Rudy Mancke: A Natural History

NOTE: This is story was published in The State Jan. 13, 2002

The first thing you need to know about Rudy Mancke is he’s incapable of driving past a stinky hunk of roadkill.

Possessed by little-boy wonder and scientific curiosity, he has to stop. He examines the carcass. Usually, he picks it up, stuffs it in a pillowcase and throws it in his vehicle.

Ask anybody who has spent time with Mancke to pass along a story about him, and they tell a tale of roadkill.

“Riding in a van with Rudy is like riding in a rolling garbage truck,” said Beryl Dakers, who was co-host with Mancke for the first seven seasons of “NatureScene” on S.C. Educational Television. “Not because he’s messy, but because he picks up animals off the road.”

“NatureScene,” one of South Carolina’s most famous exports, has filmed the last of its 23 seasons. The last shows will be broadcast this year, and the program will live on in reruns. But the “NatureScene” crew no longer will stop along God-forsaken roads to pick up critters, dead or alive.

Dakers recalled a trip back from the Lowcountry town of Round O with a live copperhead hissing inside a pillowcase and “a very old, very dead loggerhead turtle” in the back seat.

Mancke took many of the carcasses home to examine in his backyard shop. His wife, Ellen, eventually ceded a small portion of the family freezer as a morgue for smaller creatures such as birds, spiders and scorpions.

“It’s my fault,” she said. “We grew up together in Spartanburg, so I knew what I was getting into.”

At least life with South Carolina’s most famous naturalist is never boring. What the rest of the world views as a vacant lot, he sees as an adventure.

That’s what made “NatureScene” so successful. The S.C. ETV show started as a 30-minute field trip for South Carolinians. At its peak, it was shown in more than 200 markets in the United States and Canada.

But Mancke will begin communicating on a more intimate level this month in his new job as an instructor at the University of South Carolina.

Students better not count on field trips to spectacular locales. Two of the “NatureScene” shows Mancke is most proud of were filmed along a power-line right of way and in a seemingly barren downtown lot.

Dakers remembers asking Mancke, “Why are we here?” on the vacant-lot shoot. Thirty minutes of walking and talking later, she understood everything about the plants and creatures found in that lot, and Mancke hadn’t even made it all the way across.

A TEAM EFFORT

The second thing you need to know about Mancke is he can steer every question about the show back to his “NatureScene” co-workers or his parents or his teachers.

In 23 years of filming “NatureScene,” he has earned loads of recognition, even adulation. But you get the impression he’d trade each compliment for a new piece of roadkill.

“I honestly and genuinely feel I’m as fortunate as any person has ever been,” said Mancke, 56, of the long run of “NatureScene.” “I had the greatest support. I had the most help. And I’ve had nothing to do with it.”

His co-workers chuckle at his reluctance to take credit. They know the show wouldn’t have become a national success without Mancke, without his encyclopedic knowledge and never-ending excitement about the outdoors.

Allen Sharpe, director and videographer for “NatureScene” from the beginning, recalled one of Mancke’s first appearances on an ETV program in the mid-1970s. He accompanied Mancke to Shealy’s Pond in Lexington County to film a seven-minute segment for an anthology-type show. It didn’t work out that way.

“It was supposed to be seven minutes, but it ended up being 14,” Sharpe said. “I came back and told Beryl, ‘This guy is great. All you’ve got to do is turn him on and let him talk.’”

After “NatureScene” expanded to a national audience in the mid-1980s, others started to notice Mancke’s talent. Once, a national entity tried to hire him away from S.C. ETV.

“I thought about it for about this long,” Mancke said, holding his thumb and forefinger less than an inch apart. The “NatureScene” family held more sway than the lure of more money or fame.

The end of “NatureScene” doesn’t mean the plug has been pulled on Mancke. He’s making a move he has dreamed of for years. On Tuesday, he starts teaching in the USC School of the Environment. SCANA and the V. Kann Rasmussen Foundation have contributed more than $500,000 to fund the position for four years.

Mancke’s spring class in natural history filled quickly. He hopes to pass along his enthusiasm for nature not only to scientists, but also to future accountants, engineers and, especially, teachers.

“I hope to bring some other people along who have the views (‘NatureScene’) has,” he said.

USC approached Mancke a year earlier about the job. He turned them down, saying the timing wasn’t right. This year, the three principal players in “NatureScene” - Mancke, Sharpe and host Jim Welch - agreed it was time to stop.

Mancke will squeeze in a few specials for S.C. ETV and will continue his morning “Nature Notes” on S.C. Educational Radio, but there’s no denying he has started a new phase in his life.

CHILDHOOD WONDER

The third thing you need to know about Mancke is that he grew up in Spartanburg, the oldest of four children of Rudy Sr. and Lera Mancke.

The four siblings, three of them boys, spent many of their days in the woods near their home. “We had two wonderful parents who encouraged us to get out and discover,” said his sister, Cathy Mancke Tisdale.

His interest in nature was first piqued by his grandmother’s fascination with medicinal and edible plants. He discovered the county library and began to study about the natural world.

“I started with snakes, and when I found out I knew more about snakes than adults, that made me feel powerful,” Mancke said. “Knowledge is power.”

