I Remember Papa Bear by Dick Lattimer

A lot of people over the years have thought that Fred Bear was at least part Native American because of his name. Not so. The Bears were English, Swiss and German. His mother’s Drawbaugh family was English and Dutch.

His mother’s uncle, Daniel Drawbaugh, invented the telephone in 1867, but lost out on the final court decision by just one vote on whether he or Alexander Graham Bell should be given credit for having done so. Obviously, creativity and inventiveness ran deep in Fred Bear’s genes. And Bear family tradition claims that the judge that cast the deciding vote was found to hold a large amount of Bell stock upon his death.

How this shy Pennsylvania farmboy from the Cumberland Valley ended up becoming a revered outdoor legend is due almost entirely to his determination to make something of himself doing that which he loved best—hunting and fishing. Today’s young people can learn a very important lesson from Fred Bear’s life.

Fred very easily could have spent his entire life in his home area of Pennsylvania working at the Carlisle Frog & Switch Manufacturing Company, or even in the Detroit area working in pattern-making or some other creative trade. But that he did not is a fascinating story of how he was able to use his unique and memorable name, his talents, his interests, and his attention to detail to build a household name among sportsmen and women around the world in the 20th century. And he began it on a shoestring budget using only his ingenuity and persistence to finally accomplish his goal.

Now anyone who accomplishes something like that must have a healthy dose of self-awareness and drive. And this can be a tricky thing to handle, balancing the ego with the need to build the name recognition. I’ve never known anyone who did it better than Fred, or who was more humble about his accomplishments. Proud of what he accomplished, of course, but never egotistical. Naturally, building an image was what the game was all about, but he never let that overshadow his basic down-home farmboy personality. He was always cognizant that his public persona should not get in the way of his private life.

BEAR FAMILY ROLE MODELS

Researchers tell us that for most of us, our basic beliefs and value systems are set by the time we’re 10 years old. They’re hardwired into our internal operating systems. And Fred had several immediate family members to look up to as far as style and creative salesmanship were concerned. His grandfather, Abner Bear, was a salesman for the Henry Diston Company, manufacturers of sawmill equipment. He was a tall, well-built, imposing figure with a handlebar moustache and was usually sporting a Stetson hat. I suppose it was from Grandpa Bear’s example that Fred got his idea of wearing a Borsalino hat for quick photo identity in his early hunting years. I never thought to ask him about it. Abner Bear also sold farm machinery and used some very creative demonstrations at state fairs and the like in doing so. Fred undoubtedly got his innate salesmanship and promotional smarts from Grandpa Bear.

Uncle Charley Bear, his father’s younger brother, on the other hand, left the farm and went to New York City where he was a skilled penman and illustrator for the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company. He was an impeccable dresser, self-assured and respected by people around the country and, indeed, around the world. Fred visited him several times in New York as a boy and was very impressed with how sophisticated his uncle was and how well he seemed to get along with everyone from doormen to cab drivers to waiters. Another valuable lesson that Fred would never forget. Fred always seemed to be completely at ease, whether on Fifth Avenue in New York City or in a tar-paper hunting shack on the Alaskan Peninsula. I spent quality time with him in both places.

Then there was his real boyhood idol —- his father, Harry Bear -— a skilled machinist. From his dad he learned to shoot, to appreciate the outdoor life and to respect both the animals he hunted as well as all wildlife and nature. His conservation ethic and sense of sportsmanship came from Harry. He was one of the finest rifle shots in all of Pennsylvania in those days, as well as a skilled trapshooter. And when Fred was 8 years old, his father gave him a .22 rifle—a single-shot, swing-bolt Quakenbush. When Fred later got hooked on archery, Harry also took up the sport and got very good at it. Matter of fact, while we were all still living in Grayling, Michigan, Fred gave me his father’s archery tackle box since he knew that I would care for it as if it were my own father’s. After Fred died, I gave it to Frank Scott to put on display in the Fred Bear Museum.

MARKING TIME

Fred knew of my deep feeling for history. After all, I had been documenting his life for decades in photos and print, but he also knew of my passion for the space program and my documenting a part of that in my book “All We Did Was Fly To The Moon.”

So it really was no surprise one day when he walked into my office carrying a couple of treasures from his service in 1922 with the 104th Cavalry of the Carlisle National Guard during an ugly strike in the state’s western coal mines. Fred had joined the Guard when he was just 16. He dropped his old cavalry saddlebags on my desk that day saying, “I thought you might like to have these.” Needless to say, I was thrilled to death. He had converted one side of the saddlebags to hold his camera equipment during his early filming days on horseback.

Another day he dropped off the canteen that he had used during his Guard service. And a third day I found the oil can he had used in the Guard sitting on my desk when I returned to my office from a meeting. He had signed both of them. He did keep his footlocker at home in the Gator Room in Gainesville, and following his death it was passed on in the family.

All of the interesting details of Fred’s life in Detroit after leaving Pennsylvania as soon as he hit the age of 21 are in Fred’s biography written by Charlie Kroll. I produced the book and contributed a small portion of the manuscript. I won’t repeat that part of this interesting story here, other than to say that Fred got hooked on archery and the idea of bowhunting in 1927 while in Detroit. There, he and his friend, Ray Stannard, went to the Adams Theatre and saw Art Young’s “Alaskan Adventures” bowhunting film. Then, to further cement the attraction, he later met Art Young at a Rotary Club meeting in Detroit, and the two became friends. Matter of fact, they worked on archery equipment together in Fred’s basement. Art Young eventually showed Fred how to make double loop Flemish bowstrings. I’m sorry to say that one day Fred stopped in my office in Gainesville, showed me photos of this same type of bowstring and asked me if I thought I could learn to make them. Like a dummy I was all wrapped up in writing catalog copy and never took him up on his challenge. An opportunity missed.

