Speaker 1: 0:00

Hey everybody, welcome back to the Son of a Blitch podcast. I'm your host, George Blitch, and I just wrapped up a wonderful conversation with Patrick Durkin. For those who aren't aware, he has been a lifelong outdoor writer. He is a frequent contributor over at the MeatEater website at themeatetercom. Just search his name. You'll see all those articles. You can also go check out PatrickDurkinOutdoorscom, which he features his weekly and biweekly newspaper articles there, his submissions. He shares those as well. There's a ton of different articles that he's been a part of you can go check out.

Speaker 1: 0:50

Today we kind of talk about that history. You know how that started, how he kind of got involved in becoming a writer and then working with newspapers and then outdoor magazines and then you know, eventually now you know teaming up on media contributions. But we really kind of covered a lot of other things in his life to uh his time in the Navy a little bit. We talked a little bit about, uh, the trip back to Normandy where they had their 80th anniversary or D day. We talked a lot about that and just a lot of life philosophy lessons, uh things that were important to him. We really covered a lot of ground today and I think you guys are really going to enjoy this conversation. Uh, patrick's just a wonderful guy and it was really an honor and a privilege to sit down and chat with him. So I hope you guys will tune in. Make sure you check out all the show notes below because there's a lot of links so you can go and follow his writings and his career and a lot of other things we kind of talked about and touched on today.

Speaker 1: 1:39

So, without further ado, here's the podcast with Patrick Durkin. Y'all enjoy. Hey, pat, thanks for joining me today. How?

Speaker 2: 1:45

are you? I'm doing fine. I really appreciate this chance to talk to you, George.

Speaker 1: 1:50

Oh man, I'm excited too. I know we've kind of been, you know, chatting about this here for months and it's really great to sit down with you, and you know there's so many questions I want to ask. You know, I kind of just figured, for people who may not be familiar with your work, with your writing, with your history, maybe we can go ahead and go back to talking about where you were born and raised. Maybe, you know, some of the mentors kind of got you into the outdoor space and the writing space and you know, then I want to talk about, you know, your Navy career and obviously your illustrious writing career, work on Meat Eater, and there's so many things that we'll thread throughout there. But I kind of just figured, give a little bit of a foundation on kind of you know where you come from and we'll kind of go from there.

Speaker 2: 2:36

Well, thanks, george. Yeah, I grew up in Madison, wisconsin, and I lived on the far west side of town. And one thing I really didn't realize at the time that I was lucky in that era was I could walk out the back door of my parents' house, cross a railroad track nearby and walk down to Lake Mendota. It was a mile-long walk and then I would carry a little backpack and a fishing rod and that kind of stuff and a rubber raft on my shoulder. I could go out fishing and I used to fish from the shore down there and then when I got to be really teens I bought this rubber raft from Army Navy Store and got into that, also on that railroad track.

Speaker 2: 3:15

In that era this is back in the 1960s that railroad track was pretty much the far west side of Madison and since then the city's grown up quite a bit. You know like two, three miles beyond there. But in that era I could still take my bow and arrow and hunt that railroad track pretty effectively and you couldn't shoot like a .22 or something, but you could shoot a bow and arrow and nobody would bother you. And pellet rifles I tended to avoid those because the police would see that and think you're going to be shooting. In that era we still had telephone poles with these glass things up on. I don't know what to call them.

Speaker 1: 3:57

Yeah, like the ceramic conduits and stuff.

Speaker 2: 4:01

They'd get shot out by kids, and so I just learned to. Not the cops didn't care about you shooting a bow and arrow, but anything. Anytime they saw a gun they would stop and ask you what you're up to, you know. So anyway, that was my background as a little kid and so I was able to go hunting and fishing right from my backyard, you know, back in the in the 1960s, early 70s, and I used to um in that era too. It's kind of fun to think about how I I could ride my bicycle out five miles me deer hunting, and you know I could carry my shotgun. In that era wisconsin required to carry your gun in the case. So I just put the shotgun in the case and tied to my handle, tied to the bar in my bicycle, and go riding out and see him with a bow and arrow.

Speaker 2: 4:51

I was shooting a recurve back then because we didn't have compounds when I first started hunting. So I really I was one of four boys in my family and I was the only one that really had that real strong desire for hunting and fishing. My one of my brothers still fishes, but the other two don't do either. My dad was kind of a casual hunter. He's an excellent shot. So I I got a little coaching from him, him on a shooter rifle. He wasn't in the bows and his dad was more of a hunter than he was. So it's just, I always find that kind of interesting how families, um, you know, kids find their way, what would interest them, and that that's why I like I could talk about this recruitment stuff, hunting all day, because it's so unpredictable how we get young people into hunting and fishing. In my case, my dad was not worried about creating the next generation of hunters. You know, just that's kind of a modern thing that we worry about.

Speaker 2: 5:49

In that era If you hunted or fished, that wasn't this, that wasn't. They weren't worrying about the long-term hunting population back then. So that's my background. I was basically a bluegill and perch fisherman as a kid crappies when they'd be on the shores, and then small game but by age of 15, I was getting serious about bull hunting and then I killed my first deer as a teenager with a recurve. I recurved when I was 17, I think, and then I just over the years I just, you know, I kind of found my way to where, eventually in my career, deer hunting became the primary thing and to this day it's still kind of my primary focus in my work. But you know, back then I didn't have any, didn't really have any clear aspirations, that where it would all go as far as writing and that kind of thing.

Speaker 1: 6:47

Well, how did that writing start? Is it something that you were writing as a kid and then eventually that's something you kind of decided as a vocation you wanted to move into? That Was it always outdoor related? Give me that idea of like how that kind of turned into beginning to pivot into that career that you've had, you know, for all these years and kind of how that began.

Speaker 2: 7:09

Yeah, it's. I think I was the last person around me who who really realized that was my one strength, something I could make a career out of, when I I went into the Navy at age 19, I just bought. I wasn't quite 20. I was maybe a year and a half out of when I went into the Navy at age 19,. I just thought I wasn't quite 20. I was maybe a year and a half out of high school and when I went into the Navy my goal was to become a firefighter. My grandfather and my father were both front mass and firefighters. My dad actually was fire chief by the time I got out of the Navy, so I really had an in if I had wanted to pursue that career. But my dad had this good advice about I should finish off, go back to college, get my degree in journalism and then, if I still wanted to be a firefighter, he'd always say it'd be a great part-time job for a firefighter when you're not on on duty. You could, you know, work on on freelancing and.

Speaker 2: 8:11

But but by the time I got out of college after the navy, I spent five years in the navy. Um, I should say the navy made a lot of things possible for me, and it helped me realize where my strengths were right. Um, because I wanted to go into firefighting, the navy trained me in damage control. I was, um, you know they didn't call it damage control, but that's basically what I was trained in, though, was you know how to quickly patch patch holes, patch um, you know whatever pipe spray, whatever it might be. So I learned how to weld. I learned how to all the different forms of welding, whether it's um with you know arc welding or gas welding, sheet metal work, uh, pipe fitting, and it's just a lot of good trade skills I learned in the navy. The same time, I was writing home a lot to friends and family, and over the over those years was five years.

Speaker 2: 9:06

It was interesting how many people started telling me when you get out, you should go into journalism or going to some kind of writing career. They really liked the way I was writing my letters, and I, in fact, I even bought a manual typewriter back then because of the ship eyes on. I could sit, you know, I don't know bang away a typewriter much faster than I could um handwriting letters, so so that's what I did, and so by the time I came out. I kind of had this idea that maybe I should at least explore journalism and then see where it takes me. And the next thing, you know, I ended up in a career in journalism. I started off in a newspaper in Oshkosh, wisconsin, worked there for eight years, and never did get into firefighting, and I've often.

Speaker 2: 9:53

When my dad was still alive, I told him a couple times. You know, dad, if I'd listened to you, I could have been retired by now. But here I am, at age 68, and I'm still cranking away, and I'm not complaining. I'm just saying that's just the way life unfolds sometimes and you get into something like what's really your passion, and obviously writing and reporting was something I got real passionate about, and editing and those different skills and editing and those different skills, and so the thing I take away from it too, though, george, is that one thing I really liked about the Navy was, by working these trade skills, the Navy taught me to function effectively on a ship.

Speaker 2: 10:37

I started to realize that I wasn't as good as some of the other guys around me in those skills, and those guys, I think, probably got in that in those skills, and those guys, I think, probably got out and put those skills to work out in the marketplace. Whether they worked in shipyards or wherever it might be they, they probably did pretty well themselves. One guy I know ran his own hardware store in dallas, texas. For all this career he retired, and after he sold out his business a few years ago. So he'll tease me about how um he benefited from the navy's training. And look at him. He made it, did pretty well for himself and he retired long before I ever will. So.

