Reminiscing: How About You Old Timers?

[fishone]

I started in archery and deer hunting approx. 1975. I bought a new Wing recurve, 45@ @ 28", aluminum arrows and bear broadheads. My first traditional kill was a groundhog from a hay loft in an old barn. Never took a shot at a deer with that set up. Went to the dark side for a couple of yrs. I got back into traditional archery in the earyl 80's and have never looked back. Man have I had fun.

[elknutz]

I remember "Plaid Shirt" night as a kid in Michigan.  My dad and brother, along with other family members, would go and watch whatever movies they showed.  All I can remember are the Fred Bear movies.  Great times.

[ed burgholzer]

i'm 61. started bowhunting in the early sixties.  my first bow was a hoyt pro hunter. shot my first deer the first year i hunted . fred bear was my mentor. still have his book. my son shot his first deer with my hoyt about 7 years ago..Ed

[Don Stokes]

As a kid in the 50's my friends and I bought little hickory bows with red-and-white striped strings that came with rubber suction cups, which we immediately pulled off so we could sharpen the tips with our Barlow knives. After we lost all the arrows we made our own from weed stems.

I bowhunted deer for the first time in 1962, I think. I had a solid fiberglass ambidextrous Bear bow with a 40# draw weight that I bought for $5 from a friend of my brother's who had upgraded to a recurve. The local Western Auto sold Bear cedar hunting arrows complete with broadheads.

Deer were so scarce in the area that just seeing a deer made for a successful season. It took me many years to get my first, a spike killed with a 47# Ben Pearson Sovereign recurve. By then I had graduated from college and moved to SC, where deer were much more plentiful.

After finally getting a deer with my recurve, I bought a Jennings compound that self-destructed and put a big knot on my forehead. In the early 80's a house fire took all of my equipment, including the old Sovereign. I was living in GA by then, and called up Dan Quillian after seeing his ad in a magazine for a take-down recurve. I bought a Bamboo Longhunter from him instead, and started a relationship that lasted for years, including having him as my sales manager in the arrow shaft business. Killed a 4X3 bull elk with that Longhunter the first year I hunted with it.

I'm already looking forward to next year, and hunting my buddy's new place in MO that's full of does and big bucks. We have a plan in place to hunt the rut next November, the week before gun season opens. This will be the third year of antler restrictions, and I can hardly wait! At 61 I still look forward to archery season as much as I ever did, and I still get excited enough to miss my share of shots. When I quit getting excited, it will be time to quit. I can't see that happening.

[Bonebuster]

I`m "only" 43, and my first, for real, deer hunt was in 1978. Some of you many not consider me an "old timer"...but I am old enough to remember.

I remember a cardboard cutout of Fred Bear, in a local hardware store that sold archery equipment.
I remember everyone telling me I "needed" to get a compound bow. I "needed" sights...and this arrow rest...and this trigger release. I remember picking up broken wood arrows and sniffing the freshly broken end.

I remember how much fun archery always was(is).

I have watched many things change over the years in regards to archery. One thing has remained the same. The people who truely loved it back then, are the same kind of people who truely love it today.

[3Under]

I'm "19 days" from 71. My first bow was a lemonwood longbow. I probably got it when I was 9 or 10, I'm not sure.

My dad got me a Howatt Hunter in '64 as birthday present. I still have it. Made my first arrows with a buddy of mine. We ordered 100 shafts and each took 50. The average cost came out at $0.25 an arrow. Still have a few. I hunted in northern Wisconsin for about 4 years without getting a deer. Then moved to Montana an hunted with firearms there and elsewhere until about 1978. Got my first compound in 78. I didnt get a deer with a bow until 1996 in Kentucky. I went back to  traditional archery in '95. I didn't get a deer with a trad bow until '97. I used an Elberg Jaguar Special to take a doe. I got rid of my compounds shortly thereafter.

I guess I was just a late bloomer or a slow learner!

Hardly a day passes, rain of shine, that I don't shoot one of my trad bows.I deer hunt as often I can.
 
I have made it a tradition to always hunt the last day each deer season (usually past mid January) which I don't believe I've missed since '78.

It's not a remarkable tale but I get a lot of satisfaction from Trad archery!

[Cherokee Scout]

I am almost 62. I caddied all summer to buy my first bow. It was a solid fiberglass bow. I thought it was great. I had no idea about proper arrow spine, I just bought arrows with the best looking feathers. The bow had a piece of cork glued onto the riser, a stick pin was used as a sight (it came from factory this way). I moved the pin up or down in the cork to adjust elevation and pushed into or pulled it out of the cord to adjust windage.
My first laminated bow was a Bear Kodiak Magnum and Microflite #10 shafts. I am still a fan of the Microflites. I have a collection/display of one of each size 0-12 of the Microflites.
I hunted rabbits and groundhogs in Ohio with the Kodiak Mag. Killed some too!

[cheech1]

i would just like to than you gentlemen for sharing all of those fond memories with us and to many more like them.

[sweet old bill]

At 68 years yopung I got into archery with my Dad theu Herters was the catalog to have. We would get it and look and both of us dream of what we would love to have for hunting or fishing.
My Dad first bow was a Ben Pearson fiberglass limb bow 60 lbs, you would just stick the one limb into the handle, then put thye bow over your leg to string. I was 12 when he got it. We would have 3 hay bales out with a paper plate to shoot at with family coming over for a cook out. My first bow was from the local harware store a Bear 52 inch in 40 lbs. I got arrows from Herters in fiberglass tan with white dip crown and 2 yellow feathers and one red. They looked so good I would just use one to shoot and practice with. I did  not want to lose them. I paid I think was under 12 dollars for them. I also got a 6 pack of the bear BH's. The bow I purchased was like 37 dollars. I had worked most of the summer at a local grocery store packing bags at 65 cents a hour. Over the years I have had a lot of bows, but that first Bear is still shooting arrows, I gave it to a buddy of mine for his grandson who wanted to try traditional.
I also gave him a set of alum arrows in 1916
size. I wish I could now tell you that over the years I have taklen big bucks or gone to a lot of other states to hunt. But no, I just shoot about every other day 30 to 50 arrows with my current recurve to get my hand and eye cordination. I find that shooting a traditional bow is a challenging sport. Not like with a rifle, or compound bow were you sight in and you are on.

Bill

[Jack Shanks]

I'm 57 and started shooting a bow in the early sixties.I can't remember the brand of my first real bow or exactly how it came into my possession now. What I do remember is a older neighbor kid telling me he could make it stronger by stringing it backwards which he proceeded to do. He then pulled it back and promptly broke it.

 My next bow was a Ben Pearson fiberglass bow 35# that could be shot off either side. Although right handed and right eye dominate I shot left handed because Fred Bear did. Hey, no one ever explained to me why I shouldn't too. My cousins and I spent every weekend during the winter months chasing rabbits with our bows around the woodlots near our Grandparents house. I once actually got one too. Boys will be boys and we always had to see which one of us had the strongest bow. Shooting an arrow in the sky to see how high it went was usually the test. We had to stop that practice after the time one of my cousins arrows came down went thru my hat and cut the top of my head.Our parents would have never found out if my aunt hadn't needed to take me to the doctor for stitches. Probably a good thing we only owned field points at the time too.

 A friend's parents owned a Sporting Goods store where I worked in my early teens. They carried Bear bows in their inventory and I actually sold a few of them to customers. I couldn't afford one myself so the store owner's son and myself bought Red Wing Hunters for $35 each from another store that handled them. Mine being 45# and left handed of course. I gave that bow to a young nephew years later that was left handed. His mother took it away from shortly after he received it for shooting an arrow thru the garage wall. I believe he is supposed to get it back next year when he turns forty.

 I didn't become serious about bowhunting until after I got one of those mechanical contraptions with sights in the late seventies. A right handed one to boot. It was the first time I could actually hit something I was aiming at. After a number of successful years with that I saw the light and have been hunting with stickbows since.

[Tom Leemans]

We had one of those all metal (alum?) bows in the house when I was a kid too! We never strung or shot it. My dad told us to throw it away once and I think my brother did. I wish I had it, just to hang up.

[PaPaFrank]

I got my first hunting license sometime in the mid-sixties. There were no deer in the northern part of the state, and very few elsewhere. I can remember reading that the yearly deer harvest was around 5,000 for the whole state! Now, we have COUNTIES that consistantly produce 7,000 deer every year!

