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Bruce: Hey, everybody out there in Whitetail Rendezvous Land. I’m sitting here with Bob Roark, my partner, and Dick Rogers looking at the Whitetail Rendezvous site on Facebook.
You see a young man probably in his 20s, plaid jacket, looking at a nice little whitetail. That gentleman, Dick Rogers, is sitting here.
The story behind that [inaudible 0:00:27] deer you see on the page is simply I was working for Dick at this part of the library in La Crosse, Wisconsin.
Both Dick and I were attending, what we call back there, La Crosse State College, which later became University of Wisconsin, La Crosse. Anyway Dick had a barn, I needed a job, so I went to work and along the way, he said, “What are you doing for Thanksgiving?” I was from New York so hears this funny accent.
But anyway I said, “I’m not going home for Thanksgiving,” so he said “Why don’t you come out to the family farm?” and he said, “You need a shotgun or a .30-30.” I said, “Okay, how much is that going to cost – for shotguns, plugs, boots, hat, and jacket?” So, off we went to Union Center, Wisconsin. Dick Rogers, why don’t you introduce yourself and tell us some stories?
Dick: Thank you, Bruce. My name is Dick Rogers and I met Bruce in 1966. I’m an operator of a college beer barn. Bruce was a hard worker and I took a liking to him. Being from New York, I introduced him to rural Wisconsin. I grew up in farm about 60 miles from LaCrosse. We went down and did some squirrel hunting and shooting, bagged a few squirrels. I saw that Bruce was really into it, so I invited him down for deer hunting also. It was kind of strange. I know this is all about whitetails.
This goes back to the mid-60s. If you see the deer in the pictures, they have very small racks. Those were good racks from back in those days. In central Wisconsin, we didn’t have whitetail until probably the late ’50s or early… I don’t ever recall so much deer on our family farm. So we always went north in the state forest and national forest. Well, all of a sudden, deer started running down to central Wisconsin and of course now it’s probably beaming down here in the central area. Do you agree, Bruce?
Bruce: I’d certainly agree. And so Dick and I left, I guess it was Friday night, and headed to Union Center. Was that when we first went to…? You were playing at…
Dick: Wisconsin Dells or that was a different one.
Bruce: That was a different one. We’ve got a lot of stories. We’ve got a lot of them. But anyway we headed over to Union Center and rolled into the Rogers’ farmhouse.
The only thing I can remember about that is it was kind of late at night and I went upstairs. They put about five coats on me so I wouldn’t freeze during the night, but then it didn’t seem like too many hours went and all of a sudden they’re tickling my nose with a feather saying it was time to get up.
I was like, “What?” That was the beginning of a very eventful day, and you’ve got to remember or have to think about Wisconsin – ridges, and crops along the ridges, and the side hills, and timber, and then bottoms are creeks or hayfields. So it’s just rolling, rolling hills, really a fun place to go.
So we got to the farm and they said, “Here’s what we’re going to do.” We start taking stands and having guys drive deer. It’s a completely different story how we hunted deer back then. It was mostly just driving, just pushing deer all day long.
We went through swamps. Baraboo River was pretty close to there, so many times we came out. We didn’t have waders. We had little knee boots and that was about it. So knee deep by the end of the day, but I was 19 years old having a ball so I didn’t really care and I’ll let Dick share a couple of first-day hunting stories.
Dick: Well, I’m going to back up a little bit. We woke Bruce up tickling his nose. And, yeah, it was pretty quick. The bars close at 2, and you have fresh beers at the bar until then, and then just get up and go hunting at 5.
So you didn’t have a lot of it. But anyway so we went up in the farm and our farm happened to be having some issues. Pretty much, our buildings were all on the north and [inaudible 0:05:01] south up there.
So [inaudible 0:05:06] pretty much drive it. Back in those days, it wasn’t always just driving, but kind of walking or driving. Any place that deer [inaudible 0:05:16], so we’d be hanging out the windows and shooting from them occasionally. That’s the one picture with the deer, the person loading it to a truck in the background.
My brother-in-law Harry
had a ’57 Cadillac Coupe Deville, or whatever it was, and we were going through this field and this buck started coming at us. I was trying really hard to make him stop.
