by Mart Allen
Trust and faith in truisms
Anyone who has read more than three of my columns knows I put a lot of faith in cliches. Call them what you will, to me they are more appropriately called truisms. I put as much trust and faith in them as I do in history. If people would let themselves be guided by them they would find they have less stress and strife in their lives along with those they interact with.
I drove my children and grandchildren to distraction reciting them, as did my parents a ...
by Mart Allen
Good news and bad news
The first thing I do every morning is turn on the news. Before he died early this year my best friend Morgan Roderick and I compared notes on the passing scene at least once a week. You see we both came from the old school and never ceased to be bummed out by the direction we saw the country headed in. One of our favorite analogies was to compare our versions of current mores with those of our respective parents. I shudder to think that if the trend continues ...
by Mart Allen
Fleeting thoughts on the passing scene
I must admit to being perplexed when I think about current happenings on the national scene. I was brought up in more demanding times that necessitated more personal responsibility. People were expected to work for everything they got out of life. From the very beginning at Plymouth Rock people had to struggle. We were a nation of immigrants and every newcomer was expected to carry their own freight if they were to live here. The recent Bosto ...
Most fish stories start with, "The big one got away." In this story it was a turkey that gets away. My 14 year old grandson Alec Gousset was introduced into the hunting fraternity on Saturday, April 20, the opening day of the youth turkey hunting season here in New York.
The story of turkey hunting here in the Adirondacks begins years earlier. I do not believe anyone can say for sure the exact date when a viable turkey season began in the Adirondack region. If memory serves me right it was some ...
by Mart Allen
Everybody has to make hard choices and some are harder than others. That's life. Life is much harder for some people than others. We have all heard the saying, "There, but for the grace of God, go I." We cannot pick or parents, sex, nationality or station in life. We take what we get and have to work our way from there. I have given a lot of thought to it and one of my earliest recollections was how lucky I was.
I was born in 1929 during what is thought to be one of the most tryin ...
By Mart Allen
There are some things you wonder about, especially when you get older. It's because the longer you live the more changes you see. Much of the changes I have seen in the technological aspects of life have been very positive. They have made life easier beyond comprehension. The things I wonder about the most are the cultural changes, and I fail to see how they are improving society.
Generally speaking every generation, at least in this nation, had it better than their forefathers, an ...
by Mart Allen
How hip are you when it comes to hunting and fishing? I used to be, but at 85, after years where I once considered myself as being with it, I feel like a greenhorn. When I worked my way into both sports it was a whole lot easier to work your way up to where you could consider yourself fairly knowledgeable in either field. It takes a lot more of everything today to consider yourself even halfway there especially if you are as old as I am.
In my day the only professionals in either f ...
Raccoons and I go back a long way. As a devotee to the natural world, my interactions and interests in raccoons goes back before I was old enough to have any contact or dealings with them personally. I came from a family of outdoorsmen. Hunting, trapping and fishing became the defining interest in my life along with my earliest concepts of what life itself is. Anything connected to all three pursuits commanded my waking moments. As an example, I well remember my first day of kindergarten forming ...
Varying hares
The varying hare is a creature of the north. The Adirondacks with its extremes of cold, snow and rugged terrain provides ideal conditions for their survival. They are considered a game animal and a popular one especially with hound owners. I am writing this on the last day of the hunting season for them in New York. I would like to be able to tell you that I was taking advantage of that fact and out with my grandson, son-in-law and their dog Lilly, as they are, but I am not. ...
Diversity
If you have not already met them, let me introduce you to Harri and Jatinder two of Old Forge's hardest working business people. They are the managers of the Runway convenience store, formerly the Byrne Dairy. Harri and Jatinder are married to each other and came here from India. They came for what they hoped would be a better life. They are nearing a one year anniversary date from when Byrne Dairy changed hands and they took over the management.
They, of course, are well known to the ...
It was Feb. 27, 2013 on my way to Tupper Lake and with no companion to share my thoughts with I began to think about the present. In so doing, I naturally compared it with the past and my past goes back a long way. Given the present state of affairs, and the memories I have of the past, my personal feelings are that everyone should be concerned.
As I have progressed through eighty odd years of life my personal perceptions of life were based on principals founded on common sense and proven correl ...
You cannot say squirrel around our house without causing pandemonium. We have two dogs that are fine tuned to pursuing the swift little acrobats of the animal world. I swear their thoughts are focused on them every waking moment and asleep as well. They are hunters first and foremost and never let us forget it.
Dutch and Eika are our two wire-haired pointing griffon household pets. I call them household pets because that is what they are in every sense of the word. No place is sacrosanct in our ...
It is particularly hard for a political pundit in this day and age to have a legitimate political opinion. Their reasoning, instead of being answered with legitimate debate, is more often answered by casting aspersions on their personal character. The pendulum swings both ways but it appears to me to be much harder to examine problems affecting ethnic or gender based groups without one side or the other resorting to personal attacks instead of directly debating the issue with facts and reason. I ...
