People like Daniel P. Mannix

Daniel Pratt Mannix IV (October 27, 1911 – January 29, 1997) was an American writer, journalist, photographer, sideshow performer, stage magician, animal trainer, and filmmaker. His best-known works are the 1958 book Those About to Die, which remained in continuous print for three decades and became the basis for the Ridley Scott movie Gladiator; and the 1967 novel The Fox and the Hound which in 1981 was adapted into an animated film by Walt Disney Productions.

The Mannix family had a long history of service in the United States Navy, and Mannix' father, Daniel P. Mannix, III, was an American naval officer. His mother would often join her husband on his postings, and the Mannix children would stay at their grandparents' farm outside Philadelphia. It was there that Mannix began to keep and raise various wild animals. In time, the cost of feeding them led him to write his first book, The Back-Yard Zoo. Following family tradition, Mannix enrolled in the U.S. Naval Academy in 1930, but left the next year, moving to the University of Pennsylvania and earning a degree in journalism instead of zoology.