I remember a number of years ago, i was taking a trip back east to my home state, and while on the plane i read a romantic-style article about some guy's hunting dog who up and died on him unexpectedly. May have been in "Grays,"-- can't remember now. But it was a moving story that hit me right in the heart. Right then and there i knew that if i ever got in "the game," I wanted to write stuff that would move people like that. I've had a few of those articles published with some decent reviews now, and those are definitely the most satisfying articles, IMO.
1 of the neatest pieces i ever read was the short foreword that Bob Bell wrote in his Gun Digest Book of Scopes and Mounts titled, "In the Beginning," about a single long-range chuck shot he made with his .240 Cobra/Unertl Ultra-Varmint, that was just as neat as it gets. Very seldom do u ever read anything more than technical about varmint shooting, but Bob hit it right on the head with that short piece.
Actually there's kind of a neat story to go along with that. Awhile back I wanted to write an article for PS magazine as a sort of "thank you" to the gunwriters that influenced me to become an outdoorsman years ago. It was titled, "Through Their Words," and Dave Brennan was gracious enough to publish it several years ago. I wanted to dedicate that short piece to those guys, but i didn't know how to get ahold of Bob. In the book he mentioned he was from a certain town in PA, so i called information for that town, and they gave me a bunch of #'s for all the Bob Bells in that town, so i called several of them, and finally got ahold of him, and ran this idea by him. He was all for it, and i sent the article to him to edit. We stayed in contact for awhile afterwards, and it was a great experience. Nice to know the "heros" of your youth are quite often nice guys that are so approachable. He was certainly one of them.
