My Mentor

[Outdoor Writer]

20 hours ago, 10Turkeys said:

I've posted this before but at Randalls gun shop on 51st and Olive, there is a varmit calling trophy in there with Del's name on it. I met him a couple of times. I've heard a couple of the old timers say that some of those coyotes should have been checked for tire marks with those contest, then they would laugh.

I went back and reread that thread. Here's a couple of my meesages that would have been tips to "My Mentor." 

Yup. I recall him writing about his bear calling exploits before that method became very popular with the crowd. Ironically, I killed my first bear by calling it in with a Circe jackrabbit call near Cibeque Ridge on the WMA res in the 1960s before the tribe managed hunting. It was by accident, though, because I was trying to lure in a lion after I had seen its fresh tracks the day before while I was concentrating on killing a gobbler. 

 
I still have the wooden one that I used on the bear. It was given to me in the 1960s by Jack Cain -- the brain behind Circe right here in Buckeye. He and a few others started the calling craze in AZ in the 1950s and organized The Arizona Varmint Callers. They held regular contests and set up the world championship. 

It's sort of humorous that we're discussing this now, because a couple weeks ago after mention of the Lee Bros, I was going to start a thread with the title of "Tales & Legends From the Past." It was going to be sort of a trip down memory lane for me from the 1960s on. One of the first mentions would have been my main hunting mentor from that era who was a legend in the calling world. He taught me how to call and was chasing his turkey on the res while I tried to entice the lion after already tagging my bird.. 

Given the general tone on this site lately, however, I decided not to start the discussion. Like most others, it would have been side tracked with a lot of inane blabbing. 

This is the bear from the res:
 

[Outdoor Writer]

On 11/18/2020 at 9:12 PM, biglakejake said:

Thank You Tony!!  called in most everything starting about 1972 with my partner Bob Kyhn and my trusty old Circe..  predators plus cow elk, mule deer, buck pronghorn, owls, hawks, bear and javalina.  almost got eaten by a bunch of unleashed dogs at midnight in east mesa one time with nothing but harsh language to defend ourselves with.  oh and a few chupacabra down on the border in 36a/b/c.  they looked like coyotes but did not have any hair.

lee

So I did a bit of googling and came up with this progression:

The Arizona Varmint Callers Assoc. started in 1957.
The Estrella Varmint Club began in 1959.
In 1962 the Tucson Varmint Callers joined the association.
The Mesa Varmint Callers were formed in 1964 as a chapter of the AVCA.
In 1967 the AVCA disbanded and reorganized as the Phoenix Varmint Callers Inc. (PVCI is still around today and meets at the AmericanLegion on 57th Dr. in Glendale)
In 1976 the Tucson Varmint Callers became known as the Southern Arizona Wildlife Callers (still around and meets at the PSE building on N. Fairview)
In 1995 the Mesa chapter was renamed the Arizona Predator Callers ( still exists and meets at the Fratrenal Order of Police Lodgeon E. Main)

There might have been others around the state; do you recall any of them? 

[Outdoor Writer]

On 11/18/2020 at 2:32 PM, Swivelhead said:

 I was thinking Lew Early but he was too young.

Okay, help me with this one. My addled brain can't recall him. 

[biglakejake]

I went to mesa varmint callers meetings 75-79 without joining and then joined Arizona Trappers Association 1979-1984.

[Outdoor Writer]

34 minutes ago, biglakejake said:

I went to mesa varmint callers meetings 75-79 without joining and then joined Arizona Trappers Association 1979-1984.

That's about what I did with the AVCA. I attended a couple meetings and calling contests with Sam but couldn't get enthused about making hunting into a competitive sport, so I didn't join. That's the same reason I fished only one or two organized bass tournaments. 

Trapping is one discipline I never tried, mostly because it seemed to take a lot of time to do properly. 

[trophyseeker]

On 11/19/2020 at 9:46 AM, Outdoor Writer said:

His son was Bill Dudley. More later on him. I have a couple fires to put out. 🤣

Waiting patiently..............😉

[Swivelhead]

On 11/21/2020 at 7:11 AM, Outdoor Writer said:

Okay, help me with this one. My addled brain can't recall him. 

" I was thinking Lew Early but he was too young".

Lew Early won a world championship in the 60's.  Not sure if it was a hunting contest or a calling contest.  The instructions that came with Circe calls had his name listed (as well as many others noted in this thread).  Lew was a client of my fathers during that time period.  At my fathers request, Lew let loose with a calling sequence in my dad's office.  Dear old dad was impressed.

[Big Tub]

BTW: I was going to guess Bill Sizer but that is a little late for this dance.

[Outdoor Writer]

2 hours ago, Swivelhead said:

" I was thinking Lew Early but he was too young".

