Toys Of A Lifetime

My baseball card collection disappeared when we were 18 years old. My mother decided that we (twin brother George and I) were quasi-adults now, and what did we need with 5,000 or more cards from the mid-1940s through the late1950s.

We lamented the lost cards then, and really miss them even more now, but what's past is gone forever. I moved on, and over many years, began picking up outdoorsy things that I liked. Fishing and hunting books topped my list (and still do), but there were other items available for an aging packrat like me to collect.

Much of my "stuff" was stored in cardboard boxes for safekeeping, and much of it has now been found again. Imagine going through cardboard boxes and finding my old Marble knife. The handle is wrapped in rawhide, and the blade is big enough to slay bison singlehandedly.

The toys of my lifetime have been reunited with me.

And right next to it was an old Marble compass from the late 1950s, It still works, and has been put away in a safe place. I was thinking I'd hit the jackpot until I laid my hands on a Winchester Model 61 .22 rimfire magnum pump rifle. After high school, I worked for two years at Water Wonderland Sporting Goods, at the junction of Dort Highway and North Saginaw Road, about three miles north of Mt. Morris.

It was legal in the late 1950s to hunt whitetails (very few of them were in our area) in southern Michigan with a .22 rimfire magnum. They also came in handy for shooting red foxes, and some of my old fox-hunting buddies like Max Donovan, G.V. Langley and others carried one on our winter fox hunts.

I saved my money, and bought the rifle. I was prepared to go out and run with the big dogs now. The rifle was purchased during the winter, and about three months before the firearm deer season would open, the Department of Conservation (forerunner of the Department of Natural Resources), outlawed the use of a .22 rimfire magnum for deer hunting. I hunted for woodchucks often with that rifle, and close shots like this could be deadly.

The come-and-gone Remington jack knife.

I've always had a thing about pocket knives, or as we called them back in our youth, jack knives. Brother George had given me a Remington two-blade pocket knife 45 years ago. I'd lost track of it, and then it was found, and soon after was lost again, and hasn't been seen since. The blades had been sharpened so many times, and the steel is so great, that I often used it to fillet bluegills. It was a treasure that had been lost, found and lost again.

I'd lost my baseball cards but still have that rifle. I potted a few fox, a coyote or two and an abundance of woodchucks with it over the years. I still shoot it on occasion, but looking at it now brings back memories of buying it to hunt deer only to have it made illegal for that purpose.

In another box was my shotshell reloader with all the powder and shot bars, crimping tools to seal up paper and plastic shells. I found a great, huge box of Winchester AA plastic cases. Some had been reloaded two or three times, and many had been fired only once.

Several years ago I was visiting with the late Fred Houghton, formerly of Clio where we grew up, and he mentioned he still had that rod and reel I'd loaned him 40 years before. The rod was an ultra-light Wanigas fiberglass rod made by famous Trout Unlimited co-founder Art Neumann, and a Cargem Mignon spinning reel came with it. This rod and reel had been a favorite, and thanks to Fred's honesty, I now have it back.

Deep in another box was a round metal tin of Mucilin that we used years ago when fly fishing. There also were a half-dozen No. 1 traps that I used 55 years ago when running two traplines. They brought back memories of days when prime muskrat pelts sold for $8. each, and we'd often catch five or six 'rats a day, and some years we made more money trapping than our father made in a week of cutting hair.

There was an old Jones-type hat that had traveled North America with me. It was half rotted, and I thought it had been thrown away, but there it was -- as ugly as ever -- and it brought back grand memories.

Then I found a small pocket knife with the likeness of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police on the handle. Next to it were two rusted knives I'd found sticking in logs where some hunter had probably field dressed his deer, drug the animal out of the woods and forgot the knife.

There were a couple of old wood duck decoys I'd found in the cattails while jump-shooting ducks in the 1950s. Their decoy anchor lines had rotted and broken, and they had drifted off during rough water. George and I found 50-100 old wood dekes many years ago, but these were all that remain.

One might think this was a collection of old junk, but not me. I looked at all those old items, and counted them as wonderful memories from a bygone era when hunters knew enough to keep their paper shotgun shells dry. If they didn't, they would swell up and it was nearly impossible to get them to fire or get the swollen shells out of the shotgun. We soon learned to keep our knives sharp for when they might be needed, and every boy of that generation carried a knife to school but no one ever used it improperly. Try that now, and a kid would be expelled and probably picked up by the police for carrying a dangerous weapon. Back in those days it wasn't a weapon, but a tool to be used, and it was a rite of passage to carry a knife.

Those were the days, my friends, we thought they'd never end. And they haven't because fishing and hunting is still great fun for me, and I still share a lifelong love affair with the outdoors.

Posted via email from Dave Richey Outdoors