FRED ON FILM

Art Young died the year I was born, 1935. It was the same year that Fred killed his first white-tailed deer with a bow and arrow in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Fred and I had an interesting experience in the 1980s when Art Young’s nephew came to Gainesville and we videotaped he and Fred talking about Art Young’s “Alaskan Adventures” silent film. Our intention was to sandwich their reminiscences around the actual film and offer it as part of our Fred Bear library of videos and films. I wanted to add a soundtrack to perk up the film, but Fred wanted it to remain in its original “silent movie” configuration. Unfortunately, the timing was wrong to ask the management of Bear Archery at the time for funding to do so, and somewhere this footage is collecting dust in the Bear Archery company vault. Or, it might have been passed on to Bass Pro Shops when they recently purchased the contents of the Fred Bear Museum. That is, unless it was accidentally disposed of by someone not appreciating its historical importance to our sport.

In 1975 Fred and I drove to Detroit to shoot part of the film we were working on at the time—“Rural Route One, Grayling, Michigan.” I had suggested to Fred and Bob Kelly that it would make a good addition to our Fred Bear film library. They readily agreed, and a filming budget and script were subsequently approved. Dick Shanahan, producer in Detroit, and his assistant, Selda Gibbons, tackled the production for us. I supervised the project. If you’ve never seen it, it showed how we made recurve bows and other archery accessories in those days.

We needed to have Fred do an introduction on camera; however, unlike the manufacturing end of the film where extraneous noise didn’t matter, we did not want outside noise interfering with Fred’s message. And that would’ve been almost impossible since Fred’s office sat right next to the machine shop in the Grayling plant, and the noise from the adjacent office area could also have interfered with the sound track. So we loaded up enough stuff from his office in Grayling and took it all down to Detroit with us.

There we reassembled everything on a sound stage and shot the scenes. As always, when working with Dick Shanahan and Selda Gibbons, the filming went very well and was a “happy set.” Dick was always loose and a true professional, and Selda had a tremendous knack for keeping everything on track, including matches between shots. When one makes a film, they are not always shot with more than one camera, and after one angle is filmed, the camera is then moved to another viewpoint. Everything must remain the same or the two different views won’t match up in the final editing. And Selda was a master at making sure this happened.

MOTOR CITY MEMORIES

After the filming, Fred wanted to drive around Detroit and show me some of his old haunts. As always I had his old Nikon F2 camera and lenses along and was able to capture photos of him at two of his three Bear Archery locations in Detroit. The third location had burned down in the 1960s, shortly after I had started working for him.

The first place we drove by was the first house that he had lived in during 1923 on Lothrop Avenue when he first went to Detroit and worked at Packard Motor Car Company. He regaled me with the story about the friend of his who had come to Detroit with him from their home area in Pennsylvania. It seems this fellow had been courting the sheriff’s sister back home and got her in a family way before he left town, without knowing that he had done so. One day the sheriff showed up at the house in Detroit. When Fred’s friend answered the door, the sheriff simply asked, “How’d you like to be my brother-in-law?”

“Well, I think that would be a fine idea,” the embarrassed fellow quickly answered, and the two left town that day for the long drive back home. Fred hunched up his shoulders and laughed when he told me that story.

BEAR ARCHERY IS BORN

The first Bear Archery manufacturing location was an old commercial garage building on Tierman Avenue and Begole in Detroit. When the Jansen tire cover plant that Fred and his friend, Charles Piper, worked at burned down, putting them out of work, the two decided to pool their savings of $600 and go into business. They bought a couple of second-hand sewing machines and some other equipment and rented this small garage building on Tierman. When I left Bear Archery in 1989, not long after Fred died, one of those original sewing machines was still sitting in the back of the plant. Fred not only used it a great deal over the years, but he also kept it for sentimental reasons. Fred and Piper set up business as the Bear Products Company. Their main business was making silk screen advertising banners for the Chrysler Corporation. But off in a corner of the building Fred started making archery equipment. Bear Archery was born, although not yet officially.

I could only imagine the memories that were going through Fred’s mind that morning we visited as he peered through the window of his old building. What a struggle that must have been, to start a company on a shoestring with all the unknowns that go with that sort of venture, and especially to do it in the depths of the Great Depression. Most small businesses fail, and it takes one heck of a lot of stubbornness and grit to make a go of it. And luck.

After a year or two, the business was moved into a larger building on Burlingame and Broad Street in Detroit. So on our sentimental trip that day, Fred guided me to that location, where I took a second photo of him. By the time of our visit, this second Bear Archery location had been turned into a Baptist church.

As I mentioned, Fred couldn’t show me his third plant in Detroit that they had moved to in 1939. It had been destroyed in the racial riots of the 1960s when much of Detroit was burned. However, it was an old Maxwell automobile garage and was located at 2611 Philadelphia Avenue and Linwood. It was 60 feet by 100 feet in size. From there Fred moved the business up to the tiny town of Grayling, Michigan in 1947.