Lew Early won a world championship in the 60's.  Not sure if it was a hunting contest or a calling contest.  The instructions that came with Circe calls had his name listed (as well as many others noted in this thread).  Lew was a client of my fathers during that time period.  At my fathers request, Lew let loose with a calling sequence in my dad's office.  Dear old dad was impressed.

Cool. Thanks.

[Outdoor Writer]

Just now, Big Tub said:

BTW: I was going to guess Bill Sizer but that is a little late for this dance.

Oh, another old friend, but I never hunted with him that I can recall. If I did, it would have been for dove or quail, along with my photography mentor, Jim Tallon.  Bill wrote a pamphlet on taking care of game in the field. He passed away about 12-15 years ago. 

[Outdoor Writer]

5 hours ago, trophyseeker said:

Waiting patiently..............😉

Okay, already. 😂 

Bill Dudley worked at Goodyear Aerospace as an electrician, and he liked to party hard. Now all the minute details are somewhat foggy, but this is the best I remember from what Sam later related.  

Bill got pretty drunk and rowdy. I seem to recall that a bar fight ensued. The Phx police were called, arrested Dudley and threw him in the back of one of those old-type paddy wagons, that was basically a PU truck with a box on the back. Off to the downtown jail they went. When they got there, Bill Dudley was either already dead or very close to it. He died of CO2 poisoning. They later found that the truck had a faulty exhaust system, and the lawsuit that followed cost the city a lot of money.  

Now you know the rest of the story. 

[trophyseeker]

18 hours ago, Outdoor Writer said:

Okay, already. 😂 

Bill Dudley worked at Goodyear Aerospace as an electrician, and he liked to party hard. Now all the minute details are somewhat foggy, but this is the best I remember from what Sam later related.  

Bill got pretty drunk and rowdy. I seem to recall that a bar fight ensued. The Phx police were called, arrested Dudley and threw him in the back of one of those old-type paddy wagons, that was basically a PU truck with a box on the back. Off to the downtown jail they went. When they got there, Bill Dudley was either already dead or very close to it. He died of CO2 poisoning. They later found that the truck had a faulty exhaust system, and the lawsuit that followed cost the city a lot of money.  

Now you know the rest of the story. 

Man that's crazy. I was just a little kid in the 1960's so don't really have a good memory of that era when Sam and Bill Dudley were prominent figures. 

19 hours ago, Outdoor Writer said:

Oh, another old friend, but I never hunted with him that I can recall. If I did, it would have been for dove or quail, along with my photography mentor, Jim Tallon.  Bill wrote a pamphlet on taking care of game in the field. He passed away about 12-15 years ago. 

Don't remember Sizer, but Tallon's name rings a bell. Did his photos appear in magazines or...???

[Outdoor Writer]

On 11/23/2020 at 10:16 AM, trophyseeker said:

Man that's crazy. I was just a little kid in the 1960's so don't really have a good memory of that era when Sam and Bill Dudley were prominent figures. 

Don't remember Sizer, but Tallon's name rings a bell. Did his photos appear in magazines or...???

At the risk of being called a narcissist, I'll fill in some blanks.

From the late 50s on into the 70s, varmint calling & hunting became really popular. A lot of clubs cropped up in CA, TX and even CO. Bill won four world championship calling events and probably would have won more had he not died when he did. Sam was an expert caller, as well and excelled at the hunting end. He often used a 20 ga. shotgun that he called "Singin' Sally."

Tallon had been a guide at the Grand Canyon, worked in the I&E dept. at the AGFD for a time and eventually became a freelance, prolific photographer with photos in about every major outdoor magazine and most notably as a regular contributor to AZ Highways. If I had to label him in regards to myself, I'd call him a "life changer." He was also my link to Bob Hirsch, Bill Sizer, Steve Galiziola & Wes Keyes -- all folks he knew from when he had worked at the AGFD and later introduced me to them.

I first met Jim one afternoon in either 1967 or '68 when I was hanging out at Bellows Sporting Goods on Camelback & 27th Ave. Ed Bellows, the owner, introduced us, and somehow the topic of why Jim's wife's car wouldn't start came up. At the time he lived just east of 35th Ave., north of what was then Grand Canyon College. So I offered to go and take a look at the car, an early 1960s era VW bug. It was a simple fix: no spark because the points weren't opening. As of way of thanks, Jim invited my wife and I to dinner the next night. It was the start of a friendship that would last until his death in 2010 at 85 yrs. old.  During the 1980s, we usually met for coffee every morning at the Smitty's at 35th Ave. & Bethany. That ended when Jim moved to Ahwatukee.

I was doing a lot of hunting back then, so when we'd be together, I often related some hunt or another and sometime showed him a crummy snapshot taken with one of the cheapie cameras avialble then. To this day, I remember what he told me after a few months; he said, "You need to buy a decent camera and start putting your experiences down on paper." I took that suggestion to heart; a few days later I went downtown to the Jewel Box and bought a used Minolta SRT101 camera with a normal 55mm lens for $75, and within a year or so, my photo gear expanded greatly. As for putting stuff on paper, that was easy since my college majors were biology and journalism. And I even owned a manual typewriter -- the "computer" of old.

