OUR FIRST COMPOUND BOWS
An
unusual-looking bow sat in the corner of Fred Bear’s office in Grayling. He had
taken one look at it when it arrived at the office and dismissed it. “Who’d
ever want to buy a bow looking like that?” he asked.
The bow joined many others
that had been sent to Grayling during those years from inventors who thought
they had discovered the next giant leap in bow design and function. Many, like
this one, were really unusual-looking devices. But Papa Bear was having none of
it. He was always into the aesthetics and traditional clean lines of a bow that
at the same time provided dependable performance. Designing and producing
beautiful, high-quality recurve bows was his passion.
Then one day in the early
1970s a famous writer came to town. His name was James Dickey, and he had
written a book about archery that had been made into a very popular film of the
day titled “Deliverance.” Bear Archery later provided the archery equipment for
that film starring Burt Reynolds, Jon Voight and Ned Beatty. Bear Archery’s
regional sales manager, Hugh “Hoss” Blackburn, had been the technical advisor
on the film during filming on the Chattooga
River in Georgia. It was released for
viewing in 1972 and it still can be seen from time to time on television and in
video rental stores.
Dickey was a professor of
English, winner of a Pulitzer Prize, and one of the finest modern poets in the
world. He was also a devoted archer. And Fred admired his writing talent, as
only another writer can do.
So when Dickey glanced over in the corner of Fred’s
office during his visit that day in Grayling and asked “What is that?” Fred
knew he had to show him this monstrosity of a bow that he had rejected
out-of-hand. He handed the bow to Dickey, telling him that it was a new bow
design that someone had sent him.
Dickey picked up the bow,
lifted it to the vertical, set his fingers along the bowstring, and pulled
back. When the bow hit its let-off point and eased to full draw, he lowered the
bow, looked Fred in the eye and said, “I want one for myself, one for my wife
and one for my son!”
Going with
the Flow
That was the day that Fred
knew that he had to get into the compound bow business. However, with his pride
as a bowyer, pattern-maker and craftsman, Fred felt that he and his people
could improve on the compound bow’s design to make it more attractive and more
saleable to the hunting public. And he had a great R&D department in those
days to help him develop and flesh-out his ideas.
Bill Stewart was the
bowyer when I first started working with Bear in 1966 and was largely
responsible along with Fred for the beautiful recurve bows we sold in those
days with their exotic imported hardwoods such as shedua, African bubinga,
rosewood, and zebrawood. But by the time I moved to Grayling in late 1971 to
set up The Fred Bear Sports Club and then the in-house advertising agency,
Stewart had moved on.
Owen Jefferey was our head bowyer by that time, and the
department included Neil Byce, Sr., Norm Groner, Bob Remick and Jim Helmick on
special developmental projects. Gene Ellis was our general foreman. Our old
friend from the Grayling days, Orin Pelto, then supervisor of the arrow
department, reminded me that “Jim Helmick was the man who came up with the idea
of impregnating maple wood with the various colored dyes for bows. Also, he had
introduced Bear to injected-molded parts such as the hoods for bow quivers,
Weathers® for arrows, and the bubble-packaging system for accessories.”
Helmick and his wife also
owned a motel on the north edge of town, and when I first arrived in Grayling I
lived there for a number of weeks before moving into a rented cabin along the
backwaters of the Au Sable River above the Old Dam.
As our R&D guys worked
on the design with Fred on the new compound bow, I began putting together the
introductory material and advertising plan while Kelly put together the pricing
and marketing plan. One of the fun things about being in advertising is writing
copy, creating layouts, and coming up with new names for products. In honor of
Fred’s many trips to hunt in Alaska
I named our first hunting compound bow the “Alaskan.” And, in keeping with
tradition, in our tournament/target line I suggested using our trademarked
“Tamerlane” name for our first target compound. Both met with Fred and Kelly’s
approval.
Understanding how
something as simple as a screwdriver works has always been a challenge for me.