But how did Fred get to the point in the development of Bear Archery that he eventually would see his annual sales reaching into the tens of millions of dollars? The following is a letter he wrote in the spring of 1938 from the Burlingame Avenue plant site in Detroit. He, of course, was making bows for himself and his friends prior to this, but now he was thinking of going into bow production as a business.

BOWHUNTING GRABS HOLD

In 1937 Fred organized the first Michigan bowhunting season near his old stomping grounds in St. Helens, Michigan. He had an old log cabin and a sign for it that read “Pope Hall” in honor of Dr. Saxton Pope, who had inspired him to try bowhunting. Fred named the area Camp Sherwood in honor of Robin Hood’s Sherwood Forest.

Fred had become active in promoting bowhunting and also had a hand in helping get the first Wisconsin bowhunting season established in 1934 and the first Michigan season started in 1936. Naturally, the primary person who made this happen in Wisconsin was Roy Case, who was the first white man to kill a deer in Wisconsin with the bow and arrow. He downed a buck in 1930 in Vilas County, Wisconsin, and our sport was off and running.

Fred Bear with a buck in 1941

In 1941 Wisconsin established a nonresident deer license for a fee of $5, and 182 out-of-state people bought such a license—eight of them harvesting a deer. Fred was one of those eight successful bowhunters and in that year he also joined the fledgling Wisconsin Bowhunters. Incidentally, Fred’s deer was a nice 7-point buck. Membership at that time in the WBA was $1 a year. Among the Wisconsin Bowhunters board of governors at that time were Larry Whiffen of Milwaukee and Roy Case of Racine.

Larry and Fred had become friends, and, as a matter of fact, in 1939 Fred, his first wife, Marie, and Larry made a cross-country automobile trip out to San Francisco to shoot in the NAA Tournament at Golden State Park. And when the archery manufacturers first set up their trade association in 1953, Larry was our first volunteer president. The organization was actually founded in Wisconsin at the Three Rivers Archery Tournament, and Fred was one of its charter founders. The archery manufacturers and dealers had originally conceived the idea in 1947 at the National Archery Tournament in Salt Lake City, Utah. When it was founded, the organization was known as the Archery Manufacturers and Dealers Association (AMADA).

I had the honor of becoming the first full-time president/CEO of the same organization (by then called AMO and now ATA) in 1991 after Fred died and I had retired from Bear Archery. I served in that capacity until I retired near the end of 2000. And during that 10-year period I always tried to do things the way Fred and Bob Kelly had drilled into my being. Always trying to think of the good of the sport first and trying to bring as many people around the table as possible so that all opinions and sides of an issue could be heard. My old sidekick, Pat Wiseman-Snider helped me run the organization during that time, and about halfway through our service to AMO, Doug Engh joined our staff. But back to Fred’s story.

TARGET ARCHERY GAINS POPULARITY

Fred had also made a name for himself as a target archer in Michigan and knew most of the archers in the state. Here is a list of the ribbons he won, taken from his old scrapbook. Although it is Fred’s printing in his scrapbook, I would bet that his first wife, Marie, was the one who originally started it. It would have been out of character for Fred to have done so. Here, then, are Fred’s target archery accomplishments:

You’ll notice in Fred’s target archery records that there is a gap between 1939 and 1945. At that time Fred became deeply involved in building bows and arrows and his leather products, as well as doing war production work. As a result, he did not take time to participate in organized target archery as such. However, he did continue to go bowhunting so that he could gain publicity for his small archery company in Detroit. Toward the end of the war he did do a small amount of target archery, but his avid days as a target archer were over.

SHOW ON THE ROAD

Fred Bear trick shooting

Fred also became very active in the 1930s and 40s shooting archery exhibitions on the sportsmen’s show circuit in the Midwest. These were generally weeklong events, or even longer, and took time out of his work schedule at his small plant in Detroit. But he justified the time away since he not only shot the archery exhibitions in front of packed audiences to help build an interest in archery, but he also traded his shooting exhibitions for free booth space. There he could display his archery equipment and provide attendees with the opportunity to try shooting the bow and arrow. Here is a list of the sportsmen’s shows he took part in during 1942, as well as a list of some of the other acts. Fred was billed as the “World’s Greatest Archer!” They generally did two performances a day, one at 3:30 p.m., another at 9:30 p.m.

February 21 to March 1, 1942 March 7 to 15, 1942 International Sportsmen’s Show Southwest Sportsmen’s Show International Amphitheater Municipal Auditorium Chicago, Illinois St. Louis, Missouri

March 21 to 29, 1942 April 4 to 12, 1942 American/Canadian Northwest Sportsmen’s Show Sportsmen’s Show Municipal Auditorium Public Auditorium Minneapolis, Minnesota Cleveland, Ohio