Although he was a bit older than me, Jim sort of took me 'under his wing,' especially with the photography aspects. And after a few months I was writing regularly for 'Outdoor Arizona,' which was published by the same company as 'Phoenix' magazine. The editor of  both was the late Manya Winsted, who eventually went on to 'Phoenix Home & Garden.' Thus, my outdoor writing career began, and when I finally had enough stuff published, Jim had me join the Outdoor Writers Association of America (OWAA). 

After we bought our resort at Vallecito Lake in CO in 1976, Jim visited twice -- once to use my entire family for a photo shoot in the Valley of the Gods (Utah) for a Winnebago motor home brochure and another time to pick me up for my first visit to Yellwostone NP during the elk rut, which would be only one of many in the years that followed.

This was also the time I made what I decided was the worst trade of my life. In the early 1970s I managed the Pennys sporting goods dept. at Tower Plaza shopping center. While there I bough a beautiful Charles Daley O/U 20 ga. The wood was spectacular. I swapped it with Tallon for a motor driven Minolta camera body that was all manual. For wildlife photos, it was a royal pain, compared to the other auto everything bodies I had in my arsenal. I found out through her FB page that the Daley was passed on to Jim's daughter, Rachel, who was born the year after I first met him and eventually became a NP park ranger at Petrified Forest NP.  She's now well into her 50s and is still using the gun to hunt. 

It was on the YNP trip in 1976 that I first met Jim Zumbo. Tallon and I were sitting in a pullout in his van watching a herd of elk when Zumbo and his friend, Gabby Barrus, pulled in behind us. Zumbo had recognized the van and walked up to Tallon's window. He had met Tallon at an OWAA conference. By the time they were done talking, Zumbo had invited us to dinner in the trailer they had parked in one of the campgrounds. I wouldn't see Zumbo again until 1980 when I attended my first OWAA conference, which was one of many. I became quite active in that organization, serving three years on the board along with Zumbo, and several years on both the ethics and membership committees, the latter for vetting applicants' credentials. In the meantime, Zumbo and I became good friends. By 1984, I was selling enough articles and photos to quit my sales rep job and go fulltime freelance. I never looked back. Eventually I had stints as the AZ state editor of Outdoor Life for 7 years and as a contributing editor of Arizona Hunter & Angler for 10+ years. In addition to features and the Last Shot column for AH&A,  I also wrote the 'Lake of the Month' feature under my "pen name," Lou Migali -- my late grandfather who was a mentor of sorts, too.  

In 2005, at the SHOT show in LV and the SCI show in Reno by tele-conference call, 200+ of our peers elected Zumbo, me and seven other writers as the steering committe to form a new writers' organization. We all travelled to the White Oak Plantation in AL to do the task, which became the Professional Outdoot Media Assoc. (POMA)  The steering committee served as the first board of directors. In the photo below, two of the nine are missing: Laurie Lee Dovey & Jim Casada.

As I wrote earlier, meeting Jim Tallon that fateful afternoon was life-changing.  😉 

Now, I'm tired of trying to remember stuff for now. When I get my mind back together, I'll provide some back story about Sam. Stay tuned. 

 

 

 

 

[Outdoor Writer]

On 11/23/2020 at 10:16 AM, trophyseeker said:

Don't remember Sizer, but Tallon's name rings a bell. Did his photos appear in magazines or...???

Here's a good article written in 2009 (a year before his death) about Jim. It paints a nice image of who he was. 

Local wildlife photographer has seen – and shot – pretty much everything

            

[Outdoor Writer]

On 11/16/2020 at 11:45 AM, 10Turkeys said:

 Your mentor wasn't a taxidermist was he.

Speaking of which....I meant to address this earlier.

Though he wasn't a mentor of mine per se, the taxidermist Sam Dudley got me to using when I killed my bear while he and I were on the WM res hunting spring turkey was Fred Campbell. He and his wife Louise did their thing out of their house in Avondale across from the high school. Louise made most of the forms he used. In the ensuing years, they did a couple mule deer and one Coues buck, a turkey (now discarded due to bugs), two antelope, a javelina, bobcat rug, the bear rug and my son's Kaibab doe.

When I returned to AZ after our 3-year Colo. experiment, Fred had passed away.  What I remember most was their extemsive collection of indian artifacts. They had several large glass cases in the reception area that were filled with arrowheads and other such items. Outside on the driveway, long one wall of the house was a lineup of dozens of metates and grinding tools. I never counted but would guess there were at least 25 of them. Fred told me they had found most everything around that the greater Phx area and the White Tanks over many years. 

If I recall, they named a park in Avondale in his honor.