So it was out of necessity that I depended on Neil Byce, Sr. for help with
writing the instruction, catalog and advertising copy for our first compound
bows. Fred happened to be out-of-town with Mrs. B in Florida for the winter
during part of this time, as was his custom after he sold the company to
Victor, and Neil and I would camp out in Fred’s office where we knew we wouldn’t
be disturbed and sit at his desk as we went over the two bows and pounded out
how best to describe them. Neil was very patient with me and kept explaining
things to me in baby language even I could understand. Then I’d go back to my
office and write the copy for the advertising and instruction books. My
assistant, Bill Macintosh, was also a big help.
As I said, Fred and Mrs.
Bear would spend the winters in Florida with Fred coming up north a couple of
times each winter to stir things up at the plant and to keep us all on our
toes. In truth, he also missed the northern Michigan winters along with all of his
friends at the plant. In between visits he kept in touch via mailed notes,
phone calls and tapes. I still treasure a fair-sized box I have of the hundreds
of notes he wrote me in those years. And when those days come along when I
spend too much time missing him, I get the box out and paw through it,
eventually smiling and then laughing at some of the things he sent me.
Field-Testing
the Compound
One of the most enjoyable
things about building new archery products is that it is necessary (Fred always
said with tongue in cheek)to take them
out into the woods and field-test them. When one can figure out a way to justify
taking them to another country to field-test them, it is even sweeter.
In another chapter I cover
our involvement with The American Archery Council, a small group that Fred and
Kelly helped get started back in the early 60s. Gordon Bentley sat on the AAC
in those days representing the Archery Lanes Operator’s Association, and he and
I immediately hit it off.
In fact, Gordon and his
wife, Mimi, became good friends and they wanted Fred and some of the rest of us
to come up to Canada to hunt
at their bear camp, Bear Paw Landing, in western Ontario.
So it was that on May 25,
1974 we journeyed first by car from Grayling to Sault Ste. Marie, Canada to
catch a flight over to Dryden to field-test our new Alaskan compound hunting
bow. Enroute we flew all the way down the length of Lake
Superior at an altitude of 26,000 feet. What a beautiful flight.
It was a nice, sunny day.
In our party from Bear
Archery were Fred (president), Bob Kelly (vice president-marketing), Ray “Hap”
Fling (national sales manager), Bob Bigler (national accounts manager), and I.
Bear Paw Landing in Ontario in 1974. Left to right: Ray "Hap" Fling, Bob Bigler, Fred, Gordon Bentley, Bob Kelly, and Dick Lattimer.
Being enamored with the
idea of a “take-down” bow like our successful recurves that Fred had designed
and perfected on hunting trips to Africa, we
boldly stated in our preliminary advertising material that the Alaskan was a
true “take-down” compound bow that didn’t require any special tools for
assembly or disassembly.
Bear Paw Landing was a
short boat ride from the mainland and a wonderful camp. It was a series of five
cabins capable of housing several dozen bowhunters at any one time. After we
were suitably settled into our cabin, we started meeting the other bowhunters
in camp with us. Naturally, all wanted to meet Fred. Some of the names I jotted
down in my little notebook of that hunt are Jerry Dale, Harley Noftsger, John
Kolometz, Jim Richards, Tom Lazar, Tom Pucci, Tom Flaugher, and Ed Flaugher.
One of my main goals for
the trip was to take photos of Fred for possible use in our next Bear Archery
catalog when we would introduce the Alaskan. In those days I used a Nikon F2
camera with a series of lenses ranging from wide-angle to telephoto, with a
special lens adapter for the 55mm lens to allow me to get extreme close-ups.
And Fred had given me his old Halliburton camera case to store my equipment in
and take on my various jaunts. He had also given me the Bausch & Lomb
9X35mm Zephyr binoculars that he carried on his hunts to Africa and India in the
’50s and ’60s, and I still use them to this day.
I wanted informal shots of
Fred sitting around fiddling with the Alaskan, as well as shots of him actually
shooting the bow. Little did I know until later what a turn of events all of
this would be.
Next up: Chap 10 Pt 2, Fred Fails With the Compound.
