Jim is "a darn good guy." Have spent considerable time with him from places like Glenrock, Wyoming to a tour of all the Zeiss factories in Germany in the early 1990s. (At the time, just after the fall of the Berlin Wall, there were 3, one in what had been East Germany).
He does know a LOT of stuff. One of the instances I remember occurred after a hard day of prairie dog shooting with a major bullet company. After we got dropped off, he invited me to have a Scotch together in his motel room in Glenrock. This was shortly after I'd published an article in National Geographic, and he wanted to talk about that a little.
The conversation then wandered to other subjects, and I eventually asked a question about optics. In the 1970s I hunted a lot with an older guy in northeastern Montana who had a low-range variable on his pre-'64 Model 70 Winchester .30-06. He'd purchased the rifle in 1937, the first year Model 70s were available, and had a Bausch & Lomb scope mounted in their adjustable mounts . As I recall it was a 1-4x, and it had reticle with a small dot centered on very thin crosshairs.
Back then a common method of hunting whitetails in that part of Montana was jumping them from brushy draws, and shooting the deer on the run--a lot like what Jack O'Connor described about hunting Coues deer in Arizona and Old Mexico, also in the 1930s. When my older hunting partner expected a close shot, he adjusted the magnification on his B&L so the dot got "larger".
After I started writing about optics a lot some 20 years later, I wondered about that--and contacted the folks at Bushnell (which by then owned B&L) and asked about what the deal was with the "adjustable dot" scope. They had no idea.
I told Jim this story that afternoon in Glenrock, and he leaned back and started thinking. I didn't interrupt him, because I could just about see the gears turning. After maybe 3 minutes he said, "It was a first focal-plane scope. When he turned the magnification up, the dot looked larger, even though the field of view was smaller." Well, yeah!
In some ways Jim was lucky. Hunting and shooting magazines paid LOT more during the years he wrote for Outdoor Life. That started changing about 20 years ago, about the time he retired from OL. But he deserved every bit of his luck, because (like most writers who manage to make a living at it) he worked HARD, and kept learning. And still is.