Speaker 1: 11:15

So those kind of things always um come to mind for me, and what a good experience it was for me so when you you did that eight years at the newspaper, I mean I know since then there's been a lot that we can cover too. You've worked, obviously, as a journalist in many facets and now you know today you're a contributor media. You got your weekly columns that you're still doing now and you know you've done editorial services and other things too. So kind of walk me through, after you did that eight years there and while you were there, was there a particular thing that you were? Were you doing outdoor writing then, or was this something that you cause? I know?

Speaker 1: 11:51

You know we talked a little bit about the sign behind you there and basketball and doing some things there, and and I I'd love for you to share that if you care to, but it it it seems like you had done a lot of writing in a different you know many different categories. So I was kind of curious how, uh, you eventually chopped into finding have that be your focus in kind of that outdoor lifestyle.

Speaker 2: 12:10

Sure, um, that's another one of those little career journeys I love talking about when people today I still get I get quite a few um inquiries from young um people wanting to get into the outdoor writing as a career. The thing I always tell them is that the path I took was a very not uncommon path. You know, 40 years ago today, I really wouldn't know where to start, other than to say you just start digging and you start working and you shouldn't expect to get, get where I've gotten to be overnight, because I certainly didn't get here overnight. It was a long process and you got to work your tail off every step of the way. But to answer your question more directly, yeah, I spent eight years at the newspaper in Oshkosh and the fun part about that, I think, was that by the time I was halfway through college I was working part-time for the newspaper in town covering high school sports, covering college sports wherever they needed me. I mean I even covered a few Packer games Green Bay Packer games because we were only about an hour south of Green Bay where the newspaper was at. So they would send me up to Green Bay once in a while to give me an assignment and see how I do, but the thing that I kept kind of pounding at.

Speaker 2: 13:35

I knew enough about the newspaper industry back then to realize that the outdoor page where I really ultimately wanted to end up there weren't many full-time jobs in Wisconsin for full-time outdoor writers, but there were a couple. And to get there, though, you know, you had to build your foundation. So I knew that most newspapers had an outdoor page and Oshkosh had an outdoor page. So I kind of wanted to work my way in to get get control of that page, because no one really was putting a whole lot of effort into it. And so I, after about a year, after about six months on the job, I started this kind of right, trying to make a point of writing at least one outdoor article a week, giving it to the editor who handled that page. And eventually, um, they kind of asked me what do you just want to go over that page? And of course that's what I wanted. But I but of course I couldn't do it full time, they would still have me working on.

Speaker 2: 14:33

Um, well, I worked, worked two years on the sports department, because I should have said one thing I should have said was that, um, the outdoor page was controlled by the sports editor, and so the sports editor um, I figured well, I'll start as a sports reporter, cut my teeth there, and even though my only real interests in sports were the Packers and the University of Wisconsin Badger hockey team, I knew enough about football and hockey to get to function as a reporter. And then I learned my shortcomings, where, even though I played baseball and stuff, I didn't really know about what I kind of do, about scores and all the things you learn in the job as a sports reporter. So I did a lot of, I'd say, real hardcore sports reporting where you know you sit there and watch a game, go down the locker room, interview the coach, interview the today, having to do things quickly and efficiently and not having an abundance of mistakes. It really is a tough way to make a living. You see why people in the newspaper industry were notorious for being heavy drinkers and heavy smokers. It wasn't an easy way to make a living, but they did it, you know, and so I.

Speaker 2: 16:07

I did that for a couple years, though, and then I started kind of branching out, and when I got control of the outdoor page, I was still a regular. I became a regular beat reporter for the wisconsin oshkosh school system. I covered the oshkosh school system. I covered the Ashkosh school boards and the high schools and spent a lot of time covering the nuts and bolts of a school board and school budgets and learning how unions, teacher unions, negotiate things. It was good training. It was really excellent, where you have really digging the union contracts and how teachers negotiate, how school boards negotiate and how they juggle all these things and then I.

Speaker 2: 16:51

So I did that for another couple years and then eventually, after about four years of the newspaper, they promoted me to be a weekend editor where I was in charge of the weekend newspapers and I was still doing that outdoors beat though the whole time and along the way, george, um I um, I used to interview a guy for some of my local outdoor stories named al hofacker, and al was one of the original founders, uh and creators of a magazine called deer and deer hunting magazine and they started in 1977 in appleton, wisconsin, which is only about 25 miles up the road from oshkosh. So I got to know al and he was a just a real good local conservationist guy who was, you know, he not only ran the magazine but that was real involved in the politics of deer management, wildlife management in w, and I'm really engaged. So I learned a lot from him. And one day, about eight years into my newspaper career, they contacted me at the magazine to ask me if I was ever interested in switching over into magazine work. And I have to say I really wasn't into it. I was on a newspaper track. I loved newspaper work. My goal was to become the author-editor at the Milwaukee Journal, which was then just the Milwaukee Journal, and later it became the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

Speaker 2: 18:17

And this is where you started to realize even though it's much easier to see in hindsight that the media industry was changing. Newspapers are fading, are fading. Newspapers started consolidating. Uh, magazines were still doing pretty good. But I didn't really um realize till you know, like 20 years into my career, basically, that um I I was riding this wave of dying media. You know, as, as newspapers were starting to fade, I was stepping off into magazines and about time I left the magazine in in 2001, during left year and deer running in 2001. Well, magazine industry was collapsing too, and these days I'm still writing my weekly newspaper column. I still sell it to about seven or eight newspapers here in Wisconsin. But over the years I lost some of my biggest newspaper clients. They just, you know, they consolidated.

Speaker 2: 19:10

And one of my stories, to kind of move things along here, is I remember I met Steve Rinella in 2010. Doug Duren introduced me to Steve during a hunt down at his farm, first time he met Steve too. Steve came down to the hunt and Doug had invited him after reading his book American Buffalo. So it's like 2010. But I'd been freelancing. I started freelancing full time in 2001. And so I was cobbling together different sources of income and I found I was pretty good at it.

Speaker 2: 19:50

Really, freelancing worked out great for me because I was always. I never needed someone to tell me to go to work. I was always pretty self-motivated and I always had this I knew enough about freelancing by the time I started doing it, 20 years into my career, that you have to write and edit as if there's a gun to your head. That if you're not constantly cranking, finding new outlets for your work and then also not doing it for free or for a bad price, you have to really insist on being paid and paid a fair wage. I'm still not great at that, but I think I could be making more, probably than I am, but I think I'm not a great negotiator either, but I am a hard worker. So, anyway, the reason I mentioned Steve at that point was one of my stories that I've shared started sharing more openly is that in 2018, this is like Steve.

Speaker 2: 20:55

I think he started Meat Eater around 2012 or so right in that era, and then he started his podcast in 2015. I think he had the Netflix TV show going by then, but we had stayed in touch. He would call once in a while when he was working on articles and I'd share information on who to contact here or there. It was a good mutual respect type of relationship where if I needed help, I knew I could call him for advice on something and if he needed help, same thing. But when Steve got that podcast rolling and then next thing, you know he's got this whole big thing taking off.

Speaker 2: 21:42

I remember in 2018, doug and I were in La Crosse, wisconsin, and Steve was in town to be the keynote speaker at a Leopold event a Leopold event down there. I think it was at a local college there in La Crosse. The conservation type group had brought him in. So while he's in town, he uh, janice, tell us was his producer back then for the podcast, asked if we'd be available to do a couple of podcasts. So of course you know, I'll always say no one says no one says no to steve ranella. And it was kind of fun about that. It ended up being we recorded the podcast in the morning. Then they said, well, you got time to do one in the afternoon. So I said, of course, yes, and after lunch I'm just getting ready to start recording another podcast.

Speaker 2: 22:39

And Steve told Giannis to wait a second, steve told Janice to wait a second. Then he asked me if I said, hey, I'm going to be starting an expanding meat eater here for the next few months, would you be interested in doing some regular writing for us? Of course, not the time. At the time, george, I really didn't need extra work. I was really beyond belief already Commitments. But again I had the sense to realize you don't say no to Steve Rinella, he offers you something. You make room for it. And so I did so. I almost instantly said of course, you know when do I start basically? And I think within a couple of weeks.

