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STYLE SAVE THE RHINO!

A Fort Worth millionaire’s wild kingdom
By Ann Booker |

JUST SOUTH of Glen Rose, Texas, lies a lit-tle bit of Africa. It’s called Waterfall Ranch, but it’s anything but an ordinary cow ranch. Instead of longhorns or herefords, marketing-execu-tive-turned-rancher Tom Mantzel raises and protects some of the most exotic animals in the world. When Mantzel isn’t out wheeling and dealing in his Fort Worth office, he’s at the ranch hosting sightseers such as novelist James Michener and TV’s Marlin Perkins or throw-ing Save the Rhino costume parties in an effort to bring endangered rhinos to Texas.

Mantzel is a sophisticated country boy with a turnip-wagon drawl who would just as like-ly glad-hand the cafe waitress as the multimil-lion-dollar executive. Forget his Fort Worth country club house, his 1,500-acre exotic animal ranch and his brown Mercedes 450 SL. Mantzel’s just a good ol’ boy.

“He’s a good ol’ boy who started with nothing,” says Fort Worth resident Sherry Lloyd, who met Mantzel at TCU 17 years ago. “Everything he’s got, he made. In college, he told us he was going to be a successful businessman. None of us were surprised that Tommy was successful. Yet with all his success, he’s still just a down-to-earth good ol’ guy.”

Mantzel isn’t surprised about his success, but he shrugs off talk of money. “You can just put so much food in your stomach,” he says. “You can only wear one suit at a time, but it’s the freedom, coupled with the thrill of making a dollar. It’s all relative. There’s an absolute turn-on that money can’t buy, and that’s a two-inch rainfall at the ranch in the middle of August. To be down there when the thunder and lightning build and you can smell the ozone in the air, with the water dripping off the cedars and the oak trees-there’s a certain aura that you can’t capture. It’s something that money can’t buy.”

Then there are his exotic animals-those rare species whose days may be numbered in their native habitat. The African addax and scimitar-horned oryx from the Sahara Desert are two of his endangered species. Others include African sable antelope, gemsbok and the South African oryx, the Arabian ibex and, from Africa, Grevy’s zebra and waterbuck antelope.

Mantzel’s work with endangered animals and with the Species Survival Project (SSP) has earned him blurbs in Newsweek and Reader’s Digest as well as spots on Dallas’ WFAA-TV and KXAS-TV. Good Morning America plans to herald the arrival of the black rhinos that are scheduled to arrive at Waterfall sometime this fall or early spring.

Part of Mantzel’s work with the SSP involves the International Species Inventory System (ISIS). Through ISIS, a record of each animal is kept in a worldwide genetic pool in Minneapolis. Mantzel says, “If a zoo in Hamburg would like a male animal, they have their own stud book, and they know which males and females are related in the United States. What we’re doing is eliminating dilution of the genetic material that we have to work with.” He recently borrowed “Goblin,” a Grevy’s zebra from the Dallas Marsalis Zoo to introduce new genetic material to his herd. “The Grevy’s zebra is considered to be the most beautiful of the zebras,” Mantzel says. “In Northern Kenya, they are being wiped out. Their future in the wild is doomed.” During the early Seventies, he says, about 10,000 Grevys lived in the wilds of Africa. He estimates that only 800 exist today in Africa and about 100 in the United States. Mantzel, who also has been interviewed for an upcoming article in National Geographic about his work with the SSP, says that he finds wild-game ranching to be fascinating and unusual, but no more so than his regular job.

When Mantzel isn’t riding the range in his Levi’s, he’s dressed to the hilt, rustling business for Geo-Science. From its offices on the west side of Fort Worth, where he serves as vice president of marketing, Geo interprets satellite data for oil, gas and mineral exploration in a mode that Mantzel calls revolutionary. “Ten years from now,” he says, “it will be commonly accepted as one of the key exploration tools for oil and most mineral exploration.” The use of satellite-based information evolved after the United States began using satellites to determine the wheat yield in Third World countries, he says. “It’s amazing what we can do with it. We use computers to enhance data that comes from 540 miles above the earth. It’s a very stimulating business. It fits my crazy lifestyle.”

Mantzel is a hustler who rarely sits still. ’ It’s not part of my lifestyle,” he says. “I have a fear of being put in a pine box not having accomplished something with my life-to plow back in a little more than I was given.” He denies being a super-salesman. “If I had to typify my marketing ability, it would be tenacity. I bulldog ’em. I wouldn’t say I’m rough-hewn, but I’m no smooth, glib sales-type. I like to think I’m pleasantly persistent.”

But there’s nothing that Mantzel enjoys more than showing off Waterfall Ranch to visitors. No one looks the part of the handsome, rancher-bachelor more than Mantzel, who is 36 years old, 6-foot-4, blue-eyed and tanned. He’s been involved in the raising of rare and endangered animals since he bought a parcel of 420 acres in Somervell County 10 years ago.

