Category: Remembrances

The Hardest of Times

August 20, 2025 | Remembrances | Comments
My father’s life was a continuing battle with failure. He was sustained in his struggles by a sense of humor. Born in 1897 to an Appalachian farmer-livestock trader father and a direct descendant of Shawnee abductee Mary Draper Ingles mother, his formal education ended with high school, from which he did not graduate. In 1915 he bought in partnership a livery stable in Christiansburg, Virginia, its business ferrying drummers between the Cambria train depot and the hotel on Christiansburg’s courthouse square. Alas, Henry Ford’s Model T quickly felled it. Its assets were auctioned for creditors May 1, 1917 on the courthouse steps. Read more

Fred B. Leggett Jr.

July 9, 2025 | Fred B. Leggett Jr., Remembrances | Comments
Fred B. Leggett Jr. died July 5, 2025 at his home in Danville, Virginia. He was eighty-eight years old and predeceased by his wife, Joan Allen Leggett, who died November17, 2024. He is survived by his children, Fred III, Will, Mike and Helen Reynolds. Read more

Last Brace – A Memorial Day Tribute

May 25, 2025 | Henry Caruso Jr., Jim Heckert, Remembrances | Comments
Once Upon A Time, at the storied field trial grounds at Indiantown Gap, Pennsylvania, daylight was running out. There were two more braces to run, but only time for one. No one wanted to stay another day. What to do? The four handlers with dogs in the last two braces: Dave Grubb, George Tracy, Henry Caruso, Jim Heckert. By agreement, all four dogs were run together in a last brace. Laughter flowed throughout from handlers, judges, gallery.  Read more

A Memory of Bubba

May 14, 2025 | Bubba Moreland, Remembrances | Comments
With the shock of reading Bubba Moreland’s notification of death today on Facebook came a flood of memories of being with him and his mutual best friend Luke Weaver. For those who did not know them, Bubba handled Luke’s bird dogs in open competitions, and they were brothers in all ways but blood.  Read more

My Nanny

March 25, 2025 | Remembrances | Comments
Nanny was my maternal grandmother, Ethel Blevins Privett, born in 1867, daughter of Dr. John Faulkner Blevins of Selma, Alabama, born 1838, 18th graduate of Tulane Medical School in 1858, Captain and Assistant Surgeon in Law’s 44th Alabama, present at the Sunken Road at the Battle of Antietam and a half dozen major Virginia battles of the Civil War,  and afterward assigned to hospital duty to care for the wounded in Richmond, and after that war, a practicing physician in Selma until his death there in 1901. Read more

Hawfield

February 25, 2025 | Field Trial History, Parke C. Brinkley | Comments
No history of field trials in Virginia would be complete without a chapter on Hawfield. For several years following the loss of the Camp Lee grounds in 1940, The Commission of Game and Inland Fisheries and The Virginia Amateur Field Trial Association spent a great deal of time and effort in attempting to find suitable grounds. This search culminated in 1948 in the purchase of Hawfield, a 2,760 acre farm in Orange County. The manor house had burned in 1936 and the farm became run down, much of it had grown up and the drainage system had ceased to function adequately and very little farming was being carried on. Read more

Understanding Death

January 25, 2025 | Remembrances | Comments
Death is always but a moment away. My father died of injuries from a car crash when I was fifteen. I had known his death was coming soon since age twelve. How had I known? Because of a freak storm you can learn all about on Wikipedia, the Great Appalachian Storm of 1950. On the Friday after Thanksgiving, our family woke to radio warnings of a fast-moving nontropical cyclone with devastating force. Deep drifting snow and sub-zero temperatures were forecast to arrive in the afternoon. Thanksgiving day had been mild and pleasant. I had turned twelve on June 29. Read more

Memories of the Free-For-All

January 17, 2025 | National Free-For-All Championship, Remembrances | Comments
It was my privilege to report the National Free-For-All Championship at Sedgefields, Safford, Alabama a few years just before its discontinuance as a three-hour stake. It was unique, and its loss was a blow to the sport.  First run in 1916 by the National Field Trial Club, it was first won by John Proctor (HOF 1954), which had won the National Championship the week before after a two-hour second series. Read more

Spring Shuffle Delayed

July 29, 2024 | Ben Reach, Short Stories, Ted Baker | Comments
Oliver Bain sold his AI (artificial intelligence) Unicorn (billion-dollar start-up) to Microsoft instead of taking it public. He was 58, and unknown to any around him, had a secret ambition he would now satisfy. As a boy growing up on a farm in Virginia, he had walked with his father, a dirt farmer, behind home grown pointers and setters after quail.  Read more