The List of Acts

1. Hal Totten - NBC Ace Sports Announcer, Ray Dean - Dean of Sports Show Announcers
2. Sons of Legionnaires - Square Post No. 232, Squadron National Champions
3. Chief Chibiaboos - Chippewa Indian from Minnesota-Indian Songs
4. Chief Evergreen Tree - Pueblo Indian from Mexico City - Bird and Animal Imitator
5. Log Rolling - Watson Peck, Bear River, Nova Scotia; Willard Jack, Bear River, Nova Scotia; Leo Wagner, Barss Corner, Nova Scotia; Warren Rhodenizer, Barss Corner, Nova Scotia.
6. “Playboy” - Diamond D. Dewey and the only trained Buffalo drive.
7. World’s Champion Professional Caster - Tony Accetta, Kalamazoo, Michigan
8. Lan Tech, Crack Drill Team - Cadet 1st Lt. Leonard Stelk, Chicago; Cadet 1st Lt. Walter Miller, Chicago
9. Tub Racing and Log Sawing - Watson Peck, Willard Jack, Leo Wagner, Warren Rhodenizer
10. Dog Retrieving Exhibition - Nelson Rodelius and George Brown, Chicago. Exhibition of Amateur Dog Handling.
11. Northwest Mounties - Glenn Morning, Warren Foster and Carl Sandberg-Canada
12. Exhibition Table Tennis - Bill Holzrichter, Illinois, Missouri and Ohio Champion, Bob Anderson, Chicago
13. World’s Greatest Archer - Fred Bear, Detroit, Michigan
14. Parachute Jump -Carl Rupert, Wheeling, Ill. The only free-fall indoor parachute jump in the world.

In his archery booth he and his first wife, Marie, blew up balloons and invited people to shoot at them with bow and arrow. That’s how he met Frank Scott in 1939. Scotty, as those of us close to him always called him, was also working the show circuit with his family, “The Shooting Mansfields.” They were a touring Vaudeville act skilled in rifle-shooting and knife-throwing. Fred met Scotty, asked his father if he could hire him to work in his booth blowing up balloons, and permission was granted. The two hit it off so well that at the end of the show season Fred went to Scotty’s father again and said that he’d like to take the lad back to Detroit with him to work in his small archery operation. Again, permission was given, and the remainder of Frank Scott’s life in archery was set.

His last 25 years or so were spent as curator of The Fred Bear Museum, first in Grayling when he retired as a field sales manager and later in Florida after we moved the museum down there. During that move Scotty coordinated things in Grayling packing up everything, and I coordinated their arrival and storage in Ocala, Florida. We later moved the things into a display area in Gainesville at our plant. As I mentioned earlier, the Fred Bear Museum was sold to Bass Pro Shops and has become part of their incredible complex in Springfield, Missouri.

Scotty’s earlier years were out on the road selling archery equipment to sporting goods dealers and “mom and pop” archery shops and doing all of those things an archery salesman does to help build his sport and territory. These hard-working fellows put in thousands of hours each year at not only their Monday-Friday jobs calling on archery dealers, but then on weekends they work archery tournaments, sportsmen’s outings and just about anywhere that there are groups of people who might be talked into shooting a bow and arrow. I have always had the greatest admiration and respect for our cadre of professional archery salesmen and their wives who put up with this craziness in their marriages.

TAPPING THE MEDIA MACHINE

During this same time, along with working the show circuit, shooting in archery tournaments and working hard back in Detroit to build his small archery business, Fred sharpened his skills at getting free publicity. He could not afford to pay for traditional advertising in those early days, but he knew that a deer taken with a bow and arrow could usually get him some ink on the sports pages of the area newspapers, and, eventually, even in national publications. Especially since doing so was so very unique in those early days of bowhunting here in the states.

He made friends with the Detroit sportswriters, and one in particular, Jack Van Coevering, of the Detroit Free Press, played a huge part in Fred’s start in this quiet self-promotion business. Van Coevering took his movie camera up to Blaney Park in November of 1942 and followed Fred around as he hunted. Fred finally took a deer with his bow on November 13th, resulting in the first of Fred’s films and the first of a bowhunter in Michigan harvesting a deer.

In October 1944, Albert Stoll, Jr., conservation editor of The Detroit News, also gave bowhunting and Fred a real boost with a two-page spread in its pictorial section. Photos of Nels Grumley (Fred’s first bowyer), Daisy Olsen, and other Detroit area archers, were shown on a field archery range. Grumley was shown with a rabbit taken with bow and arrow, and Fred was shown at full draw with his unusual snakeskin-backed osage orange 70-pound bow. He at that time was president of the Detroit Archers Club and the three-time state champion.

The article pointed out that 2,000 of the state’s 15,000 archers also hunted small and big game with their bows. And that in 1943 the state’s 807 licensed bowhunters had taken 31 deer. In 1944 the bowhunting season was to be from November 1-14 in every county of southern Michigan and all of the Upper Peninsula. The article pointed out that, “This was authorized to reduce the deer population in our southern counties where the animals have become established and are proving a nuisance over farm lands where it would be highly dangerous to use rifles.” This positive spin on the short-range sport of bowhunting still is used today to justify the culling of deer herds in urban areas of this country.

Fred also was able to work in some publicity for his Detroit Archers in this article by feeding the writer the information that the Detroit Archers had an archery range at Telegraph Road and Ten and One-Half Mile Road—70 acres with 28 targets in a roving range. In other words, “Dear Reader, come out and shoot bows and arrows with us.”

A year later in 1945, Mr. Stoll again gave Fred a ton of pictorial coverage when he carried photos and a short article on Fred’s first successful hunt for moose in Ontario. And the key to Fred’s entire effort to “sell” the idea of hunting with the bow and arrow, thereby creating a market for his new products, was set in the very first paragraph:

“‘One Arrow Bear,’ they call Fred B. Bear, president of the Detroit Archers Club since he returned from the northern Ontario wilderness with a 1,500-pound bull moose. Bear’s feat clearly demonstrated the effectiveness of hunting big game with the bow and arrow, a sport that is rapidly expanding throughout the nation.”

