Toys of my lifetime

One of my favorite pocket knives & an old Orvis fly pouch with brown trout.

OK, so I’m a packrat. I come by it naturally. My mother and father saved all kinds of weird things, and I must have picked up this habit from them.

My baseball card collection disappeared when I was 18 years old. My mother decided that we (twin brother George and I) were quasi-adults now. What did we need with 5,000 or more baseball cards from the 1940s and 1950s.

Out went Al Kaline rookie cards. Gone too were Joe DiMaggio, Ted Williams, and others. We had them all, and in some cases, a dozen of each one.

The baseball cards were gone, and it was time to move on.

We lamented our lost cards then, and miss them now, but what's past is over and done with. I moved on, and over a period of many years, began picking up outdoorsy things that I like. Fishing and hunting books topped my list (and still does), but there were other items for a packrat to collect.

Much of my "stuff" was stored in cardboard boxes for safekeeping, and much of it has now been gone through and some marvels were found. Imagine finding my old Marble Boy Scout Knife. The handle is wrapped in rawhide, and the blade is big enough to slay bison with a single blow.

And tight 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 hit the jackpot until I laid my hands on a Winchester Model 61 .22 rimfire magnum pump rifle.

After high school, back in 1957, 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 those days to hunt whitetails (very few lived in our area near Flint) 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 hunts.

I saved my money, and bought the rifle. I was now ready to go out and run with the big dogs. The rifle was purchased during the winter, and about three months before the firearm deer season would open, the Department of Conservation outlawed the use of a .22 rimfire magnum for deer hunting.

I bought a Model 61 Winchester but it became illegal to use for deer.

My baseball cards may have been lost but I still have that rifle. I potted a few red foxes, 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 shotgun shell reloading equipment with all the powder and shot bars, crimping tools to seal 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.

Five years ago I was visiting with my late friend, Fred Houghton, formerly of Clio, and he mentioned he still had that rod and reel I'd loaned him 50 years before. The rod was an ultra-light Wanigas fiberglass rod made by famous Trout Unlimited co-founder Art Neumann of Saginaw, and a Cargem Mignon ultra-light spinning reel. This rod and reel had been a favorite, and thanks to Fred's honesty, I now have it back.

I've always had a love affair with pocket knives, or jack knives as we called them. Brother George gave me a Remington two-blade pocket knife almost 50 years ago. I'd lost track of it, and then found it and now it's back in my pocket where it belongs. The blades have been sharpened so many times, and the steel is so good, that I often use it to fillet bluegills. It was a treasure that had been lost and found again.

Deep in the box was a round metal tin of Mucilin that we used years ago when fly fishing. There also were a dozen No. 1 traps that I used 55 years ago when running two trap lines. They brought back fond memories of days when prime muskrat pelts sold for $5-8 each, and we'd often catch five or six 'rats a day. Some years we made more money in a week of 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 of far-flung fishing trips. Am p;d Ptvos fly pouch held flies I used when guiding brown trout river fishermen.

Browns of this size were common in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

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. They are useless but I keep them anyway

There were a matched pair of old wooden duck decoys I'd found in the Saginaw Bay cattails while jump-shooting ducks in my youth. Their decoy anchor lines had broken, and they;d 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 junk, but not me. I looked at all these things, 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.

Those were the days, my friends, we though they'd never end. And they haven't because fishing and hunting is still my way of life, and some of the old tools of the trade are still functional and remind me of the good old days when almost everyone in town turned out for the opening of the deer and pheasant seasons.

It’s not quite the same anymore, but my memories still bring joy. And, at this point in my life, that’s still very important to me.

Posted via email from Dave Richey Outdoors