The “Sell Everything” Day

Readers of this column may recall that weeks ago I wrote that I was going to have a big sale here on Lightnin’Ridge on September 26. I have decided, because it may be so hot then, to postpone it to Saturday, October 24. If it rains we will have it a week later. The list of things to be sold will be put on my website early in October, but it amounts to a ton of stuff I have accumulated over 60 years of hunting and fishing and a life in the outdoors. I hope I have enough room up here beneath the oaks to put all of it out, and enough tables. I don’t like the thought of an estate sale when I kick the bucket and I am not expecting to live but another twenty years or so!

When I was only about thirteen years old I had such a fascination with outdoor magazines that I bought every one I could afford. I remember buying twelve bound volumes of Forest and Stream magazines about 1970. They were from 1914 to 1926 and I paid 200 dollars for the whole bunch, about 150 magazines which had once sold for only ten- to fifteen-cents. In 1959, Outdoor Life and Field and Stream and Sports Afield were only a quarter. I wrote my first article for Outdoor Life when I was nineteen and my first article for Field and Stream and Sports Afield when I was 22. By then they were 60- to 75-cents apiece. Can you believe I still own all of them?

But that’s not all. I now own thousands more, going back to 1908! I started collecting old magazines and couldn’t stop. I have about 20 titles of various antique magazines and I have an entire big basement room full of them, plus a couple of hundred or more of my own magazine…the Lightnin’Ridge Journal. I also bought old outdoor and nature books that I hate to see go. As an Arkansas State naturalist and then NPS naturalist later on in my life, I learned so much I needed to know from those books, written by great naturalists who came along a century or more ago. I enjoyed them and learned so much more from them than my college books on fish and birds and plants and wildlife.

It is hard to sell a magazine or gun or fishing reel that you have had since you were a kid in the 1950’s. One of the hardest things to see go is my 19-foot Grumman square stern canoe that I have floated in since 1972, when it was given to me by the Grumman Company from Marathon New York. I had graduated from college and became the Outdoor Editor for the Arkansas Democrat newspaper in Little Rock. I was only 21 and poor as a dust-bowl gopher. The only boat I had to use then was a wooden johnboat built by my dad that I had brought down from home.

I had written an article for Outdoor Life about my Uncle Norten acquiring and guiding float fishermen out of a brand new Grumman 19-foot square stern and I had made a trip or two with him. I said I was envious of him, having something almost better than our johnboats. Grumman officials saw the article and told me they were sending me one at no charge on a train to Cabool, Missouri. I couldn’t believe my luck and I picked it up and used it a day or so later for the first time on the War-Eagle river in Arkansas, then Crooked Creek and then the Kings River. In time I brought it up to the Big Piney and my dad, with a couple of his good johnboats sitting on sawhorses in the back yard, went with me on fishing trip. This was a man who said he wouldn’t ever even sit in a canoe.

In fifty years that Grumman canoe has been used in 5 states and 2 provinces of Canada, including the boundary waters. No Dablemont that I know of actually floated in a 17-foot canoe, but that wide, square-sterned canoe eventually became something several of my uncles and cousins acquired and used. I have no idea how many trips that old 19-footer of mine has been on or how many miles of water has passed behind it, but I’ll bet that it is still being used 20 years from now, when it will be 100 years old. Other items I hate to see go are my Bigfoot goose decoys and my duck decoys. A few years back I would have told you that I would never give up those treasured items nor the great wildlife art that is hanging on the walls of my den. But someone now needs to enjoy everything I have as much as I have.

In early October as I start to get my ‘sell everything’ sale organized I will put a list of everything we are selling on the Internet under, larrydablemontoutdoors. My fall magazine is ready now; to get a copy just email me at lightninridge47@gmail.com or call my office at 417 777 5227.