In 1946 it was another 14-photo pictorial spread covering Fred’s successful hunt for his first bear. This one appeared in the Detroit Free Press in November of that year. What outdoors-person could resist the photos of the Ontario hunting camp with Fred’s Native American guide, Johnny Negonapinee? Bowhunting really began picking up momentum.

Also about that time an article about bowhunting appeared in Goodyear’s Magazine for Men featuring Fred. Titled “Modern Bow Hunters Revive The Old Indian Game,” the article showed Fred with a bow and arrow deer as well as shooting at an aerial target thrown up by an assistant. After explaining the sport to its readers, Goodyear magazine had this to say about Fred:

Curly-haired, 44-year-old Fred Bear of Detroit is, perhaps, as accomplished an archery hunter as you’ll find without combing out the record books. He’s been bending a bow for 20 years—and he came to the bow only after a childhood and early manhood spent on the shooting end of a huntsman’s rifle. He’s an ardent archer today, and in fact, his love of archery has colored his entire career...” Archery is growing fast today as a sport, as well as a sporting method of hunting game, big and small,” he says. “The manufacture of archery tackle passed tennis four years ago, on a basis of dollar volume, and it’s still on the rise. The states are recognizing the sport’s growth and are providing for it in revisions of their game laws. Many states have special archery seasons on deer. Michigan typifies the growth in popularity of bow and arrow hunting. In 1937, the first year of an archery deer season in Michigan, 194 licenses were issued. In 1941 this had increased to a total of 1,016. After a slump during the war, owing to transportation difficulties, and the workings of other war restrictions, archers roared back stronger than ever in 1945—and Michigan issued a total of 1,950 licenses.

“Sure we play the Indian’s game,” Fred Bear will tell you, “but we don’t ‘play Indian,’ as many people seem to think. We stalk, track game and shoot much as the Indians did. But we wear no feathered headdresses, no fanciful buckskin costumes, and we never smear our faces with war paint. We’re just an ever-growing association of huntsmen who believe there’s more fun in hunting with the handicap of the bow than there is in hunting with the sureness of the gun.”

Our Grayling weekly newspaper, the Crawford County Avalanche, announced the start of Bear Archery production in Grayling in its May 1, 1947 issue. After going into the details of the size and cost of the modest new plant, the article revealed a bit more about how Fred helped build the sport of bowhunting in Michigan, and, thus, the market for his products. Here is just a portion of that article:

Bow and arrow hunting is growing in popularity by leaps and bounds, as witnessed by the bow and arrow hunting bill recently passed by the Michigan House. The bill is now in the hands of the Senate, and would open Montcalm, Ionia, Alpena, Benzie, Iosco, Leelanau, Newaygo, Gogebic, Roscommon, Montmorency, Oscoda and Crawford counties from October 1 until November 5 for the hunting of either buck or doe with bow and arrow. The vote in the House was 82 to 1 in favor of the bill.

Mr. Bear and the company have been active in promoting the sport, and he and Mr. Grumley are well-known for their hunting exploits with these weapons. Mr. Bear has both a moose and bear to his credit in hunting with bow and arrow.

The company normally employs about 20 or 30 men and women when in full production.

Fred continued his one-man publicity campaign to reach the hunters in Michigan by convincing the Detroit News to carry a full-page pictorial in its Sept. 5, 1948 issue showing bow production in his new archery plant in Grayling where it had moved the previous year. Here’s some of that article:

Manufacture of hunting and field archery equipment remains for the most part an enterprise calling for skill and patience as it did in ancient times when bows and arrows were in common use. More, according to Fred Bear, of Bear Archery, Grayling, Michigan, who says that modern materials have made it possible to produce more accurate equipment than was the case previously. Wood for use in bows is seasoned for five or six years and then matched into sections, each section representing a half of the bow. The sections are formed individually and then joined into a bow by cutting a ‘fish tail joint’ in each section, joining them to form a complete bow.

When the bow has been formed, the task of reducing it to size begins. Excess wood is removed by hand and there are frequent testings to determine its accuracy and power. “Tillering,” removal of wood from each half of the bow, makes it flex evenly on each side of the handle. After finishing, each bow is mechanically tested by being flexed thousands of times...three varieties of wood—osage, yew and hickory—go into the making of a hunting bow.

A PROMOTER IN BUSINESS, TOO

Naturally, Fred designed most of the equipment and techniques used in the manufacture of this early archery equipment as he did for the industry during most of his years during the 40s, 50s and 60s! Fred permitted everyone in the industry to use his inventions for the good of the sport. No royalties were ever charged on his patents in those days. Can you imagine anyone doing that in today’s dog-eat-dog business climate? But that’s just the kind of person Fred was.

It was this magnanimous philosophy that permitted our competitors to use the methods and machinery he invented to help turn our small industry’s manufacturing into mass production to reach more potential bowhunters from among the pool of firearms hunters from which we had to draw.

Fred had seen Henry Ford do the same kind of thing when he worked in the early automobile business in Detroit. He even ran into Mr. Ford occasionally as he made his rounds of the various offices selling advertising banners in those days. Fred did for the archery business what Henry Ford had done for automobiles; cut the cost of the product by smart mass production, thereby enabling more Americans to purchase his products.

