Mel Koontz

Melvin Lawrence Koontz was born on December 1, 1910 in Fort Scott, Kansas. He was one of nine children and a fraternal twin. Mel Koontz and his family moved out to Los Angeles when he was a teenager, and he went to work at fourteen as a popcorn and peanut vendor at the old Selig Zoo in Los Angeles. By the time he was eighteen, he worked himself up to "cage cleaner", according to the 1930 Federal Census. From that humble start, he began to work more and more with wild animals until he became known as one of the premier animal trainers of Hollywood's "Golden Age". Koontz was known as the trainer of "Jackie", the MGM lion, and, by his estimation, he had worked in six hundred movies, and appeared in more than three hundred of them, including doubling for 'Maurice Schwartz' in Slaves of Babylon and Mae West in I'm No Angel. In 1939, he went to New York where he had an animal act in Frank Buck's Jungleland that was one of the major events of the World's Fair. After the fair ended, he returne