Speaker 2: 23:27

Then we got together and figured out how often I could write for him and what kind of work I'd be doing, and then different editors came and went, the first couple of years at MeatEater, and within two years, though, by the time, spencer Newhurst became the editor you know, online editor for MeatEater and it. You know, within two years, though, by the time Spencer Newhurst became the editor you know, online editor for MeatEater, I think Spencer came in like maybe six months into my first few articles for MeatEater and I started hitting it off with Spencer, and then we kind of settled on a format, for my work would be a longer version of articles. You know not, I was. I think I started off writing a thousand word articles and then over after a while, we started realizing, well, some of these topics I'm tackling really they just can't be done in that short of space. You know, based on newspaper format, they need to be expanded and then more of a magazine long form um articles. So I, with with spencer's help, I started doing that, and that's kind of where I've been ever since. You know, these days, um, maggie hudlow is now my editor at meat, meat eater and um, you know it's.

Speaker 2: 24:38

I just I really believe in this idea that, um, when it comes work, that you give it your best shot every day, that you can't mail it in some days and just hope that that will get you by. I really believe in the idea that you make your best effort every day when you sit down and that's how you stay in business. And I keep little motivational things on my. You can't see it from here, but around me I have little motivational quotes from people that help, you know, keep me inspired. Basically, one of them is a Vince Lombardi quote where he let's see here this is a Vince Lombardi perfection is unattainable. Excuse me again, perfection is unattainable. Unattainable because we're human but in striving for perfection will achieve excellence. And I always think that's a powerful way to look at the world that you can't be perfect but you can strive for that perfection and that in the process, maybe you'll get to be where your. Your work is excellent, and I think it's.

Speaker 2: 25:56

And he had another great line about um, um work being something where, um, you should always do do the best, because it's not an every now and then thing, it's an every time. And I think people who, um, who play sports at a high level I'm not an athlete, I can relate to the guys who say things like um. I read once mike holmgren talked about how, when you coach quarterbacks, you coach them to hit something like this big, about the size of the opening in your hands, and that you try to hit that 30 yards down the field, and if you start settling for less than that, well, the ball starts wandering around, and I think it's I think hunters know exactly what he's talking about that you aim small, you miss small, and I think, in in hunting and writing all these things, that they all have the same, I think, uh, level of devotion and and and attention to detail that you can respect in others, and that I've said I knew at an early time in life I'd never be the Brett Favre of the world. You know it was before Brett Favre, of course. In my era it was Sandy Colfax. You know this great loss of the LA Dodger pitcher. You know he was left-handed and I'm left-handed, so I thought he was my hero as a boy. But then, as you get older, you start realizing that there's only certain, only so many sandy koufax's in this world, and and so, um, but you, you still, though, as you get up, get older, you start respecting those guys that you know. Yeah, they have natural talent, but they also work at it. It doesn't just happen by accident. All these guys work at it, you know, and the more, the more, the longer I live, the more I hung around people who really work hard and work at their craft. You realize, yeah, they have exceptional talent but they're also very motivated people and I I really believe that I just don't believe anyone can get by mailing it in and to kind of continue that thought in the deer hunting world.

Speaker 2: 28:08

One thing I loved about working at deer and deer hunting magazine was that I got to meet deer hunters who were just exceptional deer hunters. You know they weren't. You know there's so much, there's so much stupid jealousy among hunters. You and I have seen it. Everyone listening to this, watching this, probably knows people who worry way too much about what other people are doing. And yeah, there's people out there who cut corners and break the law and do stupid things to get a big buck. I mean, we've all read the articles about those who do. But I also know people that I cross paths with who are just excellent deer hunters. You know, there's Jim Shockey, there's Greg Miller up here in Wisconsin. I could go down the list of many deer hunters I met over the years who I started to realize I love deer hunting, hunting.

Speaker 2: 29:03

I'm not in that category, you know, of guys. Really they have certain talents, certain instincts, um, certain observational skills, um, that I I lack. I I respect, and I so I don't. I don't spend a whole lot of time being jealous of other people's deer, other people's's big fish, whatever it might be. I just think, well, I like to think I'm good at what I do and I try not to be boastful about it. But I like to think I'm good at what I do. But I also realize it's not something that would would happen if I weren't a hard worker.

Speaker 2: 29:43

I believe in the idea of um working so hard that when opportunity knocks that you're, you're there at the door ready to take advantage of it, and that people um will eventually recognize you. If you're, if you're out there every day cranking away, eventually someone looks over and notices you as being that guy who they can count on and deliver, deliver for them. And so I, I can. That's kind of my, the approach I've taken all through my career, and I never really um lacked that motivation, you know, and that. So I think that's what carried me was that I, I, I should. I'll shut up and let you ask a question.

Speaker 2: 30:20

But the other thing I wanted to before I forget, I think I have a little philosophy, george, that goes something like a little insecurity is not a bad thing. You know, if you have a little insecurity in our lives about who we are, how good we are, it might be that keeps us motivated. The people who don't have that insecurity, I think, and they start thinking that they're just really good and they can meld in. I think it'll catch up with you. If you think that you're so good that you don't need to do your homework and do your practice all the kind of things that make people exceptional, it will catch up with you. There's very few people who can just get by on talent alone.

Speaker 1: 31:06

No, those are really great points and I thought of a few things. One it's like you see someone's success and people are like, wow, they're an overnight success. Yeah, it only took 40 years. The idea of how much work people put into things, the things you don't see. You just kind of see the top of the mountain.

Speaker 1: 31:26

You don't think about all the foundational times to put in that and I think about, like the Malcolm Gladwell, 10,000 hours and you know, and when you mentioned the insecurity there, like I think it's good to have insecurity too, I don't think you necessarily have to have in the driver's seat of the passenger seat, but you can put it in the trunk and have it be a part of your vehicle, cause I, you know there's a book I read, uh, the war of art, which kind of talks about this idea of you know, that inner voice. That's always the negative thing, that you, oh, this isn't good enough, or I don't know, like you. You have to tackle that and you have to meet it and you have to have a relationship with that uh own self, you know, doubt or reflection, to really be able to, I think, sometimes get over that and move forward. But it's going to be a part of things, and there's a lot of folks that man, I'm not as good as Brett Favre, I'm not going to be, I'm not going to go out for quarterback. Well, yeah, he wasn't ever that great at the very beginning.

Speaker 1: 32:14

Like, anything that you do, is your writing career right and anything that people will get into as a career, I think it's the time you put into it, it's the discipline, it's the hard work and I think you keyed in on it the idea of wanting to produce the best at whatever you're doing, no matter what it is across the board. When you have that kind of tenacity and focus towards that and that drive. And, like you said too, like you know, the hardest thing where they say is like the pen on the paper button, the seat, like writing, you just have to do it. And it has to be a discipline. Like, the more you create things and you work on them, the better you're going to get over time. And if you find out that welding might not be the strongest suit, and let that you know, let your buddy do that, you know you can find your direction. But if you don't try those things out, I think people get discouraged or they get lost, especially people that are coming in.

Speaker 1: 33:04

Like what do I do with my career? Do I go to college Like it's a big thing, like I kind of went through a bunch of motions and tried a bunch of different things. I've worn so many different hats over my different various careers you wouldn't think one connected to the other. But that hard work factor and trying to figure out what it is, I think, was always a common thread through those. So I like that you covered that. I think that's very important.

Speaker 2: 33:26

I think, to sum it up, there's this guy named I forget his first name, last name is Masakiya the brains behind the Muzzy Broadhead and he had a line that said something like um, the harder you work, the luckier you get. Yeah, I believe that I. I'm sure it's not an original thought to him, but he's the person I heard voice that and I I really, and I instantly grabbed it because I thought that sums up my approach, because you know, you do recognize these unique talents around you and that you've read about whatever it might be. You know, my little lines I've often used to my staff at Deer and Deer Hunting Magazine was that you can't all be Mozart. You know there's only one Mozart and find our niche out there and be our best at what we do. And yeah, we aren't going to be famous 100 years from now. But the thing I'll also say is that I'm 68. Mozart was dead at age 37.

Speaker 1: 34:47

So I think, well, I got that going for me, so, so, maybe that that is so true. I love that it's. It's a good perspective on those things too. And, um, you know that this is something that I kind of switch in gears, but it just popped into my mind because it was something that I remembered.

Speaker 1: 35:03

I really wanted to ask you about your trip to Normandy this year and you know I I had interviewed Jack Carr he had just come off of of that, um, being there. I think it's the best defense foundation who who flew out. I think it was like the 102, uh, different veterans that were almost 102 years old each right and kind of that big grand 80th, you know, anniversary and you know the marking of that experience, and so we talked about that a little bit. But I wanted to know what was it that? You know?

Speaker 1: 35:37

Had you been there before to the beaches of Normandy, have you? What made you decide that I'm going to go and what was that experience like for you? I know it's not, you know it's kind of out of left field here, but it's something that I wanted to make sure we covered it, cause I felt like that was such a profound, uh, you know, honoring of of our, our, really our heroes, and so I wanted to, really wanted to you know, know your perspective obviously, obviously spending time in the Navy and what that was like for you personally.

