An Outdoor Sporting Life

ABOUT the AUTHOR About a decade into a 47-year career teaching high school biology and coaching track and field, then university teaching of science teachers-to-be, Scott Irwin began writing about his ‘other life.’ With the perspective of hindsight, he would describe his upbringing as “ . . . lucky enough to have been born the last of eight children, raised in post-Depression 1940s – 50s in two Kansas towns - both small enough that the normal existence for families included having a big vegetable garden, hen house, milk cow, and house, lawn and garden chores that instilled an early ‘hands-on’ work ethic.” But there was always room for exploring the wild things. From early childhood, older brother, Jim, schooled Scott in small water (pond and creek) fishing, then as a hunter of back yard “spatzies” – armed first with a slingshot carefully crafted from a forked box elder limb and powered by pre-WW-II red rubber inner tube strips, later with a Daisy B-B gun. By age twelve, cottontails and squirrels were stalked with Dad and his vintage Springfield .22 single shot. Oldest brother, Jack, gifted him with a tack-driving Remington 511 .22 with five-shot clip with which he thinned out the jackrabbits that swarmed southwest Kansas during 1950s high school days. Carpentering with his dad’s building crew, then part-time jobs during college funded a Winchester Model 12 as a whole new realm of wing shooting enriched his outdoor sporting life – and has continued in seasonal cycles through marriage, family, graduate school, a distinguished public school and university teaching career and, in 2009, ‘retirement.’ A chance 1972 conversation with retired banker, Bob Foncannon, who’d stepped down from many years of writing a weekly outdoor column for William Allen White's Emporia Gazette, triggered an interview with editor, Ray Call and Sports Editor, Jim Nirider. Four editors and at least a dozen sports editors later, a 42-year archive has evolved, filled with ‘good, bad, and ugly’ accounts of things ‘outdoor wild’ across the Kansas Flint Hills - with seasonal forays into Nebraska, Missouri, Arkansas, South Dakota, and West Texas. This book, An Outdoor Sporting Life, presents a reflective ‘sampler’ of Scott Irwin's columns from those years.