Who remembers

D

don novicki

Active member
"The American Sportsman". Not that show from 2006 but the good one on Sunday afternoons back in the 60's. I can confidently say that show started the hunting fire for me, even though I didn't buy my first shotgun until I was 16 in 1970. Thereafter I always felt I was a duck hunter stranded in the land of deer hunting....
 
Yea if you watch that nitwit Chad Belding every move is calculated for maximum product placement. Reach for shells you see the box of Federals or whatever he shoots, highlight the Shotgun ( Benelli of course), highlight the camo, the boat, the pop up blind etc.,cooking duck breasts be sure to highlight the rub, the cooker, the charcoal, whatever, to make a buck. Its nauseating and I never watch that show anymore.
 
I remember it fondly . Always watched it Sunday afternoons when on. If I recall if a football game was aired it didn't come on. It was the filler for that time slot. Had the Greats on there hunting as guests. Especially waterfowl. Bing Crosby, John Wayne , Ted Williams and i,m sure many more I don,t recall names of. Was it Grits Gresham that was the narrator? I was but a kid being born in 55 but dad and I always watched it on CBS. I remember that because it was all we got on TV.
 
Used to watch a lot of the old hunting and fishing shows. The one's that always stood out to me that seemed to be regular people out fishing and being filmed was "Championship Fishing" with Virgil Ward and "The Sportsman's Friend" with Harold Ensley. Those shows were nothing but just a couple of people in a boat having a general conversation about fishing and life and catching a lot of fish. They only had a couple of sponsors. It just seemed very relaxing just sitting there watching the shows and wishing you were able to just fish with them one time and learn some good ole fishing knowledge.

Even though I do not like Bass fishing, he did do other type of fishing also, I did like to watch Bill Dance when he would have celebrities such as Terry Bradshaw, Mel Tillis, Jerry Reed, and Jerry Clower. They always had some hilarious staged stuff that they did for great entertainment.

I also liked In Fisherman.
 
My hunting & fishing buddies and I watched the show each week. We always commented on how good and informative it was. The show gave our lifestyle a boost in the right direction. Every once in awhile you will read about the show in articles in Gray's and Sporting Classics magazines. That show set the bar very high and no show has ever come close. The show had class something that is sorely missing in todays hunting and fishing shows. Coming up back then was the Golden Age of the Outdoors for folks of my generation, and I thank God for that. The Greatest Generation were our mentors long before Hunter Education courses. Back then you could carry a knife and pocket full of shells in your pockets at school cuz ya hunted before or after school. Unlike today, and that is sad.

my 2 cents
 
Loved it....we didn't have a TV, so I would go to a friend's house to watch. I believe is was aired on Sundays. Had a great influence on my developing quest for adventure. It was so different from many of the current "Whack 'em and stack 'em" shows. As Vince states, it certainly was the Golden Age for a certain generation.

I also enjoyed watching The Flying Fisherman when I could. Gadabout Gaddis had a cottage in our town that he fished for stripers and blues from. He was friends with a mentor of mine and was a Shakespeare rep. So my mentor had a bunch of white Shakespeare rods. I still have his little midge rod and his old Medalist 1492.
 
Yes as a kid I loved it. I have some old DVD's of some of the shows that I rewatch 2-3 times a year. Lee Wolf is my favorite. It's ironic that I used a 6' Fenwick fly rod for trout and salmon in Newfoundland in the 70's, and just several years ago read that Lee Wolf mostly used a 6' fly rod. Made me feel better for all the ridicule I got for a small rod back then. It was the only fly rod I had and could afford. Worked well for the small PA streams. Lee chasing bluefin tuna off Halifax in his 17' Peterborough wooden boat was impressive.
 
A good show from the late 70.s, early 80,s was The Southern Sportsman with the Zebra striped plane. Especially if you liked to cook what you killed or caught. Still have a cook book here from when he flew in and made an appearance at a local outdoor show. He always did some interesting outdoor fishing & hunting trips.
 
rfberan, short fly rods were all the rage in the 70's and were touted by Wulff and others as the more sporting way to fish. I watched the American Sportsman as a kid also and remember the episode you describe, where Wulff tied a fly with his hands. Him and Curt Gowdy were fishing in Nipigon for the huge brook trout. One of my favorite episodes had Bing Crosby and Phil Harris pheasant hunting in the midwest, singing a made up song between them back and forth as they walked. Another program I really liked was The Fishing Hole with Gerry MacGinnis. He had an unpretentious way of doing the program, always was interesting, and was centered around having a good time fishing and not about catching truckloads of fish. There was an episode about shad fishing on the Delaware with an assistant coach of Bobby Knights at Indiana, and I think his name was Conn Smyth or something like that. That guy came east every year to shad fish(it was clearly before college coaching was a year round financial business). The stuff today is mostly not worth watching, and I rarely do. Most of today's duck hunting programs are obscene spectacles of greed and volume, besides being a continuous commercial.
 
rfberan said:
Yes as a kid I loved it. I have some old DVD's of some of the shows that I rewatch 2-3 times a year. Lee Wolf is my favorite. It's ironic that I used a 6' Fenwick fly rod for trout and salmon in Newfoundland in the 70's, and just several years ago read that Lee Wolf mostly used a 6' fly rod. Made me feel better for all the ridicule I got for a small rod back then. It was the only fly rod I had and could afford. Worked well for the small PA streams. Lee chasing bluefin tuna off Halifax in his 17' Peterborough wooden boat was impressive.
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Love the Lee Wolf/Curt Gowdy episode in Labrador.
 