As he added adjoining acreage, he accumulated more than 700 animals. Fort Worth’s zoo director, Elvie Turner, says that Waterfall Ranch was chosen as the first U.S. game ranch to work with the SSP, which is sponsored by the American Association of Zoological Parks and Aquariums. Mantzel, she says, has worked energetically to increase his herds. He’s also pouring big money into the program.

Through three Save the Rhino parties at Dallas, San Antonio and Waterfall Ranch, Mantzel has raised $115,000 to bring six endangered black rhinos to his ranch. Last year, 350 guests paid $100 each to hobnob in jungle costumes at his latest Save the Rhino party, while exotic animals roamed nearby, staring at the equally exotic guests. Highlighting the shindig was a bus that carried party-goers from Dallas to the ranch. Equipped with a loud speaker, a Naughahyde tail and papier-mǎché rhino horns, the bus rambled through the ranch bellowing like a rhino in mating season.

As Mantzel’s herds increased, so did the number of species. He has 14 species, some of which are classified as common exotics (or Texotics because there are more in Texas now than in their native lands). The Texotics include Blackbuck antelope and axis deer from India, a European red stag and fallow deer, Man-churian sika deer and aoudad sheep, which are native to northwest Africa.

According to friends, Mantzel is far too modest. Rick Roark, an old TCU buddy, says, “If you parachuted Mantzel into the middle of the Swahilis, he’d have a bridge game organized in five minutes. He’s such a good salesman because he’s so good at strokes-at making people feel good about themselves. It’s genuine. You have to go a long way to find someone who doesn’t like Tom. He’s extraordinarily honorable in his negotiations.”

Mantzel credits much of his success to his upbringing. “We had patches on our patches,” he says. Born in Dallas, Mantzel was reared in Austin by a geologist lather and a mother, Lois, who is as feisty as Tom. “I grew up in an environment where my mother was the driving force behind the family,” Mantzel says. “She was a scrapper and extremely intelligent. Ours was a classic example of being brought up in a can-do environment. If you grow up in an atmosphere where you have to scrap for everything, the first time you have a problem you’re either going to develop a track record of handling those problems or you’re going to sit on them. It’s a function of throwing mud on the barn door.” Manuel’s mother had her own homespun philosophy. One time, Mantzel, who was always into some sort of mischief, got into a jam with another youngster who purportedly had a bad reputation. Lois told him, “Son, if you mix with slop, the pigs will eat you.”

By the time Mantzel was in the third or fourth grade, he had financed his first venture into animals by selling doughnuts door-to-door after school for a family friend. “This lady would pick me up, and I’d have this wire basket with a canvas strap filled with doughnuts,” he says. “For every sack I sold, I got a nickel and if I sold all of them, the final sack was either mine to eat or sell. Obviously, I would sell it. I’d get two or three weeks’ revenue saved, and I’d promptly go down and spend it on tropical fish. I was nuts about tropical fish.”

To finance his tuition at TCU, Mantzel sold Cutco knives, cars, light bulbs and doughnuts. According to Lloyd, “He not only sold doughnuts, he had other people selling doughnuts for him. He’s the best salesman on the face of the earth. You could have a junk auto in your driveway for sale, and he’d sell it back to you.”

Mantzel and Roark lived in adjoining fraternity houses; Mantzel always had something going from putting on a “little ol” country boy from La Grange act” in hopes of impressing incoming freshmen women to pretending to be Harold La Bashsh, making sure headwaiters pronounced the name La Bash-shh. Standard equipment for Tom’s car (an old ’63 Buick built like a cabin cruiser) was a fire extinguisher used to spray passing cars, Roark says.

Mantzel graduated from TCU in 1969 with a business degree, then went to work selling custom-made suits for Tom James Co. Roark, now an executive vice president with the company who started selling suits with Mantzel, says, “We were out there pioneering a brand-new concept, a brand-new product.” Mantzel was so hot, he says, “We had to follow him with a fire extinguisher. He was burning ’em up.”

The two were cohorts in comedic crime, Mantzel says. “Rick and I were always up to no good. There were some phone booths across the street from Tom James, next to the Convention Center. I don’t know how it hit me, but one day, I went across the street and got the number of the phone booth.” Mantzel and Roark would watch from inside the store and, when someone passed the booth, they’d make a phone call. The unsuspecting passerby who answered the phone would receive a request usually having to do with a car parked at the curb by the booth. “We’d say, ’Sir, I’m awfully sorry to bother you, but I’m in an office building four blocks away. I parked that blue Ford right there by the phone booth. I’ve had a slow leak in my right rear tire. I’d hate to come down in this heat and find it flat. Would you do me a favor and see if it’s flat?’ ” The innocent victim would kick the tires, roll the windows up or down or check under the hood while they watched from the store across the street. Other times, Mantzel and Roark would stand in the store window and freeze, pretending to be mannequins. When someone would stop to look, they’d wink.

