Jul 9, 2021 5 min read

In the last four months, I have lost three good friends. That is the price you pay when you get old. The only upside being you have less enemies.

I hunt and fish. That is the secret to my longevity. The other passion is baseball. For instance, in the 1920s, there was a second baseman named Rogers Hornsby, who over a five-year period batting averages were over 400. Baseball was an early passion and we played it, watched it, and lived it until I discovered hunting and fishing.

The late Mario D’Amico might have said it best when he stated emphatically, “We have lived through the best years of hunting and fishing.” It was in my early years that I discovered another pastime to distract me from playing baseball. Many times, we would play double headers and I was playing third base. I was struck in the abdomen by the ball that took a bad hop. When I approached the bench, the coach yelled at me to stop looking at the girls watching the game, my other new pastime. It was around this time I started hunting rabbits. Then it would be pheasants. Today’s youth has probably never seen a Ringneck Pheasant in the wild or heard one talk.

I remember walking down Brehm Road in Eighty-Four with my dog, who got all in a tizzy. Out of the other side of that field, 17 Male ringnecks appeared. I know because instead of shooting them, I watched them fly. My father had taught me how to hunt rabbits, but I had to learn how to hunt pheasants. My .22 rifle at that time was a Mossberg 22M, my shotgun was an Ivar Johnson Champion. When we had the time between baseball games and dates, we would be found in the ponds on Hahn Road in Cecil, fishing for anything that bit. We would walk there on the railroad tracks from Hills Station.

Later after marriage, I lived in an apartment with a new neighbor next door, Dave George, who taught me much about fishing and hunting. The man loved to fish. We about cleaned out Canonsburg Lake. It was around this time I started hunting groundhogs with my Savage 340 in 222. Those were good years.

People do not realize there were no or very few whitetail deer in this area back then. They were all up North. To deer hunt, we would all travel to the mountains. Hunting camps were plentiful and not fancy like today’s camp. The first whitetail I saw, as most of my readers may already know, I spotted in 1956 while on my way to pick up the most beautiful girl I had ever seen. I rounded the bend by her house and there was a beautiful buck. I had never seen one in the neighborhood or anywhere except the mountains. Five minutes later, I met my beautiful wife. I think my reaction was about the same awe. I was struck twice in one day. The deer herd would slowly spread by separation moving into our area. Mother deer would shove one baby out and keep one home and, as time passes, the deer appear further and further out. That is how I became hooked on deer hunting to add to my list of growing things I hunted.

Turkeys followed as they were not prevalent in our area when I was young either. At the time, people hunted turkeys in Potter and McKean Counties. I remember clearly the first ones Eileen and I saw in our area. We sat and watched a small flock on a neighboring farm in our area. Afterward, we decided to wait two years before hunting any turkeys as they were new to the area, and we wanted them to get established here.

I remember the number of grouse in Greene County, too. They were plentiful and we would hunt them on the weekends. The nice thing about grouse hunting was the large numbers of them and they were noisy. You had a decent chance of seeing and shooting them. Nettle Hill in Greene County was the grouse hot spot at the time.

The roadsides were always full of hunters looking for quail, grouse, pheasant and rabbit. Most people hunted back then, and it would be unusual for someone not too. The fishing also was popular and good. I guess there was less meat available at the stores or maybe it was less money in the pocket for most families hunted to supplement their diet. Squirrels were hunted and of course groundhogs too. Everyday, I could hear hunters shooting and see them trooping about in the fields about my home. Today, this is not common. Mario had it right, I think, when he said we had picked the best time to live for hunting and fishing. We certainly enjoyed it and now that the woods and roadsides are so quiet and the game like pheasants and grouse have all but disappeared in our area. I think it is time for the ending of an era. The era of the small game hunter.

Now. if all this sounds sad. it is not meant to be. Change is upon us. Mother nature is always up to something. She will find a way to produce a new thing to interest the outdoorsperson of today. Today, the whitetail deer pays the bills for the Pennsylvania Game Commission as they are the most hunted. Hunting has changed a great deal over the years. Now it is big game that is the most interesting to most people and whitetail lead the parade. To an old timer this seems funny since that whitetail is the new animal on the scene and the old ones have disappeared.

George Block writes a weekly Outdoors column for the Observer-Reporter