Frank Buck was born on March 17, 1884 in Gainesville, Texas, one of the four children of Howard D. and Ada (Sites) Buck. Howard Buck was a wagon-yard operator, and when Frank was three years old the family moved to Dallas, where the elder Buck worked in the local agency of the Studebaker wagon and carriage company.
Leaving school after the seventh grade, Frank spent a knockabout youth, with intervals as a cowboy, a carnival concessionaire, and a freight-train vagabond.
Through his wife's connections Frank Buck became assistant to the owner of the Western Vaudeville Managers Association and Western representative of the New York Telegraph, a theatrical and sports daily. In 1911, having separated from his wife (they were divorced in 1916), Buck traveled to Bahia, Brazil, where he purchased a large collection of tropical birds which he subsequently sold, at a considerable profit, to zoos and dealers in New York City.
When a second Brazilian bird trip--this one terminating in London--proved equally lucrative, Buck began to recognize the commercial potential of what had hitherto been an avocation. Establishing his headquarters in Singapore, he soon became a major supplier of Asian fauna to zoos, circuses, and exhibitors in the United States. Among his customers were the New York Zoological Park; the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago; the Ringling Brothers, Barnum & Bailey circus; and the Al G. Barnes touring wild-animal show. Only infrequently did Buck actually participate in the capture of his specimens; his more usual method was to purchase them from dealers in Singapore, Calcutta, or other major centers.
By the end of the 1920's, in more than forty Pacific crossings, he had brought to the United States thousands of animals, including thirty-nine elephants, sixty tigers, sixty-two leopards, and fifty-two orangutans. In 1928 Buck married Muriel Reilly (Riley); they had one daughter, Barbara Muriel. Frank Buck's greatest talent was for publicity. As early as 1915 he had worked as public-relations director for the amusement zone of the San Francisco exposition and, briefly, for the Mack Sennett motion picture company in Hollywood.
In the 1930's, his business hard hit by the depression, he turned this promotional gift to good advantage, parlaying what had been a colorful but hardly remarkable career into a reputation of national proportions. In a series of adventure books written with various collaborators--beginning with the best-seller Bring 'em Back Alive (1930) and continuing through Wild Cargo (1932), Fang and Claw (1935), On the Jungle Trails (1937), and Animals Are Like That! --Buck infused with maximum dramatic interest the incidents and escapades of his life. The same formula proved effective in several shorter books, magazine articles, lectures, radio talks, and in the six wild-animal movies he produced and appeared in, which included three based on his own books.
In 1937-1938 he toured with the Ringling circus, and in 1939-1940 he exhibited at the New York World's Fair. For several years he was also the impresario of Jungle Land, a wild-animal zoo in Amityville, Long Island. The image of the intrepid explorer and trapper was furthered by his strong and rugged features, his black moustache, and a pith helmet which he invariably wore in publicity photographs. By the time of World War II, Frank - "Bring 'em Back Alive" - Buck had become a household name, familiar to adults and a host of youthful admirers.
Buck moved in the late 1940's from New York to San Angelo, Texas. He was sixty-six when he died of a lung ailment at the Texas Medical Center in Houston.
By late 1949 and early 1950, he had many projects in the works but his health was failing. Frank died March 26, 1950, in Houston, Texas, from lung cancer, caused during his decades of smoking.
Over the decades Frank Buck handled over 500 different mammals and 100, 000 birds. He always perfected the traps and snares in ways that prevented injury to the animals he caught. He is also remebered as a contributor to the "Saturday Evening Post" and "Colliers", and for some time he had a radio program, appeared with "Ringling Brothers, Barnum & Bailey Circus", and was a popular subject of comic books. He was president of Frank Buck Enterprises, Incorporated, and Jungleland, Incorporated, and produced several motion pictures, including "Bring 'Em Back Alive" (1932), "Wild Cargo" (1934), and "Fang and Claw" (1935), (made from his books), and "Jungle Menace", "Jungle Cavalcade" (1941), "Jacaré" (1942) aka "Jacaré, Killer of the Amazon", "Tiger Fangs" (1943) and "Africa Screams" (1949) aka "Abbott and Costello in Africa". Frank's name and image were used in many commercials and advertisements. An example: "Frank Buck has smoked his way around the globe with Camels. " Many monkeys captured by Buck were used for experiments that led to the defeat of polio. That was his contribution to medicine. The Zoo in Gainesville, Texas, was named in his honor in 1954. As of March 2008, it also acquired from the Buck family material collected by Frank Buck and now set up as a permanent exhibit on the life and times.
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Buck always accompanied his animals on shipboard to America to be sure they were well treated, and refused to sell to anyone who did not have an impeccable reputation for animal care. He believed in wildlife and conservation animals for zoos, for circuses or for side shows.
Quotations:
He did, however, claim that "while acting as temporary director of the San Diego Zoo", he had invented a method of force-feeding snakes, the means "by which captive pythons are mainly fed today. "
Following the end of World War II, Buck returned to animal collecting, telling The New Yorker "You dig the same old-fashioned pits and use the same old-fashioned knives and come back with the same old-fashioned tigers. "
Buck was a member of the Zoological Society of San Diego.
In 1901, while working as a bellhop in Chicago, he married Lillie West (known professionally as Amy Leslie), a Chicago Daily News drama critic and former light-opera star who was twenty-nine years his senior. In 1928 Buck married Muriel Reilly (Riley); they had one daughter, Barbara Muriel.
1861–194
1879–1955
1848–1944
Sultan Ibrahim of Johor was a good friend of Buck's and frequently assisted him in his animal collecting endeavors
