What Field Trials Have Given Me

Folks like to talk about what someone has given to field trials, especially when Hall of Fame voting time rolls around. This is about what field trials have given to me. The short answer is, much happiness.

My introduction to the obscure sport (not 1% of the public has a clue what a bird dog field trial is) came from my law school mate, Bill Anderson, of Danville, Virginia. He introduced me to bird dogs and his friend Fred Leggett about 1960. We hunted opening days on Fred’s Cloverdale Farm (rabbits in the mornings, quail in the afternoons). The farm was loaded with wild quail then, thanks to President Eisenhower’s Federal Land Bank Program, with lots of fields planted in Korean Lespedeza (precursor to CRP) and no fescue. The farm’s low grounds on the Dan River were then trial grounds for the Carolina-Virginia Field Trial Club, which held a spring trial that attracted major circuit handlers on their way home from New Jersey and Pennsylvania on their Spring Swing. Bill and his girl friend (later wife) Carolyn were active in the Club. Fred gave me a female setter pup which I promptly rendered gun-shy but she had a pup that became my first gun dog and made me a life-long on-foot bird (quail and grouse) hunter. (Fred later made his farm available to the Virginia Amateur, which ran there for several years). 

Bill and Fred introduced me to Arthur Bean, a pioneer shooting dog trainer-handler of High Point, North Carolina, who became a dear friend and tutor. A strict teetotaler and church-going gentleman, he had worked with Paul Walker and the other great Carolina dog men of that and an earlier era and polished Elhew pointers for Bob Wehle. He told me the tales of the sport “wing beat by wing beat.” He competed in the Carolinas and Virginia and at the shooting dog futurities in New York and North Carolina and soon I was following trials locally to watch him, occasionally scouting when he had no one better. He soon retired to just training, but we stayed in touch the rest of his life. 

Then in November 1983 I was hired by Bill Pannill, CEO of Pannill Knitting Company, maker of sweat suits, to handle the legal side of the sale via an LBO of his company. That led to Bill taking me as his guest to Braemar, Scotland to shoot driven grouse. Among the nine “guns” was Ted Baker, to whom I introduced myself with, “I sure liked your Builders Addition,” Ted’s and T. Jack Robinson’s 1980 National Champion. Instant friendship followed. 

I wrote an account of the trip and sent a copy with snapshots to each gun. Ted called and asked me to report the Florida Open All-Age Championship which he sponsored. I did, first in 1995 and every year since. That’s how I found my life’s passion, reporting field trials. Ted’s invitation led to others and an avocation I pursued forty days a year for many years. 

Among the trials reported were were The Quail Championship Invitational, the Continental Championships, the National Free-For-All Championship, the National Open Derby Championship, the Oklahoma Open All-Age Championship,and the National Amateur Field Trial Championship at Union Springs, Alabama. Magic for me too were the Lee County Trial and the North Dakota Classics at Columbus. With age I have cut back reporting to just a week a year, the Florida Championship at Chinquapin Farm, the country’s greatest hour wild-bird quail trial. 

At these trials I have been privileged to watch the best bird dogs in the world in competition, and watch their handlers pursuing their craft, showing off their dogs’ strengths and trying to hide their “holes,” or shortcomings. 

Field trials have gives me priceless friendships, for example with Luke Weaver, John Thompson and Jimmy White, frequent trial judges, John Russell, long-time chairman of the Invitational, and my fellow directors of the Suwannee River Field Trial Association, Ted Baker’s pals putting on each year the Florida Championship, Howard Brooks, Skip Griffin, John Milton, Chester Stokes and especially the late T. Jack Robinson. Then folks associated with particular trials and venues, like J. D. “Duke” Boss at Paducah, Big George Moreland and his son Bubba at Coney Lake, Hoyt Henley and Ed Mack Farrior at Sedgefields Union Springs, Jimmy Hinton at Sedgefields West, Alma “Snus” Kopplesloen Dollarhide of Columbus, North Dakota, youngest child of the homesteaders of the prairie grounds there whom I met as she approached age ninety, Randy Floyd at Dixie Plantation, and especially the crew at Chinquapin, Joe Hicks and his Talicia, his successor as manager Slade Sikes, dog trainer Ray Warren, and Darrell “Cowboy” Summers, my chauffeur as dog truck driver while I report. Finally there are the pro handlers from across America whom I admire for their dedication, devotion to the ideal of the faultless bird dog, never attained but constantly sought.

Field trials have given me too a second avocation, writer of stories about field trials and bird dogs and the people around them. Not lucrative but satisfying of the creative urge, old age’s sometime substitute for sex. 

Field trials are a hot bed of interesting people, not saints but characters, men and women drawn by a strange passion to pursue excellence with bird dogs, with no goal of financial gain. People with quirks that make them intriguing to a student of human nature and a writer of stories. Among the most interesting to me are the dead-serious amateur competitors, the semi-pros, men who year-after-year breed and train and win with and sell top dogs. Men like Ferrel Miller and his Kentucky disciples, Judge Lee R. West, Cecil Rester, Billy Blackwell and Gary Winall. 

Today field trials are threatened as never before, from many directions. But trials have endured and survived countless threats since their start near Memphis in 1874. Threats like world wars, depressions, recessions, loss of running venues and training grounds due to urbanization and the growth of anti-hunting sentiment (ironic since trials are a bloodless sport).

Field trials have never been for the masses, but rather a sport for the few, those who appreciate the wonder of a top canine athlete: the truly great bird dog. “May field trials survive,” is my prayer each night when I lay my head on my pillow.