Many years ago, when I was growing up, my parents bought property in Cook Forest, Pennsylvania and built a home on it. We used it for vacations but the dream was for my parents to move there to live full time after my father took his retirement from Firestone Rubber Co. in Akron, Ohio at the age of 55 years old. Back in the 1960s you could retire at 55 if you had worked more than 30-years. He had worked at Firestone for 36-years so he was entitled. However, he would not be allowed to as, at the age of 54, the doctor gave us the news that he had pancreatic cancer. Back then there was no hope with something like that. So my mother and I watched him slowly, over the next two years fade and finally pass on. It was at the Cook Forest house that he had first felt the pains. So, for him the dream was dead also.

Dad had used the house in the woods as a favorite hunting destination over the years that he worked on it. We had bought the property in 1957 so he had had ten years to enjoy his hunting trips there. Mom liked to fish and did it in the river that flowed in front of our house. But the dream that dad had that someday he would be retired and living at the house in the forest and making hunting trips into the woods didn't die with him. Many other men and some women as well have been living that dream for centuries.

Of course, hunting had begun as a necessity of survival. Men hunted deer, bear, elk, birds and a host of other wild creatures to put meat on their family's tables. This had gone on since the caveman felled his first dinosaur back in, well, whenever it was.

Old west frontiersmen followed through with their flintlocks and the American Indian did the same with the buffalo using no more than a bow and arrow and a spear. Hunting has been a sport that is as American as pumpkin pie and golf. The British think they cornered the market on hunting with their fox hunts. Come on, your on a huge horse in your Sunday best chasing down a poor defenseless, scared shitless little fox and your using a pack of around 50 to 100 dogs to catch it. What kind of sport is that? Then when you bag the dead carcus of the tiny rodent, they all head to the country club for drinks. Wow! That's what men are made of. NOT!

Try the American Teddy Roosevelt method of standing your ground with a rhino and bringing it down before he does you. That's hunting.

Anyway, I was never a hunter. I have nothing against the sport and I thank Heaven that there's men out there willing to hunt those nasty cows as I really enjoy my steak and potatoes.

And as far as squirrel hunters, a squirrel is nothing more than a rat with a fluffy tail. But I digress. I have a love of guns being raised around them all of my lfe. I love the BOOM and the kick and go target shooting regularly. I own a fair gun collection that includes muzzle loaders, that I shoot, and historical Winchesters and Colts from the old west. But, possibly because of my dad, I have a fond respect for hunters. The jury is still out on fox hunters however.

So with all that said, I decided that a blog about hunting was in order. But these hunters are all mostly dead now themselves. This is a blog about hunting before 1970. Back before the hunter had all the fancy camping gear and electronics. Before we had a bunch of weekend hunters shooting each other because they swore they saw antlers in the bushes. These were times when the cell phones were left at home...ha! Got ya! There were no cell phones then. You were in the woods isolated from the outside world. It was a time of no interruptions, no portable microwaves, TVs or satellites. It was a time that, if you accidentally shot another hunter, it was much easier to hide the body.

I dedicate this blog to the honest hunter of yesteryear who took his son hunting to teach him the proper way to hunt down that varmint and pack it home. By the way, I went deer hunting with my dad around 1962. Let's just say it didn't go well.