I Love and Hate Fall!

I always looked forward to September with dread and excitement. I hated the fact that school was starting back. Gone would be the long, lazy, fun days of fishing local ponds, damming Dearing Branch, building tree houses and camping out in the back yard.

But fall also meant hunting seasons were near. Dove season opened soon after school started, easing the pain a little. I could not wait until squirrel season opened, usually in September back then, and rabbit and quail seasons followed in November.

When I was growing up there was no deer hunting anywhere near me. There were not enough deer to hunt and the Department of Natural Resources was stocking deer and trying to get them established. By the time I started high school in the mid-1960s it was still rare to see a deer. If anyone saw one crossing the road we talked about it for a week.

Daddy didn’t fish and hunted little, but we always got to go to dove shoots on Saturdays during season. And we had two pointers we spent many hours following through fields near the house to find quail. Bird hunting with him was always special.

Since daddy didn’t get to go hunting except on Saturdays, I squirrel hunted by myself or with friends. We often went after school and hunted all day on Saturdays when bird season was not open. I could walk out my back door and be in the woods in five minutes. I knew where every pine the squirrels liked to cut pinecones grew and the location of favorite white oak trees where they fed.

One very special place was behind my house on a ridge beside Dearing Branch. There was a huge white oak tree about three fourths the way up the slope and it was always loaded with acorns in the fall. And it was usually loaded with squirrels. I spend hours sitting near that tree waiting on bushytails to come to feed. It was a magical place for me.

I hunted with a .410 shotgun or a .22 rifle. In those much younger days I could shoot squirrels in the head with my .22 and used it when the leaves fell. But the shotgun was better early in the season when the trees were full of leaves and the squirrels harder to see.

One trip with my friend Hal stands out in my mind, even after 50 years. We had ridden our bicycles to Harrison’s pond, a favorite fishing hole in the summer, but this time we had our guns. It was about five miles from my house but we thought little about the distance.

Hal shot a squirrel with his over and under .410 and .22. It had a rifle barrel on top and a shotgun barrel underneath. I always wanted one but my daddy said I could make do with what I had.

The squirrel Hal shot ran into a hollow about 20 feet off the ground. We never let anything get away if there was any possible way to get it but it seemed impossible on that one. We came up with a plan. I rode back to my house, got a saw and hatchet, and headed back to where Hal waited by the tree in case the squirrel was able to come out.

We cut that tree down about three feet off the ground, planning on getting the squirrel out. When we cut it we looked in the hollow stump and could see hair. I grabbed it and pulled a dead squirrel out. It had died after crawling into the tree.

While we were celebrating getting the squirrel, I noticed the wood chips and sawdust in the stump moved. I looked and saw more hair, so I shot into it with my rifle and pulled out another squirrel. That made us look closer, and we again saw hair, shot into it and pulled out another squirrel. We got three out of that hole!

We ate anything we caught or killed and three squirrels made a decent number for squirrel and dumplings that night. My mother could cook anything. I often thought she could take and old hunting boot, season it and cook it and it would turn out as a gourmet meal!

We ate a lot of squirrel, rabbit, quail, dove and all kinds of fish. My mother often said a fish was big enough to keep and clean if it would make the grease smell. She especially liked the crunch tips of the tail and fins after deep frying little bream.

I have great memories of growing up wild in Georgia and hope many other kids are making those memories right now.

One Thanksgiving memory of mine is usually best left for after the meals are all eaten. It was Thanksgiving with dad. My father did not like dogs in the house. He never let me or my brother have a house dog although we did have outside dogs.

After I got married Linda and I got a border collie and she slept under out bed every night, stayed inside all day and went everywhere with us. And my dad tolerated Merlin in the house when we came to visit.

One year on Thanksgiving Day I went rabbit hunting after lunch and Merlin went with me. I shot one rabbit and field dressed it as soon as I recovered it. And Merlin feasted on the guts before I could stop her.

That night we were having our big Thanksgiving Dinner. Mom had the big round table extended with both inserts, as big as it would go, and it was loaded with food. As we sat down for the blessing Merlin decided it was a good time to crawl under the table and throw up all the rabbit guts.

Dad got a weird look on his face, got up and went into the living room without a word. Mom helped Linda and me move the table, clean up the mess and put Merlin out in a car. We then reassembled around the table, had the blessing and ate all we could hold.

Dad never said a word about it and I don’t remember him ever bringing it up.

I would give anything to have one more meal with my parents but now all I have are the memories, good, bad, funny and sad. But I cherish them all.

