A Little More Sporting Heritage

I owe my father for, at a minimum, a love of reading, art, and natural history, and for the practice of keeping pigeons. But as regulars know he also passed on a love for sport and a taste for barely affordable expensive shotguns (I have published his 1954 pic with his Winchester Model 21 “Heavy Duck” double before, but will repeat below).

I have had less opportunity to follow him in such things as saltwater angling. But here he is on the cover of a 1957 Saltwater Sportsman (still in business, with its logo virtually unchanged!), off Green Harbor Mass, where I lived many years later. As I said recently to a correspondent, one of the delights in culling and shifting ones’ possessions and library is all the good forgotten stuff you find.



Below, Joseph Angelo Bodio with M21 and black duck, Concord River Mass, 1954.


4 comments

  1. Ahhh that's what he was doing after I was born…!!! Actually I love these pix and have been looking for a copy of this magazine in old book shops. See you soon, have lots' of show and tell…
    K

  2. These guys we called "dad" were the men who by their quiet strength and example helped set our moral compasses and calibrate our BS detectors. I would give anything to have one more fishing trip with my dad…Thanks for sharing this about yours. Gil

  3. My grandfather had nothing more than a high school degree, a good union job with a oil and gas company, and good collection of rifles, shotguns, steel traps, and fishing rods.

    He often said about others who had some prowess at hunting or fishing or living off the land that they "had a Ph.D. in the woods."

    The truth is he actually possessed several doctorates and many, many hours in post doc study.

    He would up with a post tended wells way out in the middle of nowhere– and he got the company to pay his mileage for riding a horse deep into the woods every morning.

    He had a rule for raising kids "If you hunt with 'em, you don't have to hunt for 'em." Both his sons and all his grandchildren were taken hunting and fishing from an early age. We learned to appreciate it all.

    No matter how long I live, I won't know as much about the natural world as he did. I can only live in his shadow, and try to pass on that which he was able to teach me.

    I remember when I was about 7 or 8 years old, he took me squirrel hunting, as he did every October, and he told me that there were people who wanted nothing more than to ban these activities. When I asked him why, he said that there were people who spent their whole lives in the city, never knowing what joys an crisp October morning with a .410 or a 12 gauge in hand could bring.

Leave a comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *