A Blast from the Past
Deer season was over in the Southeast and the winter of 1976 and 1977 had arrived early and it would a brutal winter. I spent a lot of my spare time cutting firewood and hauling it in. We lived in a drafty farmhouse a few miles out of Clayton and I used a wood burning heater for the whole house. It was a full time job trying to keep my young family warm.
There are two types of weather in the mountainous portions of southeastern Oklahoma. We have what we call valley weather and mountain weather and the phrase "global warming" was not in our vocabularies then. Valley weather was much better than mountain weather. It brought cold rain and ice up on top of the mountains. When it snowed, light snow usually fell in the valley and heavy snow fell on the mountain top. This year valley weather was much like mountain weather. I even had studded snow tires so I could get around! I didn't have four-wheel drive but was told studded tires were even better! Huh?
The furbearers had excellent coats of fur and fur prices were very high. An ordinary bobcat would bring over a hundred dollars. A hundred dollars would buy four times as much then as it would today. The illegal hunting of furbearers was demanding a lot of our time across the district. During that time, I was working with Atoka County Ranger Roy Mead and Jack Sanders attempting to apprehend a group of illegal hunters from Atoka County.
Now Jack Sanders had a younger wife named Kathy. Kathy always attended every district meeting with Jack. She always wore a khaki shirt that looked like our uniform shirt, green jeans, black shoes, and belt. She looked a lot like a Game Ranger without the badge, patches, and sidearm. Often when you worked with Ranger Jack Sanders, he would arrive riding in his wife's Lincoln Continental. Kathy always drove while Jack rode in uniform as a passenger. Jack had a police radio put in her car, which was on our wildlife frequency. I never knew if they had a red light in the car or not, however, they did talk about how Kathy had stopped-spot lighters in the car. They told about a night when Ranger Roy Mead was in a high-speed pursuit of a spot lighter. Kathy came up behind Roy in the Lincoln and told Roy on the radio "Get that damn truck out of the way" because she was trying to get around. A few miles down the road, Roy came across Jack and Kathy with the poachers pulled over on the side of the road.
A few days after New Year's, I received a call from "Wimpy" Newberry, my District Chief. He advised me that I was needed for a special assignment to assist the Game Rangers of Atoka County. The special assignment was secretive so none of us had much information. According to some information from Missouri, were supposed to watch for a boat on the lake after dark. We were perplexed to say the least, because the lake was frozen due to the unusually cold winter. You could walk fifty yards out onto the frozen lake without any danger of falling through the ice but, you could not see open water from the bank at night. The older Rangers suspected that it was a clever ploy to get all the Game Rangers out of the area so they could hunt the furbearers illegally. Night after night, we shivered and ran our heaters trying to stay warm. I did not own enough clothing to stay warm.
Every few days District Chief Newberry would call us telling us that they (the 'bad' guys) were coming tonight. We would reluctantly run to our spots to watch. Nothing would happen! Roy would say "I am going to laugh when this is over, this is just a trick. Someone from around here is calling their relatives in Missouri to get us out of the way!"
More information finally came down from headquarters. An informant in Missouri was calling to tell us that a ring of commercial fishermen had set thousands of yards of net in Atoka Lake. They would drive by and see if they could get a boat on the water. When they could not, they would drive on to Texas where it was warmer and run nets there. They used a refrigerated truck, which was used to conceal the fish and nets as well as keeping their catch cold. They would take the truck back to Missouri and remove the fish from the truck while parked inside a building.
One day while Jack and Kathy were out on patrol Jack found a place where someone had pulled a boat more than fifty yards out from the bank to break the ice onto open water. Jack surmised that whoever did this wanted out on the frozen lake for a very good reason. Jack fearing the worst had already happened called in the Game Rangers for another night. He hoped they had not already gotten all of their nets out of the lake.
The next night when everyone arrived at the suspicious area, they soon heard the noise of an outboard motor out on the open cold water. Rangers did not know where the suspects had put their boat in. No one was certain where or when he or she would come out. Jack talked on his radio most of the night keeping everyone informed. He could hear them really well and was afraid that his motor noise would be heard in the still night so he did not start his truck (to run the heat). Just before 5:00 am the netters loaded up and they came out on the road Jack and Kathy chose. Jack tried to start his truck, but the battery was down and it would not start. A combination of the bitter cold and talking on his radio all night ran it down. Kathy was quick-witted and told Jack to just put his pickup in neutral and let it roll down hill to block the exit road. Jack said it rolled just far enough to block the road. He jumped out and made the stop while Kathy backed him up with her trusty .30-30!
Kathy says one of the netters had taken his coat off after getting back in their truck. Jack and Kathy had them out in front of the headlights where they could watch them while waiting for the other Rangers to arrive for back up. That netter must of mistakenly thought Kathy was a Game Ranger because he asked her if he could get his coat out of the truck. She replied "You are not a damn bit colder than I am and I have been sitting out here all night! Just stay up here where I can see you!" We were all happy that Rangers Jack and Kathy had concluded this special assignment for us. More than a mile of gill nets had been in the lake. Think about the damage to the fish resource!
Rangers Jack Sanders, Roy Mead, Ron Gragg, Mike Wigginton, Fred Manous, Bob Fleenor, and I participated in this special assignment. Warden Fleenor and I are the only active Game Wardens left from the original Special assignment. Roy Mead, Jack Sanders, and "Wimpy Newberry" have passed on. Wardens Manous, Wigginton, and Gragg are enjoying retirement.
The following winter of 1977 and '78 two netters from Missouri drowned on Kerr Lake. It seems they had cut all the flotation material out of their boat so they could get more nets into it. Then they over-loaded the boat with fish and nets and the boat sank. I never knew if these were the same people as the ones that we arrested, but I helped pull numerous nets out of Kerr Lake the day after the drowning. Now, as the saying goes… you know the rest of the story!