCROSS, Ga. -- The most famous resident of Okefenokee Swamp Park -- an alligator that attracted the stares of tourists for decades -- will soon be immortalized nearly a year after his death.

The skeleton of Oscar is being assembled and will be put on display like a museum dinosaur. The 14-foot, 1,000-pound alligator had roamed the swamp from the time the park opened in 1946.

The display also will include what park officials found in Oscar's belly -- including a plastic dog collar, a dog's tag, a penny and the top section of a flagpole.

"Some people think he's a statue," a tour guide, Danny Rowe, said of Oscar in 1996. "I tell people he's real, but I don't get paid enough to show them he's real."

The Okefenokee is a 438,000-acre National Wildlife Refuge in southeastern Georgia that attracts 350,000 to 400,000 visitors a year. During the first years of the park's operation, alligator wrestling was a popular attraction, park officials have said. That ended in the mid-1950s when, it is said, one of the gators rolled over on a park manager and broke the man's arm.

The other famous Okefenokee alligator is fictional: a cigar-smoking critter named Albert in the late Walt Kelly's long-running comic strip, Pogo.