Alright Geezers now we're cooking .

Gadabout Gaddis and Lee Wulff did more to influence young folks to fly fish back then than anything else. Not only did they have style they were very good teachers and entertaining as well. Sometimes they caught fish and other times they did not yet they made it enjoyable. At that time Spin Fishing was all the rage. Fly fishing not common in many areas of the country and those men showed us the way. Lee Wulff invented the fishing vest and man o man did that ever catch on. Next thing ya know many of us had fishing vests, flyrods, fly reels and were asking the folks at the bait & tackle shops "do ya have such and such a fly? Do ya have midges?" They would look as ya like you were nutz.

The more that we discuss this the more good memories come flooding back. We are still those youngsters deep down inside our aging bodies.

Best regards
Vince
 
My good friend from N J was staying with us for a deer hunt in Solon Maine, back in the 1970's. We went up to Bingham to have lunch at Thompson's restaurant. Who walks in but Gadabout Gaddis. That made the best memory for my friend Tom. He didn't care if he got a deer or not , after meeting "The Flying Fisherman".
 
Bob Holzworth said:
My good friend from N J was staying with us for a deer hunt in Solon Maine, back in the 1970's. We went up to Bingham to have lunch at Thompson's restaurant. Who walks in but Gadabout Gaddis. That made the best memory for my friend Tom. He didn't care if he got a deer or not , after meeting "The Flying Fisherman".
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I believe that the airport in Bingham is named Gadabout Gaddis Airfield.
 
don novicki said:
"The American Sportsman". Not that show from 2006 but the good one on Sunday afternoons back in the 60's. I can confidently say that show started the hunting fire for me, even though I didn't buy my first shotgun until I was 16 in 1970. Thereafter I always felt I was a duck hunter stranded in the land of deer hunting....
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I miss those old shows. My dad and I watched religiously. In Fisherman was a favorite because it was filmed on waters we would fish on vacations. Times have sure changed.
 
Nice walk down memory lane.

Amazing how the shows now have better cameras, a better understanding of how to film, and are worse. But that mirrors the trend in both outdoor programs and outdoor writing.

The outdoor publications used to be the "me and Bob" stories - they set out to hunt ducks, or go fish trout, or whatever - and it was less about the catch than it was whatever happened along the way. The flat tire and getting it patched at the local garage, but they also made sandwiches like they used to with thick slabs of bread, and boy, howdy. It wasn't an informational list of what lake, what rod, reel, line, lure, boat, life vest, jacket, shoes, hat, trolling motor, sunglasses, etc. The hunting trips on film were less about shooting birds and more about the people...who didn't want to watch Bing Crosby shooting pheasants and listen to him make up a song as he walked? Or Lee Wulff casting to bigger brook trout than most of us even dreamed of? They were shows about the lifestyle, in places that most of us would never see, but it put the desire into us. Maybe I'd never go to Labrador to fish brook trout, but I could be out the door with the flyrod and casting to stream bred brown trout and maybe a few brookies in the upper stretch...catching a 13" native brook trout on a dry fly might be as close as I got, but I was there...

My grandparents were outdoor writers for "Midwest Outdoors" for decades and knew Jerry McInnis, Al Lindner and his brother, Dan Gapen, Jimmy Houston, and a bunch of the other notable fishing personalities of the 70's and 80's and into the 90's.

Ironically, it was "In Fisherman" and a couple of other groups that started to change that - they took the approach of breaking down lakes, structure, lures, etc. and started providing anglers with data and techniques. It became more of a "go here, this time of year, use these lures, catch fish". And as our ability to travel and incomes grew, the magazines started catering to that...

It's an interesting progression - we've almost gone backwards. It isn't about the fact that we might be actually going to Labrador, or the Gulf Coast to hunt redheads, or to Alaska to hunt harlequin or king eider...or just a few minutes away to fish a farm pond for bream and bass with one of our best friends. It is the results - limits of ducks, a B/C buck (even if the high fence is juuuuust off camera), huge trout or salmon or tarpon - and the external praises of people we don't even know to validate our prowess...and we have to discuss every aspect so those coming after can repeat it, rather than learn it and enjoy the experience.

Everything changes, and maybe I will be lucky enough to see some alternative, "retro" type publications be more than a running commercial.
 
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