Thanksgiving is a special time of year. It is the time we should all stop and think of all the things we have in our lives that make us happy. We really should do that all the time, but this week is a good time to focus on how good we have it.

Most of my thankful things involve the outdoors. Very little makes me as happy as spending time fishing or hunting. That has been true all my life and almost all my Thanksgiving memories have something to do with spending time outdoors. So hunting, fishing and Thanksgiving go together in my life.

Almost every Thanksgiving while I was growing up meant big meals with family and friends. My mother’s brothers were older than her and all but one lived near us, and they all had big families. We would always eat with at least one of my uncle’s families and all the cousins on Thanksgiving Day.

Most of those days also involved a quail hunting trip after lunch. Several of the uncles had land and most of them had bird dogs, as we did, so hunting quail was a tradition. Back then there were a lot more quail since farming was still more compatible with quail habitat.

My career in education always meant a four day weekend for Thanksgiving. Since I got my first bass boat my second year out of college, almost all my Thanksgivings after I moved to Griffin involved going to my place at Raysville Boat Club on Clarks Hill for the long weekend.

Most years I would go over after work on Wednesday, fish Thursday morning then go to my parent’s house in town for the afternoon for the meal. Then I would head back to the lake for fishing the next three days.

One year my mom decided to have the big Thanksgiving meal at the lake. I know she did it that way so I could fish longer. That morning as I got ready to go out at daylight she reminded me to be in for dinner. My brother and his family and a couple of uncles and their families were coming there for the meal. I assured her I would come in early enough to get cleaned up before eating.

I will never forget that day since I landed a big bass, weighed it at seven pounds one ounce, put it back in the water and looked at my watch. It was 12:02 pm and I was thankful my mother had planned dinner at the lake. Most years I would have had to head in before the time I caught the fish.

That was the only time my mother ever got mad at me for fishing, and one of the very few times Linda has. When I went in at 3:00 pm to get cleaned up for dinner I found out she meant dinner at noon, not at dark. We always called the noon meal dinner while I was growing up but after going to college I got used to calling the noon meal lunch and the night meal dinner.

By the time I came in all my family had gone home. The only thing colder than the stares of my wife and my mother that day was the cold turkey sandwich I got for my Thanksgiving “dinner.” But I did catch a seven pound bass that day!

There were many Thanksgiving weekends that it was just me and my dog Merlin in the boat all day Friday, Saturday and Sunday. I would often stay later than I should on Sunday and get back to Griffin well after dark and have to unload and get some sleep before going to school Monday morning. But there were a lot of great memories.

Back then it seemed much easier to catch bass. I would often leave my boat under the boat sheds at the lake, get up at daylight and start fishing. I didn’t need to run anywhere, just put the trolling motor in the water and start casting a crankbait to the points and banks around the boat club.

There was no reason to leave Germany Creek. I got to know every stump, rock, clay bank and point that way. There was one small cove with an old sunken wooden boat back in it. I could count on catching a bass beside it every time I fished it with a crankbait. Learning little keys like that has always been important to me.

I also learned to fish a jig and pig one Thanksgiving at Clarks Hill. On Thursday morning I had caught a lot of fish on a crankbait but kept thinking about a bait I had never caught a fish on, the jig and pig.

Friday morning I tied one on and vowed to fish nothing but it all day. At 2:00 pm I was disgusted, I had not had a bite on it. The day before I had landed about 15 bass up to two pounds in four hours of fishing.

At 2:00 I was going down a bank where I had put out a brush pile. I cast the jig and pig to the right side of it and caught a three pound bass. Then I cast to the left side and caught a 3.5 pound bass. That gave me enough confidence to go to a deeper brush pile, where I caught a 6.5 pound bass. Every since that day back in the late 1970s I keep a jig and pig tied on and fish them a lot!

Spend your Thanksgiving wisely – and be thankful you have the freedom to make the choices you make for the day.

The end of August always reminds me of a special camping trip I took the summer I graduated from High School. My best friend Harold and I decided to do some “wilderness” camping to celebrate the end of high school and the beginning of college.

Harold was the only other boy my age in Dearing where we grew up. He lived less than a half mile from me and we did everything together, from hunting and fishing to building tree houses and forts.

We started Kindergarten together and graduated from the University of Georgia together. Way back then Kindergarten was not offered in public school. Ms. Lively had a private kindergarten in Thomson, eight miles from Dearing.

Each morning Harold and I would get on Mr. John Harry’s school bus and he would take us to Ms. Lively’s kindergarten at her house, which was near where his bus route started. One of our mothers would pick us up at noon each day.

The summer we graduated from high school, a couple of weeks before we were to go to UGA, I stopped working at National Homes, my summer job for three years, a week early. We gathered our supplies, loaded our 12 foot Jon boat in the truck and drove to Raysville Boat Club.

My family had an outdrive ski boat at a dock there and we used it as our tow boat. After loading the big boat with sleeping bags, fishing tackle, canned food guns and everything we would need for four days we tied the Jon boat to the ski boat and headed up Little River.

After about an hour going slowly we came to a small creek with a high rock bluff on each side. Inside the mouth of the creek was a good place to tie up the boats and be protected. We went a little ways into the woods, build a fire circle from rocks and cut down saplings to make a table between two oak trees.

To make the table we lashed two sapling trunks between the two big oaks, one on each side. We then cut shorter pieces to lay across them for the table top. We also cleared brush from the area so we would have a nice opening for our camp.

We had not brought a tent, just sleeping bags, so I raked up leaves for a mattress and rolled out my bag. It had a canvas canopy at the head end that you could use to keep rain out of your face, so I rigged it up with some forked sticks and long straight ones between them to hold it in position.

For the next three days and nights we were all on our own. I will never forget how peaceful and quiet it was around our fire at night and in the little creek during the day. At night the stars were amazingly bright. When it got hot in the afternoons we went skinny dipping – we knew no one else was around.

We put out trotlines and fished every day but I don’t remember catching much. For breakfast we cooked bacon, eggs and toast on the open fire. For lunch we had potted meat, Vienna sausages, sardines and crackers. At night we ate out of cans, too.

For one night I had brought a big can of pork and beans and heated them in the can on the fire. That was a feast with some saltines!

We didn’t worry at all about anybody or anything bothering us. Back then out in the country you really didn’t have to worry much about crime and we knew there were no critters, other than snakes, that might be a problem. And we had our .22 rifles with us just in case.

We were lucky, the weather was nice the whole time. No summer thunderstorms hit and soaked our sleeping bags. Although the canopy may have kept rain out of my face, I knew my bag was not water proof and if it rained it would be soggy within seconds.

Back then we thought we had really gone a long way from civilization to camp. But now, in my bass boat, I can be at that small creek from the boat club in about five minutes. Everything is relative!

But that trip will always be one of my best memories. I wish all kids now had the chance to do things like I did growing up. We were on our own, totally self-reliant and had to make do with what we had. It was a great experience.

Does your life ever feel like the ball in a pin ball machine, bouncing from one bumper to the next in seemingly random patterns? My life does. There is an old Yiddish saying I like “Man plans, God laughs.” I also like the saying from a Robert Burns poem – “The best-laid plans of mice and men oft(en) go astray.”

Both those seem to sum up my life. Maybe some of you planned your life out and it is going like you want it to. I have never had that happen to me.

My life has a lot of bounces like a pinball, but looking back I have been really lucky in my bounces.

One of the first really big bounces was in college when I was a sophomore. One day in class I told the guy sitting to my right I Had gone to a fraternity rush party the night before. The guy sitting in front of him turned and invited me to a keg party at Delta Chi fraternity that night, and I went. After most of the keg was gone I somehow pledged!

One of my pledge brothers got me a blind date a few months later. We didn’t really hit it off but did go on another date. That is how I met Linda – next Thursday is our 44 anniversary – August 20, 2015. Getting invited to that party was a really important bounce I never saw coming!

No matter what I planned for my life I seemed to end up somewhere else, but I have no complaints. That is how I ended up in Griffin. Although I hate to fly now, I wanted to be an Air Force Pilot. The year I graduated from UGA I passed a flight physical in January at Warner Robbins AFB and went to officer training school as a pilot trainee when I graduated in June. After a week there they gave me an eye test like the one you take for a driver’s license – and I failed! I have 27 days active service, they gave me a medical discharge real fast.

So much for those plans. When I started college my dad told me to get a degree in education to fall back on if my air force plans failed, and I did. So I had something to fall back on.

Daddy was principle of Dearing Elementary School in McDuffie County for 22 years. I knew he could get me a job in that county, but I was hard headed and didn’t want to get a job just because of him. He did check around for me. One of his teachers was Mildred Moore and her daughter, Carol Ann Marshall, taught in Griffin. He told me there were some job openings here so Linda and I applied. She also was qualified to teach.

