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All dressed up for Easter services at Brown Hill Church, with my sisters Muriel (Wood) and Diana (Chadwick)
Here is your chance to get a free turkey call and eat a free fish dinner.
Last December I started trying to help an old country church to get going again. It is the Brown Hill country church a few miles east of Houston, Mo where I first went to church at the age of 5 or 6 years. For a couple of years due to the Covid mess, it was closed. It now has an interim preacher and several people attending, and hopefully it will grow again to what it once was.
On Sunday, April 16, I will be there for an 11:00 to noon service in which I will speak for about 15 or 20 minutes on an aspect of the Bible I think you may find inspiring, and then we will enjoy some old-time gospel music. The music will be great, with three ladies who have been singing together a long time, all expert piano players.
When the service ends we will go out to the pavilion and have a free dinner and fish fry. Everyone is welcome even if you do not make it to the church service. If there are ladies who want to bring a covered dish, I would surely welcome that. I will catch the fish the week before the event, so they will be fresh. If you do not like fish, we will also have chicken for you and maybe some baked groundhog if I can get one that early in the groundhog season!!
As an added attraction, I will be making turkey calls after the dinner and giving them away, teaching folks how to be an expert turkey caller like me. But then, if you have one of those calls, you’ll become an expert too. They are the best turkey calls ever made; the ones I have used to call in hundreds of wild gobblers. And that is the truth, I am not joking about that.
I need to know how much food to bring, so PLEASE LET ME KNOW IF YOU ARE COMING by calling my secretary at 417 777 5227 and telling her how many will be with you.
And now for something more serious... When I put out the publication, “The Truth About the Missouri Department of Conservation” I knew I would face some intense criticism for doing it. We published 5000 copies and we still have 1000 left. They are free to anyone who will pay the postage.
At a recent gun show where the publication was being handed out, a conservation agent told many that I was an enemy of the MDC because I had wanted to be a game warden and “couldn’t cut it”.
You need to know that at no time ever did I apply to ANY Conservation Agency for ANY job. I accepted the position of Chief Naturalist for the state of Arkansas right out of college, and immediately began writing weekly outdoor columns for the states largest newspaper, the ‘Arkansas Democrat’. That same year I began writing outdoor feature stories for Outdoor Life and Field and Stream magazine.
After a year I was offered a job for the Conservation Federation of Missouri by its Director, Ed Stegner. I considered it but turned it down at the advice of James Keefe, who was the Missouri Conservation Commission’s magazine editor and director of Information and Education.
If I had applied to the MCC back then, (the agency was a fore-runner to today’s MDC) I would have been accepted, and Mr. Keefe let me know that. In college I had written articles for his magazine, and had been writing weekly outdoor columns for the Columbia newspaper while attending M.U. But I wanted to be a professional Naturalist.
I have never ever applied anywhere for a job… not ever!! In Arkansas and Missouri, I was offered jobs without applying for them. I did not go to two colleges for five years, getting a degree in wildlife management from the University of Missouri, to become a game warden!! Today’s game wardens do not need a college education, and back then, some didn’t even have a high school education. Among them were some great men with more knowledge of the outdoors than any of today’s agents have. I know, because I accompanied many of them in their work as a teen-ager and learned from them, and looked up to them and their dedication. Bland Wilson, Ron Roellig, Virgil Davis… I just want folks to know that those insinuations about my background flow freely now, and are not true. I write the truth about what I see now, and what I write, I can back up.
BUT… in the 70’s and 80’s I wrote hundreds of articles about MCC and MDC projects that were favorable. Articles about wise conservation projects and practices that aren’t seen today. I have those newspaper clippings to show anyone who doubts that. But those people, and that organization, are long past.
I could have easily became a conservation agent, but they then and now make a fraction of what I make as a self employed outdoor writer and naturalist. As a retiring agent a few years back told me…”Don’t let those stories bother you. We are asked to lie in court… so when would we be expected to be truthful?”
Finally we have our computer site straightened out so that readers can see weekly photos and additional columns. I am told that the site, larrydablemontoutdoors carries some columns and photos from years ago.
I want folks to know that because there are articles on that website that cannot be printed in newspapers, because of content or length or whatever. Check it out each week. Write to me at Box 22, Bolivar, Mo 65613 or email me at lightninridge47@gmail.com
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