Speaker 2: 36:04

It was about a year ago I got the idea that I'm not getting any younger, and I've read a lot about DD over the years, and my main fascination with military stuff, though, is through the Navy, and therefore I've always been even more fascinated by Guadalcanal, the big battles of the Pacific, iwo Jima and Okinawa these horrible, horrible battles the Marines and sailors fought in the Pacific. But I also knew that the Navy played a huge role in Normandy, and so I always had that interest. Plus, I always have this abiding respect for the Marine Corps. The Marine Corps is part of the Navy. They don't often like to acknowledge that, but they make jokes about it. Acknowledge that, but make jokes about.

Speaker 2: 37:06

When I was in the navy, one of the things I used to take, take um, take a little. I'd be a little bit embarrassed by it, but when the marines we used to have marines come on board our ship for various, various time periods, and the marines were always these cut chiseled guys who were really in shape, and sailors tend to not to quite be that way. Anyway, to get back on track, so when I started thinking about Normandy, I thought you know, I've read a lot about World War II in Europe and in the Pacific, and I thought you know D-Day, that's emotional stuff. Just the heroism, the idea of these guys coming ashore and just many of them just being wiped out within seconds. And I think we've all seen the movie Saving Private Ryan and I think even before Saving Private Ryan, I remember being moved reading about Normandy and what happened there. And then these chilling things about you know these guys landing behind enemy lines in the dark, parachuting in, you know the 82nd Air and all, and then that push across Europe and culminating it at you know the whole thing with Patton's big march across there to pull things out at the Battle of the Bulge. All these kind of things always kind of give me the goosebumps.

Speaker 2: 38:37

Well, to kind of build up to that a little bit, too, is my daughter Leah. When she was stationed, she spent 14 years in the Navy as a Navy nurse and a midwife, and when she was stationed in Italy for three years back about 10, 15 years ago, we visited the American cemetery up at Anzio in Italy. Horrible battles there with the Germans as you push the Germans out of Italy. And then we also, a couple years later, in 2013, visited the American cemetery up at Florence, italy. And really I have a friend late friend of mine used to say that no American visiting Europe should be allowed to do anything fun in Europe until they visit an American cemetery. I get emotional about thinking about all these thousands upon thousands of our soldiers and Marines and sailors that died in Europe in World War I, world War II, and it's just powerful stuff.

Speaker 2: 39:44

I started thinking the guys who were left from Normandy, like you mentioned, there are 100 left now as survivors. They've been dying for years. One of my first personal accounts as far as the war in Europe was interviewing guys. Back in the newspaper days I'd put up these veteran picnics. They were like anniversaries of D-Day. They'd have like local gatherings of guys who'd served in Europe. I remember going to this one picnic and interviewing these guys who are now long gone, who were then the age I'm at now, and interviewing them and they're recounting their stories in Europe. So that kind of stuff always resonated with me and so the idea of going to Normandy.

Speaker 2: 40:38

I started thinking I don't go there soon, I might not ever get there. You can't take anything for granted once you're in your 60s, I think. And so, the way it turned out, my wife had a former co-worker who settled in France a few years ago and she volunteered to be our guide basically. So we weren't able to visit Normandy on on the anniversary day itself because all the dignitaries were up there. You know um leaders from Biden to you know, I think all you know France's president, all these different people and um and plus the um, some of the remaining veterans and Tom Hanks, all those kind of Spielberg. All those folks were up there on D-Day itself. But then we went up there the next couple of days and the day before and drove around, stopped in. I got to meet some guy, some young guys in the army were stationed in Italy for over at Normandy for the, I think they're. They're taking part in a parachute drop like a couple of days later. Yeah, all these different sites around Normandy, little villages that American troops fought through, and it's just. That's cool too, just to walk along the beaches and look up in these draws and see some of the, some of the old pillbox and stuff still sitting there they're not intact, but there's still remnants of them and just thinking about how many people came ashore and how many landing craft hit these beaches, how many ships were out there pushing these people out, and then just the terrible stuff that took place there.

Speaker 2: 42:21

You know, guys, if you want to read some great accounts of that, ernie Pyle, this great reporter, wrote daily accounts of the fighting. And what's interesting to me, when I read these accounts by Ernie Pyle and a guy named Richard Trugaskis who covered the Guadalcanal as a newspaper guy, one thing that strikes me is how much more graphic our reporting has become over time, like through Vietnam and into the current times. Back in World War II their accounts were really compelling. They weren't that graphic, they weren't really laying out just really how awful some of these scenes were. They described them, but in more a little bit sanitized version, and I didn't really realize when I was a kid reading Richard Trugiscus' account of Guadalcanal Diary, really how awful and brutal Guadalcanal's fighting was, and then later in life, realizing that as bad as it was on shore, the Navy suffered even greater losses in battles off around Guadalcanal and the waters around Guadalcanal. And so all those kind of things are kind of coming into focus for you and you realize, well, you know it's much harder to go see what's left of Guadalcanal and the fighting that took place in the Pacific. But D-Day is not only more famous but also more accessible. And so that's what we ended up doing.

Speaker 2: 43:58

We walked around quite a bit at Omaha Beach doing um we, we, we walked around quite a bit on at omaha beach and also we may go around you gotta go around this um kind of marshy area and get back around to where um utah beach is and that utah beach they have a navy memorial there. That's kind of cool. So anyway, I, I. But then too you read about those two beaches and the fighting that took place, you start realizing that the guys that landed at omaha beach it was just horrible compared to what went on at Utah Beach I mean, it was still vital to the victory, but the toll and human loss it's just horrible at Omaha Beach and I became aware by walking around the cemetery there on June 7th. You're walking around in the morning on June 7th at the cemetery there that overlooks Omaha Beach and I just stumbled onto a couple of different grave sites where they had these little medallions on top of the marble cross. One of them was about the Bedford Boys, like the Marble Cross. One of them was about the Bedford Boys and I had never heard of the Bedford Boys, or if I had, it had been in and out of my consciousness. But the Bedford Boys was a National Guard unit from Bedford, virginia, and I think I might be getting the numbers wrong a little bit, but 22 of them landed in this National Guard unit on D-Day at Omaha Beach and only six survived the day. Most were wiped out within seconds of the landing craft dropping its gate, them busting out and being machine-gunned and it's just horrible to read about. It's a little town in Virginia, western Virginia, by Stanton not Stanton, but by Rowan Oak in that region. Shit, these guys were.

Speaker 2: 45:55

You talk about men that there's a good book out there on it that was written about 20 years ago, before a lot of the family members were all gone, whatever.

Speaker 2: 46:03

But it made me come home and get that book and read about the bedford boys.

Speaker 2: 46:08

And then I was seeing it's fun how we, as we learn about stuff, we realize you can never stop learning.

Speaker 2: 46:14

It's just a matter of um, you know sometimes you gotta jump off and read other stuff too, but you know you can read and you can spend the rest of your life reading books about D-Day and we did a good job recording that history, but still it always be, for ourselves personally, always incomplete. So I guess that's my effort by going there. I think it was kind of just a better appreciation of what this was all about and I was thinking it still would have been fun if I would have put a little more thought into it to start walking those beaches where the British and Canadians came on at Sword and I forget the name of it Sword and Gold beaches and then walk all the way up and go all the way around all the way to Utah Beach and just get an idea of how much planning, manpower and ships and everything else it took to pull this thing off to where we won. Really, it's no exaggeration to think how different the world might be right now if America hadn't done what we did back then.

Speaker 1: 47:28

What was it like for when you're there and what were the locals? How did they treat all the Americans coming back and any other countries who have people who maybe come in to kind of commemorate these moments and give honor and respect where due? What was that like in that kind of sense?

Speaker 2: 47:50

and respect were due. What was that like in that kind of sense? Great question, george, because one of the fun things. When we got there on June 5th and started doing our touring around there, we met some of these reenactors, guys dressed up in the World War II uniforms of the US soldiers, and the first group I saw these guys gathering. I walked over and just said hello and they're all young guys. They're probably like in their 30s, a little bit older than a typical soldier of that era, of the World War II era. They're still young enough to look the part compared to me. They're twice their age, but they're from Spain. They're young guys from Spain who wanted to come down over to Normandy. They actually came north to Normandy from Spain, but they wanted to take part in this and be part of the reenactments and hang out. They have all these little places set up where they're reenacting the soldiers and how they camped, how they organized and they had all the old jeeps and they had little parades going through, I think, in St Mary's Iglesia.

