Down memory lane - remembering your Dad

[stumpstalker]

Those are super photos of ancestors with guns. All of you are very fortunate to have those.

I wish I could recover in the piles of retained “family stuff” the hazy snapshot I saw many years ago that depicted my relatives posing with hounds and guns. When I showed it to a surviving aunt to narrow down the identities, without hesitation she said, “they used to hunt foxes up in Dublin”. (“Dublin” was the unofficial name of an Irish-émigré enclave in the woods and granite-quarrying section of Lanesville, on Cape Ann, Massachusetts.)

Yes, they had hounds, but did not RIDE to hounds.

My father hunted Pheasant and waterfowl with his four Parker guns, but I have not been able to come up with a single photo of him with one of the guns or even in a hunting setting. I do have a photo of him as a budding outdoorsman which I post below, alongside a 700-plus pound Giant Bluefin Tuna he harpooned in Ipswich Bay in 1934 at age 17.

Todd: The third one of yours with you and your wife taking a break from Dove shooting does not feature a gun, but what a profile! And, I don’t mean yours.