Kiomatia, Texas ? When Stan Graff says his 4,000-acre ranch near Paris, Texas, is not about how many ducks he shoots, how big a deer he bags or how many fish he catches, the Dallas car dealer is not kidding.

Graff grew up deer hunting in the Texas Hill Country with his father, but he gravitated to East Texas and started piecing together the Graff Ranch in 1983.

Recently, Graff hosted a 10th anniversary eastern turkey hunt attended by outdoors writers, and Texas Parks and Wildlife and the National Wild Turkey Federation representatives.

“My dad always had places in West Texas, and he was always fighting a drought in some form or another,” Graff says. “I just figured it rained more in East Texas, and I really bought this place as a project.”

Like most projects, the Graff Ranch was not as simple as its owner expected. Not when you mix cattle, agriculture, waterfowl, white-tailed deer, eastern wild turkeys and 24 fishing lakes ranging in size from one acre to 34 acres.

Graff hired ranch hands to take care of the roads, livestock and agriculture. He called on four lifelong friends to act as stewards for the fish and game. Greg Person is the ranch’s director of hunting, Searcy Woodall is fishing director and Jim Hamby is in charge of bluebird boxes, which makes him a non-game specialist. Mark Ellis is the director of waterfowl.

Now approaching their mid-50s, all five still live in the Dallas area. In a real sense, the Graff Ranch is a hunting and fishing club for friends and family.

When Graff anointed Person as the Graff Ranch hunting director, he had no background in wildlife management.

Person took the job seriously, using every resource tool available from the Noble Institute in Oklahoma to TP&W and the Texas A&M Extension Service.

Woodall is the Graff Ranch fishing director. He hired a private lakes specialist, Bob Lusk, to help manage the lakes. Anglers fill out forms that reveal catch rates, fish size and how many fish were kept from each fishing trip.

“Stan really doesn’t have the patience to fish, but he gives us all the resources we need to take care of the fishing and hunting,” Woodall said. “Stan went fishing with us one day and the fishing was kind of slow.

After about 15 minutes with no action, Stan thought of some project that he should be doing elsewhere on the ranch. He jumped out of the boat, swam to the bank and headed for the project.”

Graff insists the real story about the Graff Ranch is how many children have grown up hunting and fishing there. In the process, they’ve established an attachment to land and wildlife that’s impossible to cultivate in a big city.