Dennis Marks was a true son of Southern Illinois and very proud of it, I think it's one of the things that made us such good friends. He was a US Army veteran, had done two tours in Vietnam, and was decorated for bravery. We'd traveled many a mile together and done a heap of Boy Scout work together as well. Here's a picture of him I took after what ended up being our last squirrel hunt:
That old Jeep didn't have any doors or seat belts but it would go anywhere and we sure had a lot of fun in it. He never owned a Parker, was more of a rifleman, that's his Anschutz target rifle he's holding there. He bought that gun when we were first getting to know one another and it was one of his proudest possessions.
Here's one Dennis took of me several years and several pounds ago, I think I was 24 at the time. We were in the middle of the greatest weekend of squirrel shooting either of us had ever experienced. His uncle Joe Bob Marks was with us and was in his 70's at the time, he said he'd never seen anything like it in all his years and he'd hunted squirrels almost since birth.
The stories I could tell about Dennis and our times together would go on for hours, he was an original without peer.
Destry