Speaker 2: 49:03

Or this famous scene in the movie about D-Day the longest day, this famous scene where this American paratrooper gets hung up at the steeple of a church and plays dead until the Germans cut him down. He has to let them know he's alive. And they captured him. But then when the Americans came in, they got him and rescued him. But all those kind of stories you see it in real life. You know, here's that guy. They still have a dummy hanging there in that church steeple. It's a parachute up on top and a dummy hanging down below about where he would have been hanging in his death. So the Germans didn't shoot him because a lot of those paratroopers that landed off off site, landed in in the middle of the german troops you know they were, they were mowed down before they even got hit the ground. They were dead, you know shot already.

Speaker 2: 49:59

And but to get that back to your point, one thing I really wanted to stress was, um, you know, you often hear in our country, um, people saying things like on the french you, they don't appreciate what we did and that kind of stuff, and kind of sometimes actually making fun of the French that they weren't courageous, they didn't fight for their own country. Actually, a lot of French people, a lot of the French citizens, died long before we were involved and many more thousands died long before we were involved and many more thousands were killed after we got involved in the fighting for the resistance sites that I wanted to visit, including the American grave site at Belleau Wood where the Marine Corps drove back to Germans in World War I and the French people were very nice to us Everywhere we went. And my wife and I can't speak French, you know it's kind of embarrassing how bad we are about not taking up some better French lessons before we went there, but we just basically had to throw ourselves on their mercy and hope they could help us out. And whether we're in Paris or else we're in the country, the French treat us very well.

Speaker 2: 51:28

They're very respectful. They might be too, because you know we're older and they just, you know, kind of feel sorry, for I mean, I think when you're older you tend to get treated differently than you did when you're younger, and I just find that, not only in France but I think in our own country, I just find that there's just a lot less screwing around. I find I go out about these days and there's a certain amount of respect you gain by just, you know, getting older. So I have to say that, um, we were treated very nicely and very hopefully, I mean people would um, come up to us, uh, and offer, offer help, like I remember on the subway we were looking around and kind of confused about which, which way to go to get to the next train, and some guy walked over the barely really minimum, minimal english skills but was able to help us out, realizing, you know where do we want to go? And follow him, and off we went, you know. So it was like that quite often, though oh, that's great.

Speaker 1: 52:30

well, I I just can't imagine what that would be like to go and, you know, be on that hallowed ground, especially right around that time of anniversary. I know my family and I are about to take a trip. By the time this airs we'll already be back, so I'll probably have already shared some stuff. But we're going to go to Fredericksburg, texas, and that is where they have the National Pacific War Museum and Memorial a lot of different vehicles and different things going on, and I have a personal history there.

Speaker 1: 53:02

My grandfather was a colonel in the Air Force and was in the CIA. Dia had a bunch of different work that he did all around the world and spent a lot of time in Paris and then Finland and around those eras in time and kind of in the reconstruction of sorts too. So there's so much to like. He was the last off of the Bataan Islands as the Japanese came in and took over. He was actually there as MacArthur's wingman. He and his friend were the two pilots that flew MacArthur off, who would not go at all when anybody told him he always went on his own gut, and so they're like we have to go and he's like not. Yet they were like we have to, we're going to leave you, you know so. They were like the stories though, that he had of these so many near misses, just being in these places and then leaving his whole company of friends and then never, most of the time, seeing some of those guys again, or maybe in the hospital or something, and very few going through.

Speaker 1: 54:02

And you know, that generation they didn't really. You know, while there was time that they talked about things I think too, like maybe isn't like you mentioned, like that idea of the reporting wasn't as graphic then, the details of which my grandfather would talk about. There'd be these brushstrokes of what he did, and then you'd look back on that time in history like that was a very key component or place of battle or whatever it was. It was monumental of sorts in different stages of of the war. And now looking back on that, just to see how that that you know, the greatest generation they don't, they didn't share as much. There was a lot that they internalized and went through, because I don't think we can really also envision all the different types of horrors and atrocities and what it was like, like you mentioned, to thinking about that. The gate goes down and you know nine out of 10 people around you are gone instantly. That have you know, in children, you know people who have lied about their ages to be there and serve their country. It's man, they are the greatest generation, and so I'm, I already am trying to prepare, get well hydrated, cause I know I'm just going to be teary eyed the whole time reading about this and being in the Pacific War Museum there just kind of watching it. I was just man.

Speaker 1: 55:15

It's a heavy thing, but I think it's important for us to go and experience those heavy things and know how we got to where we are, how the world could have been different if we weren't a part of this. You know winning group and changing the dynamics of history. So you know we, what do they say? Uh, history doesn't always repeat itself, but it it, uh, it sure does influence it. You know it's like you, you have to. There's a fluidity of that kind of thing too. I think it's important for us to study the history. So I, I, I definitely want to kind of take the voyage you just took as well, to kind of really put my boots on the ground and get a sense of that in person, you know one of my um common things I I share with people is I just don't think today that um, I don't think enough americans really appreciate how good we have it not.

Speaker 2: 56:08

When I hear a lot of the complaining out there and about all the doom and gloom, it makes me, I get a little bit angry about because I think, god, we live. We people, my age especially, have lived in a very good time. I mean, I I saw older guys just a few years older than me go off to the Vietnam War. I grew up with kids who lost older brothers in Korea, so I had those kind of memories. It was just an assumption when I was a little kid. It was an assumption that you would one day end up in the military. Just the way the world was as a little kid, having discussions with my older brother and not with my younger brother. I think it changed that fast. But I remember discussions with my older brother and his friends about which branch of the military you would one day serve in. And I actually had developed thoughts as a little kid that I wanted to be in the Navy, because the idea of being in an airplane and plummeting out of the sky just terrified me, just for whatever reason. It terrified me, and the idea of sitting in a trench and fighting a ground war. That didn't seem very appealing either, but for some reason the Navy always appealed to me. I remember, as a little boy too, reading about John F Kennedy and his time in the Navy. Pt-109 was a story that every little boy in my era knew. The story of PT-109 and that crew surviving, being cut in half by a Japanese destroyer it was part of your story as a kid. You just knew these things, and then, by the time I got out of high school, that was fading. The Vietnam experience was a horrible thing for a country to go through. And I still believe, though, in the idea of public service and something that I think is important, and I often say the Navy, for me, was a real formative part of my life. I have a tattoo on my left leg about how it basically created the life I have now, because I think if I hadn't gone to Navy might as well have things that fall into place in life for us, and one of the things that fell into place for me was I was in the Navy.

Speaker 2: 58:32

The ship I was on went to the dry dock in 1978 for a year. So I took that time to take a night class. In that night class I met my wife. Later on we got married and had three little girls that were now adults. I think if all those things hadn't worked out the way they did, you know, I never would have met this girl from New Jersey I was from Wisconsin. I wouldn't have had the three daughters we have now. All these things that play out in life, that there was no guiding force, that I was following. I was kind of taking good opportunities as they arose and capitalizing on them. But I and that makes me know you have a whole life behind you and you think, well, it would have been a lot different if I were to stay at home and I would have never had these exposures to people on the ship.

Speaker 2: 59:25

Living with other people on the ship came from all walks of life, literally. You know guys from the ghett, guys from the um, the ghettos of baltimore, the ghettos of chicago and just then serving a ship, and they're now your shipmates and you want to get a lot of people, and it's one thing. My dad had this theory, george, I think you'll appreciate. I grew up in a house where I shared a bedroom with three brothers and my two sisters shared a bedroom, and my dad would say later in life he thinks it's one of the reasons we as a society have gotten so contentious with each other is that we haven't learned to live together. He said look, kids today each have their own room A lot of times. They have their own computer, their own TV. They live in these little isolated blocks and I've often thought, you know, without realizing it, by growing up in a room with three brothers and learning how to function in that environment, was good.

Speaker 2: 1:00:28

Preparation for boot camp is good. Preparation for living in a ship where, for the living in a, on a, in a ship where you're sharing a room, a birthing quarters with, in my case, 180 guys in this big birthing part of the ship I was on, I was on a big um destroyer tender. It's a 650 foot long ship and we were basically a repair ship. We'd pull in the port and there may be ships like destroyers and cruisers that pulled alongside and frigates where you go. Work on those ships, but you learn. You know you may not like someone but you sure as hell better learn to get along with them when you got those duties to perform and that's where I think the military, nothing else.