We got jobs here in 1972 and got an apartment at Grandview. I found out later I was hired as a teacher at Atkinson Elementary mainly because they wanted another man there. I guess that was sex discrimination, or some kind of quota, but I took it not thinking about that at the time.

To get to Atkinson from Grandview I drove up College, turned right on 6th Street and went over the old bridge. The first day I made that trip I noticed Berrys Sporting Goods and stopped on the way home that afternoon since I always loved fishing and everything associated with it, and met Jim Berry.

That was one of my lucky bounces. Now some of you that know Jim may not consider that lucky, but it changed my life in two important ways.

Jim got me in the Spalding County Sportsman Club in 1974 and I fished my first tournament with him that April at Clarks Hill and fell in love with tournament fishing. I joined the Flint River Bass Club in 1978 and have not missed many tournaments in either club since joining them.

I had told Jim I always wanted to write. Part of that desire was from my insatiable reading growing up. And a big part of it was my 11th grade English Teacher Ms. Lewis. I was not a good student, just did enough to get by, I wanted to be out fishing or hunting, not in school, but Ms. Lewis bragged on the themes I wrote in her class. That was one of the few successes I had in school and it fueled my writing desire. Teachers can really have a long lasting influence on a student.

In 1987 Jim and the editor of the Griffin Daily News were playing poker, and there might have been adult beverages involved, but they came up with a scheme to run an outdoor column each week. Jim sponsored it and got me to write it, paying me the grand sum of $8 a week, in fishing stuff from his store. My first column was on crappie fishing in March, 1987 and was my start of writing.

Another lucky bounce that later paid off was in 1983. I made the state team through the club state Top Six that year and went to Kentucky Lake for the Southern Regional tournament. Two team Members, Les Ager and Carl Logan, wrote for Georgia Sportsman magazine and I had read their articles. One night on the way to dinner in a van I told them I always wanted to write articles like they did.

In 1988, five years later, I got a call from the publisher of a brand new magazine offering to let me write an article for them. I was happily surprised and started writing for them regularly. I didn’t know at the time that Carl and Les were two of the founders of GON and they remembered I wanted to write, and suggested to the publisher, Steve Burch, that he contact me.

We are in the middle of the Dog Days of summer. It is so hot it is almost tempting to stay inside with air conditioning and not even go fishing. Any activity outside is miserable.

The Dog Days get their name from the Dog Star Sirius. At least that is the official version. To us in the south this time of year is called Dog Days because it is so hot outside that the dogs won’t come out from under the porch!

I grew up in a big wood house with a tin roof. We didn’t have air conditioning. We had to rely on fans and open windows to try to stay somewhat cool in the house. At night a fan would blow on the bed to let us sleep. I used to love to place a fan so it blew under the sheet, making a kind of tent with air moving across me.

That house was so old it sat on stacks of rocks supporting the big floor beams. When we tore down that house to build another in the early 1960s we found ax marks on those floor beams, showing they had been hand-hewn from big pine trees. The heart of pine beams had turned to lighter wood as they aged.

We found out why the dogs liked it so much under the house and porch. That was the coolest place around except in the water of the branch. My brother and I, and our friends, played under there for hours. At places the beams were several feet off the ground and we could almost walk under them.

Our playing under there ended when daddy caught my brother, three years younger than me, when he was about five years old. He had taken some paper feed sacks under the house and was in the process of building a campfire!

I loved the sound of rain on the tin roof of that house. During the day it meant the house cooled off and was more comfortable. When it rained at night the drumming of the raindrops cooled the house and lulled me to sleep.

One treat of summer was eating a cold watermelon on a hot day. We would put them in the big walk in egg cooler and they got nice and cold. In the side yard under a big pecan tree there was a wooden platform about eight feet square and a foot high. It was the perfect place to cut a watermelon and eat it.

Mama had a big butcher knife in the kitchen we used to cut the watermelon. It was so old and well-used the blade was concave from years of sharpening. I always wanted to use it to cut bites of watermelon from my slice, but was not allowed to handle it until I was about eight years old.

Even that was too young. One of the first times I was allowed to use it I cut all the red from my rind and enjoyed it. Then, for some reason, with the rind on the wood platform, I thought it would be a good idea to stab it with the knife.

When I stabbed straight down my right hand slick with watermelon juice slide down the handle and the blade. I can still remember looking at my palm as I opened it and seeing a gash that opened raw meat before the blood started gushing. My parents wrapped my hand and took me to the emergency room at the hospital eight miles away.

