Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Ask The Gunwriters Raff out roud, how many remember Ed Zern?

I particularly remember one of his articles entitled, IIRC, "A Ruger is just a Japanese Luger."

I remember. Enjoyed his writings on the last page of........ What magazine was it?

Field & Stream

Have a book or two of his around here. Truly funny writer. Zern started out as an ad writer on Madison Avenue for peanut butter.

Zern was great.


maddog

Here's a good one:

http://www.fieldandstream.com/articles/hunting/2010/08/fs-classic-how-photograph-dogs

Whenever I feel low, I grab either my copy of "To Hell With Hunting" or "To Hell with Fishing" and laugh my ass off.

My favorite line therein was "He had a spoup�on of sagacity."

Ed was a scream in person too, though sometimes his verbal humor was too dry for some people to catch. Apparently his columns were too, as I've run into a number of people who just didn't get them.

One unprintable story I heard about Ed happened one fall, when he went out to Idaho to bird-hunt with Ted Trueblood. (They were good buddies and usually hunted together every year.) Ted was driving his pickup along a sandy 2-track road out in the eastern Oregon desert late in the day, with a glorious sunset tretching across the horizon. They came around a bend and there was this beautiful valley below them, with the orange sky above. All of a sudden Ed said, "Stop the truck, NOW!"

Trueblood slammed on the brakes. Ed opened the door on his side and Trueblood thought he was going to take a photo. Instead, Ed pointed at the horizon and said, "That hill looks just like a tit!"

I'm sure I still have my membership certificate to the "Madison Avenue Rod, Gun and Labrador Retriever Benevolent Society." The motto was keep your flies, powder and martinis dry.
And if that's not exactly correct, it's close enough.

I always read Zern's articles first every month. Loved his stuff.

On my first moose hunt in Alaska, we brought so much gear that our bush pilot couldn't carry it all to our hunting camp. He told us to pick out only what we needed and he would bring the rest on another trip in a couple of days. We forgot the misquito repellant and were getting eaten alive! Fortunately on the second day, a plane landed on our lake with some fisherman, one of whom was Ed Zern and his famous bamboo fly rods. He gave us a bottle of repellant and a really nice lake trout. Just a great and nice guy all the way around!

I sure do remember Mr Zern funniest man alive

I had the opportunity to spend some time with him on two occasions, but never saw any trace of his sense of humor. I just figured that he saved it for the paying gigs...

"How to Provoke a Wolf" is a classic and one of my favorites from A Fine Kettle of Fish Stories.

I think it was the "Madison Avenue Rod, Gun, Bloody Mary, and Labrador Retriever Benevolent Society.

It was Ed Zern who wrote the side-splitting illustrated book "How to Fish Good" under the pen name of Milford (Stanley) Poltroon -- Nobel Prize Winning Author of no other books whatsoever. Winchester Press, 1971. If you can find a copy, prepare to laugh yourself hoarse.

The graybeards on the Fire may recall the ads Zern did for Nash cars.

Youtube currently has a 6-minute ad for Nash cars narrated by Ed Zern. Some of the verbal humor is pretty good.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3BCcuZFFlM

--Bob

A Nash! The car ND should be rebuilding

The one that I liked best was his expose of Ted Trueblood...

Yeah, that was one of my favorites too!

Ed Zern was one of the greatest!

Here's a link to the Ted Trueblood piece:

http://books.google.com/books?id=LA...xpose%20of%20ted%20trueblood&f=false