Me fishing the Roubidoux in an old wooden johnboat in the 1970's
The other day I crossed the Roubidoux River and thought about Lane Davis. Lane was the longtime owner and editor of the Houston Herald newspaper and he hired me to paddle him down the Roubidoux, where he loved to fish. When I was about fourteen years old, I was a 50-cent-an-hour guide, and for local folks, one of my Dad’s wooden johnboats was included free. The Roubidoux River had about twice as much water in the ‘60’s and had lots of bass and goggle-eye.
I loved to read the outdoor magazines back then and write outdoor stories myself, for the guys in the pool hall to read. Lane got a kick out of that and he told me that he would use some of my stories in his newspaper. You cannot imagine how excited that made me. He printed the first newspaper column I ever wrote when I was about 17 years old, and made it a regular weekly column, “Summer on the Piney” and then “Fall on the Piney” and so forth as the seasons change.
I saved most everything I ever had published back then and I read one of those early columns the other day. It embarrassed me. I made some glaring mistakes, like the time I wrote that I had seen a golden eagle on the Piney. It had to be, I figured, since it was so big and dark, with no white head. Back then, bald eagles were seldom seen in the Ozarks, and I thought they all had white heads. I didn’t realize that an eagle larger than it’s parents, with dark plumage was just an immature bald eagle.
That help from Lane Davis got me started on a life as an outdoor writer. At Missouri University I got a job as a weekly columnist for the Columbia Missourian newspaper, and saved many of those columns as well. Then upon graduation in 1970 I went to work as the Outdoor Editor for the state's largest daily newspaper in Little Rock, Arkansas. Five years after my first column in Houston, I began to write regularly for Outdoor Life and Field and Stream magazines.
Last week I began to try to organize the newspaper columns I saved from the past, more than 6000 of them, published over the years in 200-plus newspapers in five states. With those, are more than 700 magazine articles published in about two-dozen magazines. What I have is a gigantic mess when it comes to organizing, and it is beyond my ability. There are many articles and features and columns I don’t even remember writing.
I put many of those magazine articles, mostly the ones that won awards, into two different books I published nearly 20 years ago. I am going to do more such books in the future. If you want to read about that first book I did in the 1970’s and what it is now worth on the internet, go to my website, larrydablemontoutdoors. This week I will put one of those columns I did for Lane Davis on that website. It comes from sixty years ago in my hometown paper, the Houston Herald. Thanks Mr. Davis, I will never forget you.
In December we will publish the last of my Lightnin’ Ridge magazines for subscribers. It will be a Christmas issue and if you contact my office before December 1, you can get one mailed to you for $8. I published the first of my magazines in 2003 and there have been more than 100 published since then. But it isn’t the last one I figure on doing, and many people have misunderstood that. It is the last I will publish on a regular seasonal basis for SUBSCRIBERS. I will publish a couple more in 2024 but those will be different in that we will no longer have a subscriber list. I have notified readers, in my fall magazine we put out in October, that if they get on a list of folks interested in reading the magazines of the future, that we will contact them when a new one is ready, or when I have a new book out. Anyone can get on that list just contact our office at 417-777-5227.
I will do some new books next year. One is a sort of biography of a writer-naturalist, entitled “The Life and Times of the Pool Hall Kid”. Another is entitled “The Justice of St. Clair County” which will cause your jaw to drop open if you read it… it is about corruption that was in the county's legal system about a sheriff who was keeping stolen merchandise in his barn, and that a judge there tried to arrange my murder. It will be the first I have written about it. Hard to believe, but true. Another book next year will be a collection of what readers have chosen as the best hundred of those 6000 newspaper columns. If you want to be notified when new magazines or books come out, contact me at Box 22, Bolivar, MO 65613 or lightninridge47@gmail.com. You can also call my office, 417-777-5227
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