It took eight stitches to close the cut. I still have a faint scar running across my palm. Mom was standing beside me on my left side as the doctor worked on my right hand extended on a table. I wanted to watch the doctor but she turned my head away.

After a few minutes she asked me why I was staring at her eyes. Then she realized I was watching the doctor work on my hand in the reflection in her glasses.

We always went barefoot all summer long and our feet got tough, but not tough enough to stop a nail. There was an old barn near the house that was falling apart and we loved playing in it. But several times each summer we would step on a board with a nail in it and stab it into our feet.

Back then the cure was simple. Daddy would clean the nail hole, put a penny on it then a hunk of fatback on top of the penny and wrap it. The penny and bacon was supposed to pull the poison out. And I guess it worked, I never died, but I may have extra copper in my veins.

Most kids now are so protected and restricted by their parents I can’t imagine them getting injured as much as I did. But I survived, and even the memories of injuries are not so bad almost sixty years later.

My father grew up on a dirt poor farm in Jacksonville, Georgia near Lumber City and McCray. He and his two brothers and five sisters worked hard even as kids to survive. I never knew his father, he died before I was born, but his mother lived in Ocala, Florida with one of her daughters and I saw her a few times a year.

Daddy joined the Navy as World War II started when he was not yet 20 years old. He never talked much about his service, other than he trained to be a gunner and got deathly seasick on the troop transport to the South Pacific. He said he threw up for 30 days straight!

After getting a medical discharge for rheumatic fever he came home and lived with one of his sisters in McDuffie County where he met my mother. Like many of his fellow veterans, he went to college on the GI Bill and graduated with a degree in agriculture from the University of Georgia. After college they moved back to McDuffie County and I was born that summer. I was born in Athens since mama continued to go to her doctor there after they moved away in June of 1950.

Daddy was the agriculture teacher and shop teacher at Dearing High School. Part of that job was visiting local farmers and helping them out with everything from soil testing to hog castration. When schools consolidated around 1960 and the high school students were sent to Thomson, he became principal of Dearing Elementary and stayed there until retiring in 1977.

In the seventh and eighth grade he taught me math and shop. It was a small school so the principal also taught some classes each day. When I say small I mean small. I started first grade and went through eighth grade with the same 28 students, all in one classroom each year as we moved from grade to grade.

Daddy also bought a small farm and started an egg producing operation, starting small with four houses with about 1200 chickens each. When I was a teenager he added four more houses, much more modern and housing about 1500 layers each. Our 11,000 chickens provided eggs for most of the grocery stores in the area from the A&P and Winn Dixie to mom and pop country stores. And dozens of people came to our house to buy eggs in small amounts.

Daddy loved bird hunting and kept two pointers in some old chicken houses about a mile from our house. We fed them every day and could not wait until quail season opened each year. I spent many hours with him, following the dogs and hoping to find a covey of birds.

For several years I just walked along and learned safety and hunting etiquette. Then I was allowed to carry a .410 shotgun and actually try to hit a bird when the covey or a single flushed. I don’t think I ever did, although I was deadly with the shotgun on squirrels and anything else sitting still.

Since daddy knew many farmers well we were also invited to dove shoots every Saturday during season. I was daddy’s retriever for several years and prided myself on finding every bird he hit no matter where it fell. And again I was learning about dove shooting and safety while sitting in the blind with him.

I was really proud when I was allowed to take my .410 with me and had all my equipment in an old gas mask bag one of my uncles gave me. I still have that bag, more than 50 years later, and use it while deer hunting now. And a few times I actually hit a dove on those shoots and got to put it in my bag!

I can remember only one time daddy went squirrel hunting with me. I went many afternoons after school and even some mornings before school. One afternoon daddy went with me. I killed my limit of ten that afternoon, one of my best hunts, and daddy never killed one. But he never shot at one either, letting me kill all we saw. He was much more proud of me killing them!

Daddy didn’t like fishing very much and never went with me or mama. Mama loved fishing and went every chance she got. As he got older daddy did start crappie fishing with us in the spring at Clarks Hill. Not because he liked fishing but because he loved to cook and eat crappie.

I was expected to work on the farm from an early age. And daddy depended on me and my brother helping out. But I know he did extra work many times so I could go hunting or fishing rather than work.

Happy Father’s Day. If you can, enjoy some time with your father. If he is gone, like mine, rejoice in his memory. And if you have kids, spend some fun time with them. They will always remember fishing or hunting trips long after movies and games they like are long forgotten.