Being hard of hearing, he didn’t hear me to stop and then we were driving further. What was nice about the rolling hills there, the bucks would run across the open field to a valley or somewhere, but we knew where they were going. It was just a matter of heading them off.
So I knew there was a buck we had picked up and had put Bruce down, because he hadn’t had a chance to shoot. So we put Bruce down at the bottom of that ridge. The ridge kind of comes on into this property. [Inaudible 0:06:14] to stop. I was up above in the hill. Sure enough, here comes the buck. I hollered at Bruce, “He’s coming! He’s coming!” All the sudden, the buck got about 20 yards away and I heard boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.
He just kept shooting. Back then, he didn’t have to put the plugs back in the shotguns so he must have got six shots in there.
So Bruce made a hamburger for us that night and it was 4:00 except Polly would’ve said, “Stop! You’ve got him. You’ve got him.” So that was his first experience and he got on to do that. Bold, white hunter ever since, right, Bruce?
Bruce: I’ve enjoyed it and that was the end of the story. We’re talking 160 acres, and see me in the pickup truck. On the site, I think there was, what, five or six bucks.
That was just a one-day hunt on 160 acres. Deer were coming into that country. The biggest thing that I thought of was the tradition. It was a whole family affair – cousins, brother-in-laws…
Dick: Me and Harry. Those were the days when we had a 160-acre farm, but we probably hunted 500 acres. The neighbors would say, “Ah, come on over. That’s fine.” Nowadays it’s [inaudible 0:07:40] 40 acres here, 100 acres there. You have to be careful where you’re hunting. Back in those days, it was wide open.
You could just hunt. Remember that, we could just run anywhere we wanted to go.
Bruce: The other thing I remember was the next day we dropped down into Baraboo River and there was a farm. What’s the guy’s
Bruce: Butler’s farm. He sat on a ridge above the river. The way we drove the deer, they put all the bites down in the river bottom. That’s where they got wet and the mud was there.
We’d push the deer out and the guys living there knew the deer were going to come out of the river bottom and go up into the hills and cross the field. You’d be pushing grass, and [inaudible 0:08:32], and stuff like that. All of a sudden, you hear bang, bang, bang, bang.
You wouldn’t get there for another 45 minutes, and there’d be all the deer. You never saw deer and I was like, “What is this all about?” You had to pay your dues.
Deer hunting is fun, but the most fun – because we were of age – we probably only got a couple of hours of sleep each day. You go out and have fun in the woods, and then you go out and tell stories all night. I remember that, because coming from New York, I didn’t have a big family group that did these types of things. It was a remarkable experience certainly for me.
Bob: Are you still hunting?
Dick: Yes, still hunting; 72 and strong. I’m in pretty much in the same area although the family farm has been pulled. We no longer are able to hunt there, but my brother-in law, sister, nephew, own about 1000 acres. It’s probably 12-16 miles from where the family farm was and we still hunt there and we hunt there, in fact, whitetail deer. Right, Bruce?
Bruce: Pretty much and I started hunting back there every fall, probably what, when I retired three or four years ago.
Dick: I think back in the ’70s though, my sister had a typical farm.
I recall the one time when we all had… Back in those days, although season opened Saturday morning, for some reason, someone managed to pop a door or something on a Friday night so they had Saturday morning.
I’m not going to say who it was, but it wasn’t me. Anyway so my sister would always have a big barbecue for Saturday of opening day at the farm house.
Remember that time we all walked out after dinner and a couple deer ran across the ridge? There must have been about 200 pieces of lead going on those 2 acres. Everybody just opened up on them.
Of course they were about a half-mile away. That’s something I’ll always remember. It sounded like a war zone. Those were the same areas we still hunt in. Now we have sand – some permanent and some temporary. Back in those days, we didn’t have sand. It was all ground.
Drivers would drive. Bangers and drivers, bangers and drivers. Different kinds of hunting then. We do do some drive, but not like we used to because the properties are divided up by no hunting and posted areas versus back in the day when there were 1000 acres, 2000 acres.
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