Oh to be a kid again. I cannot get over how much better life is for the kids today than it was when I was growing up. As I reflect back on my own life and that of my grandchildren I have mixed emotions. I would not like to have my grandchildren have to go through what I did growing up. At the same time I have to say I cherish the memories of my childhood.
First of all, I treasure the memory of the people I grew up with. As I look back today I have unstinted admiration for the character they proj ...
I have a friend who gave me one of those gift shop mementos that states, “Discover wildlife: keep the grandchildren for the weekend.” When you are our ages I would say that is a pretty fitting axiom. We have had our share of grandchildren with eight grandchildren and three great-grandchildren. We have had fewer than two years of fifty-five years of wedded bliss without daily contact with our children or grandchildren. One hears a lot of references to the real world but nothing is mor ...
I sense an aura of uneasiness throughout the general public’s perception of the nation’s future. There are two differing views about the way the nation and the world’s prospects look, depending on which way the political winds blow. At my age I have seen enough of the ebb and flow of political fortunes to know that like the oceans tide, it’s a never ending flow.
I, like everyone who takes the time and effort to carefully review current affairs and balance them against hi ...
Sometimes life is hard. John Wayne said it’s even harder if you are stupid. Sometimes I wonder about that when I see how some people fare. Otherwise, where did the old cliche, “Ignorance is bliss” originate from? I tend to believe life is hard throughout its many stages if you live it right.
At 85 I am awfully close to the final stage. Nothing about my personage is operating as well as it did in the past. I was prepared for and cognizant that the physical aspects would be compr ...
This is in response to my two previous recent columns on deer feeding from an interested reader who is also an Adirondack camp owner. Basically he wanted to know my opinion on whether or not I believe the ban on feeding should be lifted. He submitted a time outline of the DEC decision to institute the ban initially along with his request. The ban was one of other safeguards put in place to prevent the spread of chronic wasting disease in New York.
In 2002 New York initiated a statewide CWD surve ...
“Another day, another dollar,” used to be a common saying when a dollar was a day’s pay. I am old enough to remember hearing my mother and father discussing my father picking up some work filling silo in the fall and getting paid a dollar a day. They were not complaining about it but talked in glowing terms about what they could use the money for. Any money they got in those days was desperately needed for bare necessities. It is heartening to know that even the poorest of peop ...
In last week’s column I discussed the recent ruling by a judge that described the DEC’s regulations on deer feeding in New York State as “hopelessly vague” and overturned the conviction of a Sullivan County man for illegally feeding deer. I heard stories of the actions of one local conservation officer’s overzealous interpretations of the law that confirms the decision was the correct one. One woman was told she could not display pumpkins and corn stalks as Hallowee ...
No other area residents know more about the DEC regulations banning the feeding of deer than Old Forger’s. Locals have felt the heat of the DEC in the matter for over a decade. It was in the forefront of the news long before it was being discussed in the rest of the state. I well remember the heat DEC gave Andy Bozek who had a place on Fletcher Point Road into the channel between the Pond and First Lake. I also remember the protest by the public for the summons he was given. He became a lo ...
I am starting this column off by asking readers if they remember the classic World Series bouts between the Yankees and Dodgers beginning in 1947 and running off and on during the Fifties. Then it occurred to me that those of us alive in that time period are few and far between to say nothing of the select few who were baseball fans. If you are you may remember the classic retort, “Wait until next year,” every time the Dodgers got edged out. How can one remember inconsequential thing ...
We stopped into Miller’s store over at Beaches Bridge for some of Mrs. Miller’s homemade doughnuts a while back. For those of you not familiar with the store it is a family owned business featuring bulk food items and specialty meats along with several other homemade items such as baked beans, salads and baked goods. To the hunting fraternity, Miller’s is known as the largest processors of deer in the area. Hunters take their deer kills there to be skinned, cut up, proces ...
Asians revere and honor age. They also respect tradition and family units. Americans do too, but not nearly to the extent that most of the older cultures do. At 85 I have seen a great many trends come and go and would have to say a continuing lack of respect, in my opinion, is responsible for many of the ills we suffer through today. I have also learned the ramifications incumbent with loss of physical faculties. State of mind is one of those faculties and just as important as any of the others.
...
I ended last week’s column pointing out how military life and travel broadens one’s mind. Mine was broadened in a way that has never let me forget. I had no idea, until years later, the effect it had on me. The military and travel added to the experience but people and their culture provided the lasting effect.
It was in the forties and I was part of the Army occupation force in Japan. I was stationed in Northern Honshu in a sparsely occupied rural sub-marginal farming region. We wer ...
When I was a kid I used to hear a lot of chatter about broadening your mind, especially from the intelligentsia. It was the overriding reasoning behind Latin being a requirement for most any college degree worth its salt. It broadened your mind. It was the overriding reason I hated the thought of furthering my education. I like to think of myself first and foremost as being a practical man. I kept asking myself why waste time and money pursuing a course I could put to little practical use in lat ...
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