Speaker 2: 1:01:10

It teaches you a lot about human relationships and how to get along with people, and then realizing every day that a guy who grew up in Queens, new York whatever it might be this guy I'm thinking of he became a really good friend, phil phil bonilla was his name, but he was a puerto rican, and he used to always tease me about how unprepared I was for life on the street, because he grew up on the streets, you know new york and in that region, and it was a rough life compared to the life I've grown up in. I was pretty naive compared to him and so he'd go on. When we walked over and worked on our ships, he was always pointing out stuff to me on the way back about certain guys he saw on our ships. Watch out for that guy, that kind of stuff, that guy, don't mull it off to him. You might outrank him, but don't mull it off to him because he has no respect for rank and go and make these judgments on the spot. And I I learned, you know, to respect that and I'll.

Speaker 2: 1:02:20

And then, and likewise after I got married and spent time 20 some years around my wife. One thing I learned to respect about my wife is that if we, if we, had that difference of opinion about someone in our, in our world, well, there's a co-worker, the moment, I have learned over time to respect her view, that her read on that person more often than mine, turned out to be right and I thought that was all it. For me, that was always instructive, I think I go through life was always. For me, that was always instructive. I think I go through life as kind of a Pollyanna, always expecting the best of people, whereas I think well, phil Bonilla and Penny, my wife, they're a little more, they're a little more observant. I think about what's really, what are we actually looking at here? So I think I made my life as a reporter who has to be tuned into people, but I still, I still realize that I'm not, um, I'm not not always as perceptive as I think I might, might, could be, you know.

Speaker 1: 1:03:26

So well, I think also having that idea like that, you hoping that always works out to you have a positivity and a lens of which I think that kind of gives that hope, uh, credence, and that it kind of, you know, cause there's so many things in the world too, if people only just focus on the negative and there's people who do all the time, we see it right. I mean it's all the time. And when you do that you know it's very discouraging, it's not a good way to live your life. But being aware to different things too, you know, I see it a lot of times.

Speaker 1: 1:03:58

I grew up in Houston and you know there's certain street smarts you get from being in a major city and things you see and pick up on that I would see with other friends they wouldn't pick up on. I'm like yo that right there there's something about to go down. We need to move out of here. You know, and like my wife and I were just the other day like we picked up on this one guy that was like there's something right right now and just being aware of our surroundings and being cued in enough. And then there's other people were walking right by and I was like this guy's really he's probably a high on some something. There was something that he was way off and everyone else just around I was like this guy doesn't seem right. He's like calling out people and what they're wearing. I don't like that. I don't like that. I'm like here he's talking himself. I'm like, okay, we're gonna go ahead and head on out across parking lot, go to the other store and you know it was something just to be aware of.

Speaker 1: 1:04:43

But I think, uh, yeah, focus. I think I want to focus back on what you said too about that idea of like having, you know, growing up with brothers and sisters and you kind of have this forced reconciliation of sorts of like how you're going to work well with others. And it is true, I think there is something to say about that isolationism of having your own room, your own thing. You know that's, that's kind of new before. You know, growing up with my parents and beyond, there, every kid stepped in the same room and there's sometimes bigger families and you know, whatever it was, that there was a way that you had to learn to get along a little better, and I think it's important that we kind of have to do that these days and really accept each other and our neighbors, whether we have the same opinions or different opinions, just being able to respect it Right and respect that people have their own or different opinions, just being able to respect it right and respect that people have their own.

Speaker 1: 1:05:35

You know, when you were talking about kind of your journey and you know, obviously through our whole conversation, it got me thinking a lot about something that I ask all my guests and that's about this idea of legacy and I'm curious about yours and how you view your legacy. And you know you can approach this however you want. It doesn't like how do you hope to be remembered when you're gone? What is it that you think about? Do you think about that on a daily basis or weekly, monthly, whatever it may be, on your contributions from your work side of things? And then obviously you have a big family and your family side of things. So I was just kind of curious is that something you think about? And, if so, so how do you approach that idea of of legacy in that personal and professional setting?

Speaker 2: 1:06:13

I think, um, my work legacy, I think I'll have no control over it. How, how it um, you know I really don't don't spend a whole lot of time worrying about that. I figure it'll take care of itself. And I remember, um, there's a great book written back in the late 70s, early 80s. It was written by Ben Bradley, this former Washington Post editor, real famous editor of the Washington Post. But he had for a brief time a real close rapport with President Kennedy, and someplace in that book he said that Kennedy once told him that once you're gone, who the hell cares?

Speaker 2: 1:06:55

You know, as far as you know, what people are writing about you and saying about you, and I think that's kind of the way I and I think too it's just a recognition that we can't control it.

Speaker 2: 1:07:06

And so I figure it kind of goes back to my thoughts earlier that while we're here, while we're working, you give it your best shot, you put it out there and you can back it up and you just try to always achieve that level of effort every day in your work.

Speaker 2: 1:07:25

And then it's kind of trusting that if it remains relevant in people's lives, they'll find it. I think it's easier to find stuff now than it's ever been. I can find examples, george, in my daily life almost where I hear someone saying something and I'll think you know you probably read that on the Meat Eater website at some point in your life in recent years, because I don't think you probably would have gotten that particular little nugget somewhere else. But but you just have to have to realize and I think this where newspapers were great training is that you realize real quickly at newspapers and magazines that most people do not read bylines. Um, they read headlines and if they get past the headline they read the article, but they seldom go back and see who actually wrote it, unless, unless you pissed them off or something. Then they'll go back and say well, no, who the hell wrote this?

Speaker 2: 1:08:20

we gotta get a button and some signs so you think I, I just hope that I. I, of course I hope my stuff isn't forgotten when I'm gone. I'm hoping there's occasionally a Google search that will turn up something I wrote, you know, for a newspaper or Steve's media website or American Hunter magazine, whatever it might be, because most of the stuff does get online and lives there for a long time now, and so I think, hope somebody you'll find some some use in this stuff. But it's always humbling about working in this in this space. So is that? Um, no matter how famous you think you might be or how, oh, I just kind of assumed that most people don't haven't read my stuff or if they've read my stuff, they don't recognize it that I was the one behind it. I meet people regularly. Um, you stop by the house and all of a sudden they'll go oh, I see your meat eater sticker in your truck. You like meat eater. I said, yeah, we'll get talk and then I'll tell them I actually do a little work with those guys and they're they're shocked. And then, oh, I didn't know that and because you realize I don't, one of my little memories I have, george, that always keeps me grounded, was the first time I ever saw something of mine in print was at a college newspaper back in 1982, spring of 1982.

Speaker 2: 1:09:46

I had my first article ever printed in a publication and he asked is us the college newspaper? It was the first time for me I'd ever seen my name in a byline. This is big stuff. Yeah, our newspaper office in that college newspaper was down this little basement and we all didn't have keys for that that door that came in the back back side of that building. So what we do is take a newspaper and just shove it into the door so that the last latch couldn't close behind you.

Speaker 2: 1:10:22

Now I remember one day, after my column came out or article, whatever it was, I remember opening that that door, pulling the newspaper out, and they're punched perfectly through my little little byline, my byline. What was this door latch? You know it's punching through it and, and you know newspapers, it was always. They always kept you humble because people always say you use newspapers once you've read them and to line your bird cage, to put in the dog kennel, to wrap fish, all those things that kind of are this utilitarian side of a newspaper which we no longer have in many cases. But you know, that was always, I think a good way to stay grounded. Yeah, you might think you're pretty hot stuff because you had an article in the newspaper, but fame is fleeting, you know well, you know that.

Speaker 1: 1:11:17

It's so true. I, I, I think you, you know, you remember that first time that you get your name in print. And I also, I kind of look at at certain things like that where it's almost like having a short memory. Like I coach soccer and let's say, a kid goes to wide open goal and hits the ball, goes over the goal, goes this side of the goal, whatever. Or a goalkeeper goes to catch the ball, goes right through their hands or whatever sport it can be. And I always tell those kids too, I'm like listen, acknowledge it. But you have to have a short memory because now that's happened, it's done, it's, it's finished, you can learn from it, you got to live with it because you can't go back and change that. And I think, too, when you ever do something too, I look at when I, you know I got my first article that was published on the mediator website and it's funny too. I turned it in with, like I think it was like a 4,000 word article. They go no, no, no, no. The only people who can have an article of that size is Steve or Pat, and that's it. No one else gets the big ones.

Speaker 1: 1:12:25

I started laughing. I'm cutting it down and everything, and I get it on there and I was like, wow, that's so cool. It was like I was really excited to do that. But then, almost within two days, it's a it's kind of a distant memory in that sense because, also, you spent so much time working on this article. It's from an experience from the year before and it's like, okay, moving on, what am I doing now? Because I don't, you know, it's yeah, that's a cool thing. It's a neat feather in your cap. I was published here. Whatever it is, like you said too, it's like you can turn around in one moment and that's being used for the kennel floor. Whatever it is, it's done.

