Since the first grade, when I had learned to read sufficiently well enough to do so, I’ve been on the loose among the stacks, free to read anything I could understand — and it is amazing how quickly understanding can grow.
My favorite reading has always been adventure stories, and it’s interesting how practically everything written and worth reading is an adventure story one way or another. Those writers were who I wanted to emulate, even if I didn’t know it yet, and my favorite of those was Robert Ruark, with a key tip of the hat to Corey Ford. Both were lifelong enthusiasts of the outdoors, through from different angles of participation.
Ruark was from a rural North Carolina background. That background would serve him well throughout his writing life. He served in the Navy in World War II, then set himself up as a belt-level journalist in Washington, D.C.
He did reporting on military justice following the conclusion of the war, on the application of the Marshall Plan for renovating Europe, and made himself a thorn in the side of any brass who would come through the buffet line of opportunity and over-serve himself.
Ford lived in Hanover, New Hampshire, and reveled in a metropolitan background. Ford’s work appeared in Vanity Fair and The New Yorker. He was a satirist with a clever eye Christopher Marlowe would have coveted. His books were marked with a gregarious sense of humor, a love of dogs, and a love of underdogs.
He was often a welcome guest of the Algonquin Roundtable, a collection of notable wits who met regularly in New York City’s Algonquin Hotel for lunch and laughter. Its members included playwrights, novelists and comedians. Dorothy Parker, W.C. Fields, Will Rogers, Edna Ferber and Robert Benchley were among them.
Ford was quite different from Ruark as a person, something subtleties in their work showed. Taken together, Ruark and Ford provided readers with a brilliant experience each month.
In the issue of Field & Stream for February, 1953, the two were among writers launching new monthly columns. The issue’s cover art was a painting of a hammerhead shark tying into a hooked-up tarpon, which is appropriate. The two would hit the outdoor-reading public with a tremendous force of body and sharpness of tooth.
The time from the late 1940s through the late 1960s was a golden age for magazines and for freelance writers in general. Ruark secured for himself a happy contract for a three-times-a-week newspaper column through a press syndicate, but he spent much of the rest of his time enjoying hunting adventures, then selling stories drawn from those adventures to magazines. One thing he delivered for Field & Stream Magazine was a regular column called The Old Man and the Boy. This column debuted alongside a similar new column written by Ford that was loosely called Stories of the Lower Forty Hunting, Shooting and Inside Straight Club.
For his columns, Ford used his own experiences with yankee hunters, establishing his fictional club in Hardscrabble, Vermont. Ruark mined his own childhood memories for writing The Old Man and the Boy.
Ruark used a literary device I first saw from him, and so think of as his, though I’m sure it’s not. He set up stories with the central character or characters swept into the guise of a single unnamed figure. This preserves the maximum amount of space for storytelling while eliminating the confusion of tracking who was whom. I have adopted the use of this device for my own. In my writings of my own childhood influences, the Old Man is left unnamed. The device is Ruark’s, but the stories, and the experiences that formed them, are legitimately my own.
Everyone who saw the movie Raiders of the Lost Ark imagined himself discovering precious metals and dazzling jewels but, I tell you, putting hands on an out-of-print collection of The Old Man and the Boy, or on any Ford collection that includes The Road to Tinkhamtown, results in the same striking sense of wonder for me.
Ruark’s column ran for 106 installments. Ford’s column continued for some time longer, but he did his very best job with a story named The Road to Tinkhamtown. In it, Ruark’s Old Man would agree, Ford had done a mighty good day’s work.
As a present, I encourage you to google “Road to Tinkhamtown, Sporting Classics Daily” and read the story that link delivers. You don’t have to subscribe to read it – just “X” closed the Subscribe box that pops up if you want.
Merry Christmas.
Kevin Tate is a freelance writer. Email [email protected]
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