Naturalist focuses on world beyond the classroom

Deep in the back of the Hammond School campus – on the edge of a 70-acre wooded area known as South Campus – sits a 30-by-30 log cabin seemingly from another century.

“I’m cooking some old bones today,” says Hammond’s naturalist in residence, Tom Mancke, from the cabin’s front porch. Beside him is an old washtub filled with the donated bones of a couple of goats and some pot belly pigs.

The collection of bones might be unnerving for some, but to Hammond students and many of their parents, Mancke and his cabin have become synonymous with a world of wonder.

Called the Primitive Technology Center, the cabin is packed with all manner of things, from animal furs and skeletons to rocks, plants, tools and books. It’s where the 62-year-old naturalist now in his 24th year at the private school says he keeps his “toys.”

“But this is just the base camp. The real learning takes place out there,” he says of the outdoor world.

As an educator, Mancke – known for his infectious energy and unconventional style – is in his element at the private school. But he hasn’t always been this comfortable.

“I had all sorts of weird jobs,” says Mancke, describing his early years before finding his way to Hammond as a middle school science teacher.

But it wasn’t until a guest lecturer at the school quite literally lit a fire for what would become a lifelong love of all things used by early civilizations that Mancke found his true calling. That colleague was Mark Warren, founder of a primitive school called Medicine Bow in the North Georgia Mountains.

“So here’s this glowing ember coming out,” says Mancke, recounting the visit in which Warren used a couple of sticks to show a group of fifth-graders how to start a fire. “After he left, I snapped those sticks up ... and we must have rubbed blisters on our hands for weeks trying to get fire.”

Mancke soon was offered a new job as the school’s naturalist-in-residence. The Primitive Technology Center followed in 1996, and everything fell into place.

Now Mancke teaches primarily K4 through fourth grade in small group sessions that may start at the cabin and end up “in the field.” A recent trip involving third- and fourth-graders had the group hiking a deer trail that ended near Gills Creek.

“What I love about natural history is that I have no idea what we’re going to encounter,” he says. “What’s fun is watching students making that connection to that leaf, that bark or that stone.”

There are also field trips on “Old Yeller,” the school’s yellow school bus, to places like the Congaree National Park. And every year in the fall, Mancke leads a weeklong program, called Primitive Technology Week, conceived with fellow Hammond educator Rene Bickley. The program explores everything from the making of flutes out of rivercane to fashioning entire tool kits from the toe bones of a deer.

The other Mancke

Mancke’s older brother Rudy Mancke, a former host of SCETV’s “Nature Scene,” says his and Tom’s shared love of nature stems from a childhood spent wandering the countryside of Duncan Park, Spartanburg – something that Tom says started with “looking for snakes with Rudy.”

“I don’t know what our parents did specifically,” says Rudy Mancke, now a naturalist with USC’s School of the Environment. “But they allowed us to develop our own interests individually. All four of us were allowed to develop our minds.”

Rudy Mancke says that while their specific interests within the discipline vary, he and Tom have similar teaching styles and a “childlike curiosity about the world. It’s something that didn’t go away,” he says.

It’s a passion that sometimes puts Tom Mancke at odds with the modern-day world.

He does not own an iPad or smart phone (though the school makes him carry a cell phone when out in the field with students). He doesn’t do email, though an old Dell sits on the corner of a table that’s overflowing with bones and fossils.

To reach him, a caller has to leave a message with a school office. The phone message, or email as it may be, is printed out and placed into a box, which Mancke checks regularly.

“I haven’t gotten into computers yet, because they kind of scare me,” he admits. Instead, he prefers tinkering with older forms of technology that may have gone out of fashion. His latest obsession? The World War II-era “hard wire” phone.

Using old telegraph poles that he and his students found in the woods by railroad tracks and some surplus phone wire purchased at an Army Navy store, Mancke rigged a phone line from the cabin to the school office. With the turn of a handle on the MASH-like phone, he can now “call” the office, which he refers to as “HQ.”

Making a mark

If Mancke is on a mission, it may be teaching kids how to think and helping them stay connected to the outdoors – something he thinks is disappearing in today’s digital era.

“More and more, we’re becoming an indoor culture,” he says. “We say we’re more connected than ever, but we’re in a box looking at a box.”

He must be doing something right.

Catherine Herring, a 16-year-old junior at Hammond, says she remembers looking forward to the days spent at “Mr. Mancke’s cabin.”

“He would take you to this special little place in this special little world and you would look for snake skins, or bones or carcasses,” Herring said. “He would find a random rock and build a fire for us with his bare hands. Everyone was always jealous of the new group that got to go.”

Modest about the program’s impact, Mancke says he sometimes wonders at the end of the day if “anything really happened.”

“And then on certain days, things are so magical,” he says. “A great blue heron comes down, or you find some neat skeleton or a snake shows up, and that particular event was worth all those other times when nothing happened.”