Mancke majored in pre-med at Wofford. “My parents expected me to be a general surgeon,” he said. “I used to open up dead animals on the side of the road. The blood never bothered me.”

But an inspiring geology professor, John Harrington, made him second-guess his choice of a major. “He said, ‘There are going to be plenty of good surgeons, but there aren’t going to be many good naturalists,’” Mancke said.

After Wofford, he went to graduate school at USC. He wanted to work for the state parks agency or the wildlife department as a naturalist, but they didn’t have those types of positions back then. He taught school for a while before landing the job as the first curator of natural history for the State Museum in 1975.

“I found a job that paid me as a naturalist,” he said. “That was something I never thought I would find.”

His office was next to the S.C. ETV offices. That led to what became the perfect marriage.

His early appearances on other S.C. ETV shows were popular, prompting ETV to give Mancke a program of his own.

The ETV executives might have wondered about that decision when they found out the first program would focus on a standard power-line right of way.

Mancke knew what he was doing. Many plants and critters thrive at a break in the forest a power line provides.

“It was the perfect way to do the first show,” Mancke said. “It wasn’t glamorous, but the things going on there were great.”

Mancke’s voiceovers, and conversations with Dakers or Welch (who became co-host when the show went national in 1985), gave the 300-plus shows a mood anyone can appreciate. “You get the impression (the hosts) are sitting there in an office drinking coffee,” Mancke said.

“Everybody’s a naturalist,” Mancke said. “They like to take walks and see what they can see.”

WALKS IN THE WOODS

The fourth thing you need to know about Mancke is that he has an incredible store of knowledge, but he isn’t quite as all-knowing as it seems in the shows.

The team spends about a day and a half scouting an area before a shoot. If Mancke sees something he’s not sure about, he looks it up before the shooting.

But anyone who’s been on one of the thousands of nature walks Mancke has led in South Carolina knows he seldom needs those guidebooks.

“He’s amazing,” said Martha Bogle, superintendent at Congaree Swamp National Monument. “He could talk for two hours standing in one spot and see stuff that 99.9 percent of the population wouldn’t notice.”

Nearly every park or natural area in the state has asked Mancke to help publicize it by leading walks. He seldom turns any down and often comes back for more. He’s a regular at Congaree Swamp.

“When he’s here, he’s like the Pied Piper,” Bogle said. “Everyone wants to follow him. His walks are announced, and they are filled up within days. People, even if they don’t get a reservation, come down and hope to tag along.”

His new duties should allow for more guided nature walks since he won’t be out of the state so much on shoots.

Amazingly, in 23 years of doing “NatureScene,” nobody has written to tell him he misidentified something, Mancke said. The only two missives claiming an error have dealt with the age of the Earth, which is debatable.

Through the years, others in the television industry have called to ask about “the secrets” behind the making of “NatureScene.”

“They say, ‘How many cameras do you use?’” Mancke said. “I say, ‘One.’ There’s a pregnant pause and you know they’re thinking, ‘He’s lying. Why won’t he tell me?’

“Then they ask, ‘Do you send a scout team ahead?’ I say ‘No.’ There’s another pregnant pause. ‘Do you write a script?’ ‘No.’ And there’s another pregnant pause. They don’t believe it.”

“NatureScene” is minimalist. One camera following two guys talking about whatever they see. The team usually includes an engineer and a production coordinator. Several people have handled those positions over the years, but the major roles have been filled for the past 16 years by Mancke, Sharpe and Welch.

They have become solid friends. “We do trust each other with our lives,” Mancke said.

MAKING CONNECTIONS

The fifth thing you need to know about Mancke is that he wanted to name his daughter Ruellia.

It’s the name of a petunia-like flower that grew in the family’s back yard, and it combined the names of Rudy and Ellen.

Ellen was ready to give in, but “my mother had a fit, and his mother had a fit,” she said. Mancke finally accepted Amanda as an alternative. She didn’t get the scientific name, but she inherited the scientific bent. Mandy Mancke, 25, is in graduate school at George Washington University, where she studies forensic science.

The family’s other child, 27-year-old Will, works at a Columbia law firm. He said having a father who found something incredible every time they took a walk was great. He didn’t even mind that science teachers expected him to be a whiz.

The family tagged along on a “NatureScene” trip only once, long ago on a shoot in North Carolina. Ellen Mancke said she and the kids had fun, but Rudy was miserable. “He felt guilty that he had to work and couldn’t do things with us,” she said.

Ellen Mancke stayed home with the kids when they were young and later worked as a librarian at George I. Pair Elementary School. She said Mancke’s long absences when “NatureScene” went on the road weren’t easy on the family, but he called every night. “When our daughter’s goldfish died, he was on the phone with her that night from California,” she said.

The longest separation was for a three-week trip to Russia in 1993. It’s a good thing the family didn’t tag along that time, because everything that could go wrong did. Plane connections, money conversion, ground transportation - all were disasters.

But the image that sticks with the “NatureScene” crew is the reaction of their Russian guide, after Mancke spent hours pointing out interesting plants and creatures in a park near the guide’s home.

“This guy turns around to me, and he’s crying,” Mancke said. “He said, ‘I’ve walked through this park all my life, and I’ve never seen these things.’”

And that tells you all you need to know about Rudy Mancke. He can bring a man to tears by making him really see things he’d only looked at before.