Speaker 1: 1:13:02

And I think a lot of times you just got to keep pushing forward to that next experience in life and whatever that may be, because those things we, we do, are, you know, great triumphs. That doesn't mean anything the next day, right? So, uh, I, I always kind of try to keep myself humble with those things too. It's like, okay, that's happened. But I, you know, when I put out a podcast, I'm like, okay, cool, I'll promote that thing. But then I'm like, okay, that, that one's done. What can I do next? Always trying to to, you know, get to that next thing, write that next article, produce that next show, whatever it is.

Speaker 1: 1:13:32

And I think it's fun because, uh, having that short memory works in that professional setting, not just on the play field. Um, I know that I've read tons of your articles. I've gone to your website. Uh, you, you put out so much, there's so much on the meat eater. Um, for those people who want to follow and you check out some of your articles, can you go and give your website and some of your social handles that people can do before we kind of sign off? I want to make sure that people do that and I'll have all those in the show notes before, but, you know, after the show. But I want to make sure that you know you get a chance to plug those as well yeah, my website is patrick durkin outdoors.

Speaker 2: 1:14:06

All one word patrickDurkinOutdoorscom. On there I always post my weekly newspaper column and if people want to get little reminders right to my post, my weekly column, they can become site members and then I just add them to my email distribution list. So I send out the link every week. So I send out the link down every week. I also let's see MeetEater. I was pretty regular with them every two weeks for a long time.

Speaker 2: 1:14:47

I've kind of as I've gotten older here I'm not. One thing I find that's interesting, george, as I've gotten older, is that I don't process information as fast as I used to. Gotten older is that I don't process information as fast as I used to. I used to be able to really pour through interviews and reading stuff and crank out an article and then be on the next one just right away. It's kind of like my running. I've been running since I was 51.

Speaker 2: 1:15:06

I realized that I've been documenting my decline because with these running apps they'll tell you how fast you're running, how far you ran, all that kind of stuff, and then it's kind of cool.

Speaker 2: 1:15:18

But then after you've done it for a few years, you start realizing that cool app is documenting your decline for you, and so I had this nice little peak for a long time where I was getting faster and faster and then, at about age 57, I didn't realize at the time, but I had peaked it's been downhill ever since and I look at my work and, I hope, my quality, the finished product is still there and I'm finding just not getting it out there as much as I used to, and it's kind of frustrating because I think, well, you know, I'm 68, so I suppose it's inevitable that this will happen.

Speaker 2: 1:15:55

But until Maggie and Steve or whoever else is looking at my stuff tells me, hey, it's time to. Maybe your time has come, because we all know that's kind of the inevitable facts of life, that we all have our day and at some point it goes. But to get back to your question, though, I'm also on Instagram and that's just at Patrick Durkin Outdoors and Facebook, and I'm pretty easy to find. If you just Google my name and outdoors you'll, you'll find my website and I and also my meat eater stuff, and meat eater does a good job. Um.

Speaker 2: 1:16:39

One thing I do with people quite often is that they'll um ask about where can I read your stuff, and meat eater has a queue of just my stuff yeah if you knew my name and you see my little profile thing and hit that, everything I've written for media, which is over 100 and I think I'm over like 120 now total submissions to them, probably more than that. It's all there and in fact I I'm already at a point in my career where, um, I've forgotten half the stuff I've written. I go back and I'll go.

Speaker 2: 1:17:12

Oh yeah, I wrote that that was good yeah, oftentimes, george, I call something up of mine. I'll read the lead and go what the hell I wrote that, god, it must have made sense in the moment, because that's one thing that's always fun about writing is that you don't really realize until you're a few years down the road that how much in the moment we live. And so I'll read in the article it makes so much sense in the moment Makes virtually no sense five years from now. All the context that goes into your daily thoughts and stuff, and it's just a. I think it's kind of a fun thing to experience too, where you know it's you know. Finish a little thought there about how it's just also ephemeral, just it's here and gone.

Speaker 2: 1:18:10

I remember one of my early lessons that I actually was working full-time. This is back at the Oshkosh Northwestern days and then 1980s, where you showed up for work with a tie on every day. I remember one time writing an article and this is the days before the modern era of you press a button and the newspaper page would roll out in the back room. Well, they used to do it where they had. The headlines would print out on a piece of paper and the text would print on another piece of wax paper and they go over this big blue sheet and start laying the strips down with you know the exacto knives, cutting off and then putting it wrapped in the leg of the next column. I always remember I had this one article. I'd written a front page article and when I came to the second, the jump page, it jumped inside the paper. It overlapped an advertisement by about six lines, six lines of type that were hanging over the advertisement.

Speaker 2: 1:19:12

I always remember this woman in the back shop name is janet grable. She's the one that did a lot of paystep work, exacting life and rulers and stuff. Remember her laying that type down, a little um ruler underneath it, taking exacto knife and just slicing it. And then she handed me that, left the final six lines of newspaper text or wax paper with my lines on it and she says here Durkin, read this, no one else will. Ha ha, ha. And that's the brutality of newspaper work that you know it's. It's if you overwrite, if you go beyond what they've laid that that article out for you, they just whack it at the final part. That fits and that's. That was the reality of your daily life.

Speaker 2: 1:20:01

So you learned to write tightly, you know, and make it punchy, and just you know, cut out excess, excessive words. And, um, you know, and make it punchy, and just you know, cut out excessive words. And you know, I like quoting this thought from John Prine, this great songwriter. He said that the effect, that the essence of songwriting was that you remove everything that doesn't belong and then what's left, that's your song. And I think that the good songwriters, good writers, period, all understand that principle that you only put in what's necessary. You don't put all the extra words, you just chop all that excess out and you just get down. I think that's why poetry is so hard and know, just really buttoned down. I can think about what they're actually saying because it's so tight, Whereas, you know, I just don't have the talent for that kind of writing.

Speaker 1: 1:21:05

So I plus it doesn't pay, well it's. I got to study under a guy named Harvey Arden who is a national geographic staff writer for 20, I think five years, put out a bunch of books, kind of working when I used to travel with indigenous elders around the world and put together life stories and messages and I remember I would write articles or we were working on one of our books and you know I I'd hand it over to him and you know he'd hand back something and I'm like there's no words left. He's like yes, it's too much, you need to cut down. I was like there's literally one sentence he's like, and it was a good one, the other 20 or whatever they had to get out of there. So it it. It taught me before I thought this much space you got to have all those things, Cause he used to do like, uh, captions for like encyclopedias and things he's like. I had to learn to use this many words, you know, and like it it, but it really helped teach me about kind of trying to condense.

Speaker 1: 1:22:00

I'm still not good at it. I'm way too verbose. I can talk and write forever, but when I go through and I after kind of throwing everything on the page and then reading back later on and, okay, I can cut this, I can cut this, that's not important. It's really, uh, that was a valuable tool to have somebody help me to then be able to edit my own writing. And I think for anybody who you know and there may be a lot of listeners and viewers of this that are, you know, wondering about outdoor writing, obviously with your you know your career of it too, I think that's something to write, write, write, write, write, write some more, but then also learn about editing tools and kind of how you can kind of chop out the things that maybe aren't you know, the extras, and really get down to those points, cause that's really important stuff too. I I agree with you on all that.

Speaker 2: 1:22:43

It's an outdoor writer, you you always have a certain chip on your shoulder and insecurity because I think a lot of people don't take it seriously.

Speaker 2: 1:23:00

I think there's, you know, in my career I can look at some of the great what I thought were the great great outdoor writers and newspapers that I grew up reading and then later in life learned about who died. Basically the year I was born there was a guy named Gordon McQuarrie who was the longtime Milwaukee Journal outdoor writer, outdoor editor. He wrote the Milwaukee Journal for about 20, yeah, 20 some years that he I think they hired him like in 1933, away from a newspaper up in Superior Wisconsin and then he died of a heart attack at age 56 in 1956. He's just a relatively young guy and he died but I think, yeah, the year I was born McCrory died. These days I find these books that a guy I know here in Wisconsin has compiled a lot of great Gordon McCrory stories and stuff that he wrote for Sports Afield and the Milwaukee Journal back in the 30s, 40s and 50s and he realized yeah, there's a lot of gifted outdoor writers out there and that some of me, some of them, have never gotten famous.

Speaker 2: 1:23:57

But damn, you know the fact that we're still reading gordon mccorry at least a few of us, um, you know, nearly 70 years after he died. I think that's, that's pretty cool, you know, and I, I, so, I, I, every time I get a chance to turn people on to gordon mcclory, I do it because I, I think this is my worry I live in this country. You can, you can read his stuff and and just get, go back in time and realize what, what a cool way he had of writing. Another guy that came to the Milwaukee Journal was Jay Reed, who I grew up reading. I got to meet him late in his life. I always lusted after his job. I told him that he's my. I still want your job, jay. I never got it.