[Cool Arrow]

I too lived in Bear country as a young man. Long before fibreglass, my granddad found an old indian bow on his southern Mich. farm. He made a string for it and fashioned some arrows to humor me. It was love at first sight. I took that bow to the grocery store the movie theatre, and even to bed. In 49 he made me some broadheads so I could accompany my family on the annual rifle hunt to the upper peninsula. In those days you ferried because no bridge existed. What an adventure. Because of freak circumstances I managed to down a spikehorn whitetail. That was 60 years ago, and I still get the same thrill when I pick up my Shrew and head into the forest.

[reddogge]

I'm 66 and my first exposure to archery was the movies "Robin Hood" and "Ivanhoe".  After that I made stick bows out of saplings, arrows out of dowels, bird feathers and bottle caps bent over the end of the dowel as a broadhead.

I bugged my parents for a real bow and low and behold Christmas morning 1955 arrived a Ben Pearson lemonwood longbow set under the tree. Halleluhia.  I was an archer finally.

I spent many an hour shooting over our chain link fence across an alley into a bank.  The arrows got broken and lost and replaced one at a time so none matched in color or lenght after a while.  You had your "good arrow", the one that never missed, the "short arrow", etc.  The hard back quiver sounded hollow when you dropped the arrows in and I can still remember the sound and they all fell out when you bent over.

I made a dummy all dressed in black and that became the Sheriff of Nottingham and I strung him in the gate and shot him until he fell apart.

Those were the days and that's how I got into archery.

[Earthdog]

Im only 53 so I don't have quite the history of some of you gentlemen,but here goes anyway.
I first decided to use a bow after seeing one of my mates fathers walk into his shed one morning carrying two rabbits and a .22 rifle.
At 9 years old I fast worked out I wasn't going to get my hands on a rifle,but I,d seen a small longbow in a local hardward store and from that day I made sure my folks remembered about my up coming birthday,,,and what I really wanted.That was how I came to own my first bow and a hand full of arrows to go with it.
I never shot a critter with that bow but it set the path,,and it was my next bow which I now know realise was an indian archery static tiped fiberglass recurve that I took my first rabbit with.I no longer have that bow but I do have another of the same brand an model which has now been my fishing bow for about 20 years.
Following that bow was a Ben Pearson Hunter,,,I'd really wanted a Fred Bear bow as he was my absolute hero at the time "an pretty much still is".
The Ben Pearson was a very steep learning curve for me because my other bow had been only 38lb and I'd bought the Ben Pearson due to a real stroke of luck while visting a sports store to buy arrows for my other recurve when a gentleman had walked in wanting to sell it.
It was a 55lber and I was simply offered a deal I couldn't turn down.
That bow was really my most important bow and even though I'd never heard of Mr Ben Pearson at the time,I fast gained a lot of respect for the man.I took my first big game animal with my wildly over bowed Ben Pearson Hunter in 1975.
He was a big horned feral billy goat out of one of our Northland forests.
That day was another of those big stepping stones for me becauise in NZ at the time,bowhunter just didn't really exist,,,ok they did but I never knew one an nobody else I knew did either and I was constantly told by anybody that thought they were something that I couldn't do it,bows and arrow couldn't take big animals and I was just being stupid to belive they could.
Little did they know I had this book with a picture of a man with a longbow and an African elephant,so I knew it could be done.
This story could go on forever so I think I'll just leave it at that.
Thanks to all those that came before and helped lay my path.

[hayslope]

Like many of the folks here, I grew up in a hunting family, although it was totally gun-focused.

I developed an interest in archery early on before I could legally hunt in PA.  My first bow was a beater Bear Kodiak (can't recall the model year).  My Dad paid about $40 for it ( a bunch of money in the early sixties).  The Herter's catalog pretty much supplied everything else I needed.

By the mid-60s when I could legally hunt, I was (I thought) pretty adept at flinging arrows. Squirrels feared me.  Deer...another story. However, it was a few years of sailing arrows over and under deer before I finally connected.  By then I was using a '62 Kodiak, which became my one and only bow until 1982.  At the time of selling it, I had no qualms about it.

At 56, I think I would pay double the going rate to get that one back.  If nothing more than to touch it and recall the memories of youthful hunts.

[NDTerminator]

I'm 52 and first had a bow put in my hands when I was 7 or 8, a 20# red fiberglass recurve. For years my quiver was home made from a cardboard tube & strapping tape. When other kids were playing baseball or whatever I would disappear by myself into the Minnestoa River bottoms with my bow and not come home until dark.  Even in those days a kid doing this was not common, but I was about half feral.  