In those days, Roark and Mantzel lived in an apartment near TCU. Roark owned a portable microphone that could be picked up on FM band radio within a two-mile radius. One day, Mantzel said. “Rick, there’s no telling what the potential is for this.” That set the idea and, for five years, Roark and Mantzel “broadcast” phony programs for unsuspecting friends whom they would con into listening.

About a year after Mantzel went to work for James, he approached Dick Lowe, president of American Quasar Petroleum, to sell him some of his suits. Lowe says that Mantzel was down-right pesky: “The philosophy of the company was that businessmen were too busy to shop, so the salesmen would go to their offices. He kept coming up, and I told him, ’I don’t want any of your damn suits.’ One day he called and asked me what time I was going home. I told him I didn’t know-somewhere between 5 and 7 p.m. He said he’d come up at 5 and wait for me, that he was going to walk me to my car and show me his samples. He sold me two suits on the way to the car, and I told him, ’You ought to be working for us selling our drilling programs.’ A week later, Mantzel was back at Lowe’s office ready to go to work. Within a year, he was the top salesman in the company, a position he held for two or three years. “Mantzel is intense, energetic, enthusiastic, high-strung and impatient, but really a good guy,” Lowe says.

Mantzel says that Lowe had a tremendous impact on his life. “Dick is a fantastic individual, and I like the guy because he is extremely optimistic. He doesn’t have any negative thoughts, and I gravitate to people like that.” When it came to Lowe, Mantzel says, “I pestered the daylights out of him. I wouldn’t take no for an answer, which is another trait of mine that is both good and bad. Long after others have given up on business deals and relationships, I’m still there.” Mantzel stayed with American Quasar for 11 years. When his job at Quasar was phased out, he grabbed the carrot that Geo-Service dangled in front of him.

Mantzel may have once donned a tux for a debutante whirl and he may live across the street from the prestigious Colonial Country Club with a dog named Cat, but the country club circuit is not his bag. He was married briefly during the mid-Seventies, and other than wining and dining in some of his favorite haunts in Dallas several nights a week, his main love is Waterfall Ranch (the only waterfall is a 6-foot stream that feeds into the natural, spring-fed swimming pool). While the deer and the antelope roam, Mantzel’s favorite weekend activity is floating on a rubber raft and drinking beer.

In addition to his foreman, Casey Clark, and Clark’s wife, Leslie, Mantzel’s steady companions at the ranch are his dogs, a cocker spaniel named Polly and a Brittany spaniel named Daisy. “If it weren’t for those little dogs,” Mantzel says, “I’d be under a tombstone somewhere.”

Polly and Daisy once rescued Mantzel when he had a run-in with an oryx. (An oryx is a big, ornery-looking animal with long, ribbed, sa-berlike horns; it’s one of the three wild animals capable of killing a lion.) One day, Mantzel was in a pasture with Polly and Daisy when the oryx suddenly lowered its horns and charged. “I grabbed the base of his horns and did a little stutter-step backward,” Mantzel says. “I was fighting for my life.” On the third charge, the oryx connected, tearing a saucer-sized hole in Mantzel’s upper thigh, with the tip of the horn exiting from his back.

“The next thing I knew,” Mantzel says, “I was laying on the ground and my dogs had hold of his hind legs.” When the oryx turned to look at the dogs, Mantzel shimmied up a thorny tree where he hung for an hour. Later, while the oryx temporarily eyed the dogs, Mantzel dragged himself over a fence. He spent the next week in the hospital. His wounds eventually healed, but the oryx died.

“Everybody kids me that he died from lead poisoning,” Mantzel says. Lloyd, who Mantzel says rarely misses an opportunity to needle him, sneaked into intensive care and snapped a picture of the battered Mantzel. The next Christmas, the photo appeared as a mural-sized greeting card on Mantzel’s office wall with the message, “Tom, after a hard night with one of his blondes.” Mantzel says, “Everybody in the company gave me hell.”

Weekends at the ranch are often filled with the comings and goings of visitors hoping to see the wild animals. Some of Mantzel’s most popular not-so-wild beasts include a mammoth European red stag named Little Feller; a Grevy’s zebra named Bentley, which lets visitors scratch its nose, and a bottle-raised -oryx that follows Mantzel around in Mantzel’s yellow jeep and nuzzles visitors in the ear.

Mantzel often hosts groups of school children and allows others to entertain at the ranch. Sherry Lloyd, who was responsible for entertaining a group of visiting foreign gymnasts, prevailed on Mantzel to allow her to holda Texas-style wing-ding at the ranch. She says,”Not only did Mantzel have the roads graded,he had friends from Glen Rose bring theirBlazers to take the visitors around to see hisanimals. When they were ready to board thebus, he got on each bus, took off his hat, toldthem thank you for coming and if they wereever in the United States again, to come toTexas to see him. The next morning, he sent anote and a gift to all the countries thanking thegymnasts for coming to his ranch. He does thelittle extra things that make Mantzel, Mantzel. That wasn’t going to help his business.That wasn’t going to help him. That’s just theway he is. That’s what really makes himspecial.”

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