Speaker 2: 1:24:47

The way things go, I think twice I, um, you know, two or three times I applied for that job down there in milwaukee. Just the way it turned on, they never hired me and and I always think, well, there's a blessing and curse in that. You know, I wish I got the job, but I can't complain about the way my, my career unfolded. So I, you know, I can't complain about the way my career unfolded. So I, you know, plus, I think, god, if you spend a whole lot of time living with your regrets, you know, man, it's hard to get ahead, it's hard to stay ahead when you're always obsessing about things you didn't get and just geez.

Speaker 1: 1:25:32

But you reminded me of a quote. There's was a, and I think I read in a book said if you got one foot in yesterday and one foot in tomorrow, you're pissing all over today. And there's that. I it's crude, but it was something true, you know. You have to. You, you have to be aware of your present stuff, can't hang your hat on all the laurels Cause you know there's only so many hat hooks and then you can't look at all your regrets Cause those are in the past. You got to that short memory, you know, and whatever it is in that sense, um, you know.

Speaker 1: 1:26:00

One last question before we head out, and I think we're going to have to do a continuation, cause I'm I'm having way too good of a time chatting with you and there's a lot of things we hadn't got to cover that I really want to. But, uh, that said, all your writing. Obviously there's a lot of things that are categorized online Now there's things people can search. But I'm curious do you have any interest in putting out a book? Is there a desire of you to whether it's a culmination of your career and kind of maybe series of things that you've written before, that it's pieced together or, you know, kind of your journaling of your own time, something you leave behind for your family to just kind of chronicle through your thoughts in your lifetime, your lifetime Like is that something that is ever appealed to you and if so, is that something you think you'll do or is it something you thought about? But I'm not going to, so I'm just curious about that.

Speaker 2: 1:26:50

Thanks for asking. I, I, um, I've never done a book where I've actually. I, I, I basically ghost wrote a book for um, uh, a deer hunting outfitter, um named Tom Enderboe, up here in Buffalo County, wisconsin. My name's on the book but you know, basically like I think it says something like by Tom Enderboe with Pat Durkin or something like that, and I interviewed Tom extensively, I'd read a chapter for him, he'd look it over, make a few suggestions and I'd polo-stop. It's basically his book. So I wrote for him.

Speaker 2: 1:27:25

That's the only complete book I've ever written and it's not something that has nothing to do with me. So I just basically just a reporting job on for Tom. I've done some books, for I've compiled like the best of type things for, like, deer and deer hunting magazine, where I included a few of my my articles, but mainly the bulk of it was other articles. And when people ask me over the years, you know, have you done a book? I often said, and I still say no, because I like getting paid each week. You know, I like the weekly paychecks and the bi-weekly paychecks, whatever it might be, because I, I'll never, I'll never apologize for being kind of a mercenary about my writing.

Speaker 2: 1:28:09

I've always respected the idea that if you want to make a career out of this, you can't do it for free. Speaking of when I talk about quotations, one that I quote a lot is this great English writer back in the 1700s, during the time of the American Revolution, named Samuel Johnston. Samuel Johnston had this great quote about no man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money, and I keep that pinned to my desk here because it sums it up in a real tight thought that only an idiot writes for free. You know and I, um, I tell people that quite often, like what I find kind of fun these days that I get inquiries every now and then from various websites for asking if I don't fall right for them, and so my first question is well, what? What's your rate? What do you pay? And some of them say I'm not sure what you're talking about. I say, well, I don't write for free, I'm making a living at this Because I think you know if you write for a hobby, fine, but you know it has to make money if you want to stay at it, and I think a lot of people on social media will find that out over the years. Now, I mean, they're having fun cranking out videos, and there might be their websites, but at some point, if it's not putting diapers on your kids or putting food in your refrigerator, it can't, it won't last, and I think that's just the harsh reality of writing and content creating. Maybe I'll call it. It comes down to the same thing that it's got to pay the bills. It can't just be for fun, unless you really have, unless you're independently wealthy, which I'm not and never will be. And I always think, though, that I look at my work and how many hours I've put in the stuff over the years, and I don't sit around questioning my effort. I don't have regrets about it. I wish I don't think I end up on the duff bed. If that's how I go, I don don't think I'll ever say I wish I'd spent more time hunting or fishing, or I spent more time with my kids.

Speaker 2: 1:30:33

I like to think that my kids I grew up understanding that if their dad wasn't such a hard worker, they wouldn't have had the lives they've had. You know, they wouldn't have had the opportunity to go to college, them come out of college without any debt. You know, my wife and I worked, we put them through college, our one daughter, who went into the Navy, she went through an ROTC. But, you know, I like to think my kids respect the fact that I was there, but I wasn't always around them every hour of the day and trying to be the perfect dad. I am who I am and I think. I like to think, though, george, that the bottom line, they knew I gave a damn, they knew I cared, they knew I loved them. They knew I gave a damn, they knew I cared, they knew I loved them.

Speaker 2: 1:31:29

And I think beyond that, and I spent a whole lot of time worrying about you know where things go after I'm gone. I figure, well, you know, it'll take care of itself, it'll work out, and I have. But the one thing I thought about, as far as you know, after I'm gone is my only thought was well, I still have to fill up the paperwork so that, when I'm gone, the Navy can take my ashes and bury them at sea. You know and I prefer to be buried in the casket, you know, a real Navy burial.

Speaker 2: 1:32:01

I was just, you know, watching these scenes in World War II where, on the USS Intrepid, for example, they had a big ceremony of all these guys, all these bodies in these body bags, and dropped them off to the side. They didn't say a few words and left aboard and they were sliding off. Well, if I could do it that way, that's how I want to be buried. But the Navy doesn't bury you on your schedule. They bury you at sea on your schedule. They bury you at sea in their schedule. So the most guys get buried at sea. Now, for the Navy it's the ashes, because it's easier to take care of an urn than a whole casket, the body inside. So that's where my morbid thoughts go some days.

Speaker 1: 1:32:44

Well, we'll hope that that is many, many decades down the road and that we have many more of your articles and enjoyment and great conversations throughout this time, and so I really look forward to, you know, touching base again and having you on again if you'd like to join. I really enjoyed our discussion today.

Speaker 2: 1:33:05

We could talk to you sometime about why I respect the Texas sayings. Now I I you mentioned the crude when you came up a couple minutes ago, I think. Well, lyndon Baines Johnson had a lot of great sayings that were pretty, damn crude, but I think, man, that guy was sharp. You know there's something about. There's something about Southern thinking in Texas, across the United States. I think they have a neat way of expressing themselves and I don't think we get as many of those pithy sayings in the north. I'm not sure why that is, but the south has its share of people who can set these great quotations. I have a friend over in Alabama that I quote quite often. These are great lines about work and you know there's people writing all these kind of things, and the one LBJ quote that I often laugh about is he talked about one of his colleagues and why he puts up with him, and his line was something like it's better to have him on the inside of the tent pissing out than the outside of the tent pissing in. You keep him around.

Speaker 1: 1:34:26

That's a good one. There's so many colloquialisms and sayings down here. I had a buddy bob leard one time. He always to say, man, that guy's meaner than an acre of rattlesnakes, and just there's so many good ones. And you mentioned lbj.

Speaker 1: 1:34:40

Actually, you know, part of our trip to fredericksburg is, uh, we're going to go to the lbj ranch and the state and you know, uh, national park there too, which is always free, which I learned, which is pretty cool, uh, but that's part of it. We're going to go to the LBJ Ranch and the state national park there too, which is always free, which I learned is pretty cool, but that's part of it. We're going to go and see I think they called it Air Force 0.5. It was the plane that he would fly. It was smaller, but whenever he was on it it was Air Force One, right, but we're going to go and traipse through that little bit of history too. I've been through the parks there before. It's amazing. But we're going to try to do a little bit more tour of the ranch.

Speaker 1: 1:35:08

They, they shut down the mini, the Texas white house, uh, they're doing renovations for the next year, so I'll have to do that down in the future, but uh, I'm looking forward to that. Well, hey, amazing man's writings. And, uh, you know, make sure to go over themeateatercom search for patrick durkin. There you'll see all the articles there too, so a lot to read up on. And, uh, hope everyone's enjoyed the podcast and, once again, thank you so much for joining me you, george I really appreciate it.

Speaker 1: 1:35:45

All right, we'll talk soon. Man, you have a good one.