I was hell bent on hunting cottontails, and there were a lot around back then.  When I managed to bump some off I would bring them home & mom would fry them up.  That's when it first sunk in that if a guy had a bow or gun & knew how to use it, he wouldn't go hungry.  I believe that to the core of my soul to this day and still consider fried rabbit to be one of the finest meals in existence.

As I got older, I graduated to a grey fiberglass 35# longbow, then one of those 45# dark green fiberglass 52" suckers that stacked so bad you could hardly draw them past 24", that somehow wasn't possible to shoot w/o string slapping so bad it looked like a guy was tortured.  I don't know how I ever hit a thing with that bow!

My first bow quiver was the rubber one that clamped on the limbs with wire arms, and the hood clamped onto an arrow. Product liability wasn't much of an issue back then.  Bear sold an inexpensive broadhead hip quiver, which I used most of the time.

When I was 12, I was sharpening a Razorhead with that little plastic handled sharpener Bear sold, and was really honking down to get it extra sharp when the handle broke on the down stroke.
Ran my thumb down the length of the blade and it only stopped cutting when it hit bone.  Taped it up so my folks wouldn't see (that would have gotten me a "licking" with a belt or willow switch).  Probably would have been worth it to get the stitches as to this day the scar splits open a couple times a year, regular as clockwork.

My first "real bow", which I got in the early 70's and shot until I bought a compound in the early 80's was a 52" 45#@28" Shakespeare Sierra I bought new for $28. In HS I coveted a Bear or one of those beautiful & radical Pearsons, but times were hard and money hard to come by.  Only guys whose families had money shot bows like that.

I lived for bowfishing.  I would ride my bike 30 miles round trip to the Rapidan Dam to arrow carp.  When I got older, if we heard of a slough or creek where they were running about anywhere in southern Minnesota and could scratch up a few bucks gas money, we were there.

My first "big" kill was a very large boar coon a buddies shepherd had treed.  Shot him with the Sierra & a Herter's 2 blade.  He fell out of the tree with the arrow sticking out both sides, the dog met him in mid air, and a short but ugly fight was on.  I have no clue how the dog didn't get cut up by the broadhead!

[swampdrummer]

I'm only 42 but I've been involved in archery of some form since I was pretty young.

Started out with a red fiberglass bow. Think it was probably a bear. One of those combos one could buy at Kmart.

I remember in cub scouts we had archery as a merit badge ( I think) We would shoot a couple of times a week and at the end of the "season" there would be a competition with trophies involved. I was shooting so good in my age class that my cub leader wanted to move me up to the next higher age bracket for the competition. I remember being pretty proud about that! But On the big day I choked and came in last. Kinda soured me on shooting competively.....

Killed a lot of armadillos and other assorted critters with that little red bow. Moved up to a compound around 12 or 13 and my first big game animal was a wild hog. Stayed with the compound all thru my teens and killed a mess of deer and hogs.
Joined the army in 86 and usually managed to hunt at least a little wherever I went. Killed deer in Kansas,Loisianna, Georgia.

Got out in 93 and came back home. Hunted my first season back home on public land  and was totally dismayed at the number of  people crowded into what had been my old stomping grounds... I quit hunting completely......

Fast forward to 2009 and my lovely wife and I bought a place in Venus Fl. 20 acres with a small cabin. Surrounded by hundreds of acres of swamps, woods, agriculture. I knew I was back where I belonged.
Started shopping for a new bow and in the years between 93 and 2009 the compound bow had become something I couldn't wrap my mind around any longer.
My old memories of that simple red fiberglass bow got me looking at recurves again. Did they even exist? Could you even buy one? Internet research lead me here and I'm back in the game with a new appreciation for the flight of the arrow, the simplicity of the stick bow and the true meaning of the hunt.
It's been a great ride , but I think I'm just now getting to the really good part.

[jess stuart]

Used to read Fred Bear stories in the mags.  I loved the old American Sportsman show.  I have owned several Wing and Groves recurves through the early years.  Unfortunatley none remain today, was dumb and sold or traded them all away.

[helo]

 These are great keep them coming this thread brings out our past and it is awesome to hear all of these memories