This permitted bow production to go from being a “one-at-a-time” handcrafted product that had been done pretty much the same way since bows had been invented more than 10,000 years before, to one that could be mass-produced using bow presses and modern technology. Incidentally, Fred patented this breakthrough technology in 1951, the first year he used the process in Bear bows. Fred had pioneered the use of continuous filament fiberglass for bow backing and facing. This was a perfect material for use on bows since it recovered completely from the stresses of compression when drawing the bow and subsequent extension as the arrow was released.

WINNING OVER GUN HUNTERS

Fred was very much aware that there was resistance to bowhunting among the firearms hunters of the day. They spread all kinds of rumors about “porcupine deer” running around with arrows in them. Truth be known, many were jealous of the bowhunters’ ability and at getting the extra time out in the woods. Of course, many of the bowhunters didn’t help the situation any, some of whom had an elitist attitude. Some of this still exists today and probably always will. Some people just like to think that they are superior. Fred abhorred this attitude.

He quickly realized that if archery hunting was to grow, and his company along with it, he needed to jump right in and start selling the gun hunters. He had a huge advantage in this in that he could draw on his own long years as a firearms hunter himself to really relate to them. Over my years with him, I saw him many times directly confront a situation in a positive manner, rather than trying to fight it or go around it.

John Mitchell, writing for Audubon magazine, came to interview Fred, skeptical about our sport and about Fred Bear. Yet, he ended up convinced of the appropriateness of hunting with the bow and arrow, and of Fred Bear’s part in its history and development. John, Fred, Les Line (then the editor of Audubon, and a dedicated bowhunter) and I spent many hours around the dinner table at Grousehaven talking about bowhunting. Fred’s gentle manner won John over. Here is a part of what John said in Fred’s biography:

... I suspect I had come to Grayling looking to bury Caesar, not to praise him. At the time, I was one month into a yearlong assignment, a series of articles (and later a book) exploring all aspects of hunting in America. The question being: Was it an honorable tradition or a dishonorable shame? I think I went into it leaning toward the latter. I had hunted a bit as a youngster, had drawn away from it more by circumstance than by disfavor, drifted gradually into a circle of acquaintances who by and large regarded hunting as an activity falling somewhere on the far side of abomination. And I had just come down from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, having observed there a shabby no-show bear hunt replete with CB radios and jack pine savages in Cadillac sedans. Now to the lair of this man whom Cleveland Amory had dubbed the ‘Grand Dragon’ of the bowhunt. I was loaded for Bear. Or so I thought.

We talked for more than three hours, Bear and I. About what I was up to and how he perceived the motivations of anti-hunters, why one could learn more about deer in one week with a bow than in a lifetime with a rifle, and where he had traveled to film his classic hunts, and what he had shot; and whether, indeed, there would be any hunting left over when the corporate farmers got finished plowing their field to the borrow pits of the county roads, and all the Earth’s wild places had gone down the drain of development, or been shot up to hell by the lawbreakers. I was loaded for Bear, all right—and totally disarmed by him. It was not so much what he said, but how he said it; openly, undefensively, sometimes humorously (and then, at his own expense), often with perception and sensitivity; and always, it seemed to me, with such a large measure of humility for a man so tightly hitched to the practical business necessities of self-promotion. Disarmed, outflanked and won over, and then Bear saying that the whitetails were running down in Ogemaw County, and why didn’t I join him there at Grousehaven for a bowhunt in October. I told him I didn’t hunt, much less with a bow. No matter, he said. There’d be time to continue the conversation. And we did that.

We did that four years in a row—three in the bow season and one in rifle (when I did go armed, if only to put an ambiguous punctuation mark at the end of my story). Mostly, I just moseyed over the acorns with the old hunter, sponged up his yarns and savvy, watched him spend his time making sure, as Joe Engle would testify, that everyone else was having a good hunt. I had never before been in the wood with such a lucid observer of the ways of nature. And I don’t just mean his knowing where the deer might run. I mean his sense of place, his appreciation of light and color and where the wind was blowing and what a certain cloud might bring. “The finest natural hunter I’ve ever known,”the pro from Alaska had said. “A practicing ecologist,” Merrill Petoskey would say of him in Gainesville. “A catalyst ... toward helping the American citizen better understand the outdoor life as we believe it should be understood—wonderful, awesome, sometimes cruel, but always dynamic and revealing of truth to those who do understand.”

After the first two seasons at Grousehaven, my official chores as questing scrivener of the hunt were finished. I had covered the beat from Texas to Alaska, from Montana to Michigan, and had met and talked along the way with scores of hunters and anti-hunters, game biologists, public officials, and professors of this-and-that. So where, an occasional critic wanted to know, where had the moment of truth come to me? Who, of all the respondents along the way had touched me with the stoutest staff of wisdom and turned my perceptions about hunting into a better understanding of the outdoor life? And always, without hesitation, I would have to make reference to this lanky archer, and that rainy day in Grayling, and the days with him that would follow, afoot in the acorn woods of Ogemaw County. It was as if the Bear had loosed a razorhead at my prejudice—and skewered it clean. Requiescat in pace. I buried that gizzard at Grousehaven. For that alone, all praise to the Bear in the famous Borsalino hat.

