We called him Papaw Moore. He was my dad’s dad, Paris Armstrong Moore, farmer and sometime carpenter. He was a quiet man. Long after he had passed away, my dad once asked his aunt (my grandfather’s sister) what Papaw was like as a boy. She thoughtfully answered, ‘He was a mild boy’. I was there, and I’ll never forget how, for me, that completely captured his temperament. I can honestly say, I don’t think I ever saw him angry or raise his voice. He seemed to take everything in stride.
Just from looking at him you’d never know he was blind in one eye. You’d never know it by the way he drove his car either! The road from my house to the farm was narrow and winding, to say the least. His white Chrysler Coupe would just float around those curves and before you knew it, we’d be at the farm.
Evenings there were spent catching lightning bugs and putting them in Mason jars to be placed by our beds that night. Or I’d sit with Papaw in his chair with a big bowl of popcorn watching Gunsmoke.
My first introduction to outdoor magazines came from my grandfather. Although I never knew him to have a current subscription to any of them, he did have back copies of Outdoor Life, Field and Stream, and Sports Afield dating from the early to mid 1960’s. When visiting, I would often fish these neatly stacked magazines out of his closet and lay for long periods of time pouring over the stories, photographs, and illustrations. I was especially fascinated by the dramatically drawn, ‘This Happened to Me’ stories in Outdoor Life, which chronicled harrowing wild animal encounters or a survival story of someone battling the elements.
As you can see from the photo, I grew up with that influence and exposure to ‘outdoor life’. It was genuinely loved and simply passed on from my grandfather.