Bookmarks

Glen Blackwood, who passed away last December, packed a lot of living into his 62 years: husband, father, bird hunter, angler, spaniel aficionado, TV personality, auctioneer, conservation warrior, writer, discerning book dealer and collector. Glen was a contributor to The Upland Almanac for more than a decade, mainly through his popular “Pages Past” column, and also an invaluable consultant for the regular “Section 799.2” department, which featured classic stories from timeless writers.

Blackwood and I share a bit of background. Both of us were Ohio farm boys; both of us were educated at the Ohio State University. But here’s where I need to come clean. Unlike Glen, who grew up hunting and fishing before reading and writing about both, I actually read my way into becoming a hunter who writes.

Let me explain.

Eleven years before I was born, my father’s older brother was killed in a horrific hunting accident. Dad never again picked up a firearm other than the dusty .22 rifle that rested in the corner of our milking parlor between rat or raccoon emergencies.

Even if he had the inclination to hunt, by the mid-1960s of my childhood, “clean” row crop agriculture had finished the game bird population in our part of Ohio. The only bird dog of my acquaintance was Shadow, a close neighbor’s bellicose Weimaraner, allegedly used for pheasant hunting “Out West.” Shadow once raided our barnyard looking for a cat to kill. When Dad intervened, the hulking gray dog tore the seat out of my father’s bib overalls.

But my mother’s father hunted. He would let me come along and never scolded me about sitting still as I shivered and squirmed through cold early mornings in the squirrel woods. Grandpa subscribed to Field and Stream, and Grandma stacked years of back issues under a TV room end table. On visits, I would read for hours about an outdoors that didn’t include making hay or catching hell for falling asleep on a slow tractor while cultivating endless rows of bright green corn sprouts.

In grade school, I proved to be an indifferent student. But I finally found my groove in paperbacks ordered from the Scholastic Books catalogs. I would blow every penny of my chore money buying action novels by the likes of Fred Gibson, Howard Fast, Rutherford Montgomery and Jim Kjelgaard.

Gibson’s trail hounds — Old Yeller and Savage Sam — and Kjelgaard’s “Big Red” clan of Irish setters were loyal savants who knew their business, nothing like a cat-craving Weimaraner or the mongrel farm dogs that helped raise me.

I paid attention to how my favorite writers strung sentences together and soon fell under the influence of the occasional composition teacher who encouraged my clumsy imitations. After school, balanced on a one-legged stool and sandwiched between the stained flanks of Holstein cows, I ran milking machines and daydreamed of chasing wild game with a “full-blood pedigreed” dog I would train myself and feature in stories I’d write about our adventures … after quarterbacking the Packers or playing guitar with Keith Richards and the Stones.

Fast forward to the early 1980s. Having missed the NFL and rock ’n’ roll stardom, I instead was back home at my old school, teaching and coaching, struggling through stultifying graduate school classes at night. But toward the school year’s end, my cousin Rodney called.

Rod was manager of a sprawling shooting preserve in central Kentucky. The club’s dog trainer had quit, and my cousin had taken over that part of the operation. Would I like to come down during summer break and help?

Three weeks later, on dewy summer mornings I was planting birds and stepping on the trailing ends of check cords as Rodney worked a string of clients’ dogs. The one I coveted most was a coiled spring, roan shorthair named Belle. Belle was what Rodney termed a “shooting dog,” and she was being groomed to hunt in front of a Jeep. Fast and wide, Belle laced the bird field with canny purpose, skidding into molten points and retrieving to hand bobwhite quail Rodney had deftly killed with a smoothbore .22 pump gun.

At visit’s end, Rodney sent me home with a worn copy of Gun Dog magazine, the inaugural issue. On the cover was a stunning photo of George Bird Evans’ English setter Briar alongside George’s Purdey shotgun, balanced open over a ruffed grouse drumming log.

That photo marked me. I read the magazine to tatters, struck by the vivid, breezy writing of Gene Hill and Joel Vance, the smart, self-effacing prose of Charley Waterman. When the cover of the magazine tore away, I pinned it to the wall above the battered electric typewriter in my basement writing room.

On the very day I finished the last exam for my master’s degree, I rushed to my hometown public library and ransacked what seasoned readers of this magazine will recognize as Section 799.2 (Dewey Decimal-ese for “books on hunting”). Among the titles I lugged home were Hill Country, a Gene Hill anthology, and a copy of Robert Ruark’s The Old Man and the Boy that looked as if it hadn’t been checked out in years. I also found the 683.4s — “gunsmithing, firearms, and weapon technology” — and added Bob Brister’s Shotgunning: The Art and the Science to the canvas tote bag the librarian loaned me.

Finally, I stood in front of the shelved lineup of books that would tie together all of the above and change my life forever: Section 636.70887: “Dog training for specific purposes (including working, hunting, and bird dogs).” I pulled two books: Bill Tarrant and Delmar Smith’s Best Way to Train Your Gun Dog and Robert Wehle’s Wing and Shot and hustled home to read.

From a vantage of 44 years, I marvel at how my Kentucky dog training junket and that fevered trip to the county library would one day send me walking the West Virginia woods with George and Kay Evans and two Old Hemlock setters. Later, I’d don a pair of gloves so I could handle that exquisite Purdey 12-bore from my magazine cover pinup.

Studying Wing and Shot, I couldn’t imagine that I would ever be a guest of Mr. Wehle in Midway, Alabama, or train a puppy he sent to us using insights I’d gained from the Tarrant book. In her long life, Elhew Fancy Dancer pointed woodcock, pheasants, three species of grouse and two of quail in travels from the Mexico border to Vermont’s Northern Kingdom.

I wish I could have told Bob Brister, godfather of American Sporting Clays, about the day I shot part of the Homestead Resort course with a borrowed Holland and Holland hammer gun once owned by an Indian maharajah. And who’d have thought 15 years after reading The Old Man and the Boy for the first time, I’d be staring down a yellow-eyed, dove-poaching Chesapeake Bay retriever in a mowed over sunflower patch along Maryland’s Eastern Shore. That country is where the Old Man took his grandson to visit Mr. Howard on their final hunting trip together.

Reading sparked me to the dogs, shotguns, people and places that have made for some of the very best days of my life and likely yours as well. That’s what “Bookmarks” is meant to be about, a free-wheeling exchange touting our all-time favorite books and the best of new works as well. Fiction, nonfiction, travel writing, shotgun technicana, shooting sports history — if it’s entertaining, artful, useful or provocative, I want to share that writing in this space.

By “exchange,” I mean that “Bookmarks” is to be, in part, a collaborative forum. Email me at the address listed in my bio and tell me in three or four sentences about the book you’d love to read for the first time all over again. I’ll consider featuring your recommendations in future installments.

For our first book share, though, I thought it fitting to honor the memory of Glen Blackwood and his beloved English cocker spaniels with a collection of hunting essays by British expat Ken Roebuck, whom we’ll look at in the Autumn issue. See you then.