Early on, Fred had begun speaking to sportsmen’s groups wherever and whenever he could, selling bowhunting. A good example of this was the Rogers City, Michigan Sportsmen’s Annual Banquet. Here’s how the local paper reported on the coming event in an article dated Dec. 2, 1948:

Annual Banquet of Sportsmen Dec. 12
Noted Archer Heads Fine Program

Something new in the line of entertainment is in store for those attending the 11th annual banquet of the Presque Isle County Sportsmen’s Club Sunday, December 12th, in Rogers City.

Fred Bear, one of the outstanding archers in the country, has accepted the club’s invitation to speak. He will also show colored movies of bow and arrow hunting and stage a demonstration. Mr. Bear has hunted with the bow in all parts of the country and has bagged deer, bear and moose as well as many other smaller animals, etc.

And so the article went. It also featured a photo of Fred and his Canada moose taken with the bow. Fred’s purpose, of course, was to whet the appetite of these firearms hunters for trying his sport of archery. And was he ever successful! One way he convinced them of the striking power of the bow and arrow was to shoot a broadhead through a large sandbag with a pane of glass behind the sandbag. A .30-caliber rifle bullet shot by Frank Scott would be stopped by the sand, but the broadhead shot by Fred would pass right through and shatter the glass behind in a very noisy and effective demonstration of the arrow’s penetrating power. I still have the wooden frame on which he sat the sandbag and piece of glass in this dramatic demonstration.

Another small article appeared in the Carlisle, Pennsylvania newspaper during the late 40s as well. This one concerned Fred’s dad, Harry. This is the same hunting area where Fred first hunted with his father. And the fact that Fred had pasted it in his early scrapbook says how proud he was that his dad had taken up the bow and arrow as he had done:

Local Hunter Bags Deer With Arrow

Harry L. Bear, 73, of 407 West South Street, a retired machinist, felled a 95-pound doe on Saturday in the one-day season with a bow and arrow in the South Mountain near Huntsdale.

Hunting with Raymond Porter, who was armed with a rifle, Bear bagged the deer with a shot through the neck. He brought the animal down at a range of 25 yards with a 28-inch broadhead arrow. His bow has a 30-pound draw.

Joking with Bear as the two started on the hunt, Porter declared, “If you shoot a deer with an arrow, I’ll drag it to the automobile with my teeth.” Porter, who returned home empty-handed, made his boast good by dragging the animal 500 yards.

Bear was using equipment made by his son, Fred, of Grayling, Mich., who specializes in the manufacture of bow and arrows and accessories. Fred hunts only with archery equipment and has killed three moose and a bear with bow and arrow.

Bear is a member of the Carlisle Archery Club and was one of the outstanding marksmen before the War in competing with members of the Club and in inter-club matches.

Fred was a big believer that potential archers and bowhunters could be found anywhere and so he sought out publicity for his products and sport wherever he thought he could get some “ink” as those of us in the public relations business call editorial coverage. Here is a portion of an article that Fred stimulated by a letter to Cyanamid in its “Plastics Newsfront” publication in March 1947. This was part of a series the magazine did on “Why we chose a Cyanamid plastic.”

THE TOUGHEST TEST FOR URAC

When most people think of going hunting for bear, moose, deer and similar big game, they usually take along a high-powered rifle and side arms, as well. However, increasing numbers of American sportsmen scorn the use of firearms and get their game with bow and arrow.

Fred Bear, president of the Bear Archery Company, Detroit, Michigan, not only is one of the finest bowmen in the country, but he has established a thriving business in the production of exceptionally fine hunting bows. His products are laminated from the woods which, over a period of years, have been proven best for such purposes, and the two billets which make up the complete assembly are glued with a fishtail joint.

Recently, we received a letter from Mr. Bear in which he told us that he is using Cyanamid’s resin adhesive, Urac 185, in his production. Mr. Bear contends that there is no better way to test the strength and bonding qualities of an adhesive than to use it in the construction of a hunting bow. After struggling and straining to string and then bend one of his 70-pound bows, we are convinced that he is right. Excerpts from Mr. Bear’s letter follow:

“As you know, we use Urac 185 both in the laminating job and in the fishtail where the billets are joined. We find this type of glue best for the splice because the nature of the glue does not require contact at all points. In other words, it’s a difficult job to prepare, and glue fills up the spaces that are bound to occur.

“The laminating operation is really a test for adhesives. I know of no other application wherein a glued joint is subjected to such stresses as an archery bow. In its function, these glue lines are required to stretch and compress, depending on their position in the finished bow. We find that we can control the elasticity of your product by the proportion of hardener used.”

Naturally, Fred’s letter was accompanied by a photo of him with his bow and his bear taken in Ontario, along with a progression photo of his bows in production. As an old PR man myself, with more than 50 years in the advertising/public relations business, let me tell you that the only reason Fred had to hire a professional advertising/public relations company later in his career was that he got too busy to handle it all himself. This 1947 “seed” letter and subsequent article and photo coverage in the Cyanamid company publication proves that he had a natural talent for getting free publicity for his small company and his fledgling sport of bowhunting.

Even a personal trip with his second wife, Henrietta, to her home area in Wisconsin would result in some free publicity for Fred, his company and his sport. In the Sept. 2, 1950 issue of the Oshkosh Daily Northwestern there was this article:

Noted Archer Prefers Using Bow Instead of Rifle While on Hunt. Fred Bear, Visitor to Oshkosh From Grayling, Mich., Says Interest in Archery Increasing.

