The 'Dave Petzal Thread' appears every couple of years and always yields a chuckle.
For some fine reading, consider the stories in this issue of F&S:
http://www.fieldandstream.com/photo...-best-classic-hunting-and-fishing-storieF&S has been at the top of the heap for many, many years. Many good outdoor mags have come and gone; others, like SA, lost their way (and perhaps returned). Mr. Petzal has been both writing and editing there for a lot of years as well.
This means he makes his living, doing what many fine writers would love to do but are not good enough, at a typewriter. That probably means he can't spend 50 or 60 hours per week shooting rifles.
Bryce Towsley, Ron Spomer, Wayne Van Zwoll, Craig Boddington, and many others are serving the literary version of TV dinners. Petzal can write. Really write. His leading lines alone make his work worth the time.
And he writes scores of them, hundreds of them. Try doing that on demand, at his quality level.
His writing has touched hundreds of thousands of readers. They mostly don't care about minutes of angle and twist rates, and wouldn't think of shooting 300 yards. They want to enjoy the woods with good rifles. Their scopes will never break. They don't care about shooting after dark.
Those folks read Petzal, enjoy it, and become better hunters and shooters. Some of them gravitate to the loonie fringe, hang out at places like 24HR, and spend serious time studying bullet drift at 900 yards. I'm among both camps.
If Jack O., who was snotty, and this was probably why Elmer Keith hated him, had lived long enough, and been honest enough, he would have concurred that Petzal is one of the best we've had.
If anyone can write better, regardless of whether they've shot more and better rifles at more animals in more places, which is unlikely, I'm sure F&S would love to see their work. Petzal will decide if it's worth reading.
