Animals: Mann’s Ark

In 1925 William M. Mann, entomologist of the Department of Agriculture, was made director of Washington’s National Zoological Park. Dr. Mann is now 51, slight and dark. He also has thin hair and a holdover passion for ants. When he is not hunting ants in his spare hours, he is inclined to read anything from detective stories to incunabula. Fond also of the human animal, he loves parties and has been known to seat a distinguished scientist at dinner next to a circus freak. Director Mann’s system of running his zoo is one of complete democracy. He insists that when he first arrived the head keeper set him to cleaning out cuspidors.

A year after he took charge, Dr. Mann talked Walter P. Chrysler out of enough money to send a Smithsonian-Chrysler expedition to Africa to get animals. In 1931 he again took his sloppy clothes and battered hat abroad, that time to British Guiana where he hacked into the interior and hacked out again with 400 excellent specimens. Today he has nearly 4,600 specimens in the 175 wooded acres of his zoo, rated one of the leading parks in the U. S., and within a fortnight he expects to have a 30% increase in his family. For last January peregrinating Director Mann set out for the East Indies, sponsored by the Smithsonian and the National Geographic Society. Among collectors’ items he particularly hoped to pick up were some giraffes for the delight of younger zoo customers, and a husband for Susie, his orangutan. While he was gone the WPA promised to rebuild and enlarge his zoo for his new acquisitions.

Last week as the 5,299-ton British freighter Silverash wallowed down the Atlantic Coast to New York harbor, gleeful Director Mann exhibited to reporters who had been sent to meet him at Halifax one of the biggest arkfuls of animal life ever to reach U. S. shores. From the time they boarded the Silverash at Singapore he and five assistants had been busy, forking hay for their ruminants, feeding fresh eggs to snakes, dangling frozen fish before crocodiles who had to be deluded into thinking they were catching them. By a triumph of nursing and nourishing they brought back alive 1,500 beasts of the field, forest and jungle, best of all 19 birds of paradise, two blue sheep, a Sumatran wild dog, four giraffes from the Sudan, and for Susie an eligible young husband named Wrestler who took delight in shaking hands.