The ratio of deer killed by archers is eight times smaller than that by the rifle method, Fred Bear, Grayling, Mich., one of the country’s most noted archers stated here Friday.

In an interview with an Oshkosh Daily Northwestern reporter, Bear asserted that only one deer is killed by each 25 or 30 archers, while each three or four riflemen shoot a deer.

Bear, who has done game hunting with the bow and arrow on a large scale and who held the Michigan state archery title for three years, usually gets his prize. He hasn’t missed it in this state yet.

The Michigan huntsman has hunted deer in Wisconsin three times, and each year killed a deer. He came here in 1941 for the first time and returned in 1947 and 1948 to capture his second and third deer ... in addition to the 17 deer he has shot, the Michigan “William Tell” landed a bear, a moose and all types of small game ...

In running down a recent history on the sport, Bear stated that archery ceased to be popular when gun power came into existence. However, about 30 years ago the sport “came into its own again.”

One of the reasons why the sport returned again was the belief of some huntsmen that the skill of hunting was in the perfected rifle and not so much in the hunter himself, Bear asserted...

Bear designed many of his own products. Many of the Bear Company products were pioneered by Fred and through his skill and experience these products later became standard equipment used by bow enthusiasts over the world.

PROFESSIONAL PUBLIC RELATIONS

As I’ve mentioned, Fred did not have a publicity agent in those days, nor an advertising agency. He did it all himself! Finally, the day would come in the early 1950s when he could hire the Paxton Advertising Agency in St. Joseph, Michigan, and they handled his account until we at Bonsib Advertising in Ft. Wayne, Indiana took it over in the early 60s.

In the 1950s Fred did his hunting in the provinces of Canada, the American West, Alaska and his first exploratory hunt in Africa. Then, after we at Bonsib entered the picture, he returned twice more to Africa, to India, the arctic and South America. We helped him publicize those later hunts and helped him get more mass media exposure on national network television on such shows as “To Tell The Truth,” “The American Sportsman,” the “Tonight Show,” the “Mike Douglas Show,” and many more such exposures. These reached millions of people each time he appeared. At one point we asked America’s outdoorsmen and women to write to “The American Sportsman” to tell them how much they enjoyed seeing Fred Bear on their national television program. They were so overwhelmed with mail that they contacted us and told us to call off the dogs. They got the message!

Fred was a very saleable “product” in those days, and our public relations department at Bonsib Advertising, under the direction of Budd Arthur, did a fantastic job of placing Fred in the public eye. Obviously, much of this exposure had been started before Bonsib came on the scene in 1961 by both Fred and Paxton Advertising; however, Budd Arthur and his staff took it to new heights. Here’s a partial list of the national magazine articles about Fred.

• TIME FOR JAVELINA—Outdoor Life, by Byron W. Dalrymple, February 1950
• ARROW FOR A GRIZZLY—Outdoor Life, October 1957
• BONANZA IN BUCKS AND BOWS —True Magazine, January 1958. YOU GO, I STAY—Outdoor Life, by Fred Bear as told to Ben East, March 1961
• MOST DANGEROUS BEAR? I SAY POLAR—Outdoor Life, by Fred Bear as told to Ben East, December 1962
• AN ARCHER STALKS THE MIGHTY GRIZZLY—Life Magazine, by Don Moser, November 1963
• MY GREATEST TROPHY—Outdoor Life, by Fred Bear as told to Ben East, October 1964
• AFRICA’S MEANEST GAME—Outdoor Life, by Fred Bear, February 1966
• GIVING TEMBO THE SHAFT—True Magazine, by Peter Barrett, March 1966
• MY GREATEST TROPHY—Outdoor Life, by Fred Bear, April 1966
• BEAR THAT BROKE A JINX—Outdoor Life, by Fred Bear, December 1966

Friends like Tom Opre, outdoor editor of the Detroit Free Press, Mort Neff, a Michigan television syndicator, and Jerry Chiapetta helped a great deal in helping Fred promote his sport, his company and his persona in the state of Michigan. They were wonderful, and I shall always remember the kindness they showed to this greenhorn in my earlier years of helping Fred’s efforts.

Many editors of archery and outdoor magazines deserve credit for helping provide Fred with free “ink” by running stories in their publications covering his many bowhunts. There are far too many to try to go back and construct a list. However, two stand out in my mind as being extremely important to Fred’s success.

The first is Roy Hoff, publisher of Archery Magazine. Roy and Fred were friends, and he quickly understood what Fred was trying to do in building the sport by hunting and then writing articles about his hunts. Roy began featuring Fred on the cover of his publication at every opportunity and in carrying word of his exploits in his editorial coverage.

The second person that comes to mind is Clare Conley of Outdoor Life. And the fact that Clare became an advocate of bowhunting, even accompanying Fred to Alaska on a bowhunting trip with astronaut Joe Engle is tribute to the way Fred operated and the effect he could have upon people with his gentle manner.

Clare had written an article slamming bowhunting in Outdoor Life titled “Butchers with Bows & Arrows.” It was quite an attack on bowhunting. Rather than fire off an angry letter to Clare about it, as many of us might have done, Fred quietly called him and explained the facts about bowhunting and invited him to try it with him. The rest is editorial history, as they say, and Clare became a close friend of us all, even flying to Gainesville the night we all celebrated Fred’s 80th birthday.
 

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