A Chevy Chase moment from the past…a scene etched in my mind from the last holiday I went hunting with my dad. (Press Pros Feature Photos)
What you take for granted all of your life are the things that one day you find and remember…appreciate for how far you’ve come, and from how little you had when you started out? Such is Christmas, 2025.
The attic in my house is so hopelessly choked and cluttered with the collections of living together for 43 years that it’s impossible to find anything specific. In fact, it’s always when you’re looking for something else that you find that which stops you in your tracks.
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And it happened over the weekend when I was rooting around looking for a book that I found an envelope of old photographs – that Chevy Chase moment from the movie, Christmas Vacation…me standing in the middle of all the crap accumulated since Mindy’s and my first Christmas together, circa 1981.
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And in that envelope was a photo of me from Christmas, 1962…ten years old, standing by the car on Christmas day holding my dad’s shotgun. The photo, itself, is so poor that if I hadn’t remembered I wouldn’t have recognized myself…made with Mom’s old Kodak Brownie camera that used 126 film, purchased when I was a year old, in 1953. She was teaching back then, at Fairland High School, in Proctroville, and had saved $7 to buy that camera.
I don’t know about the rest of you, but have you ever noticed that things that you received as a kid, or that happened to you back when you had nothing…mean more after fifty years than the new Corvette you can finally afford?
Just little things, like that old photo…tickets to a Gatlin Brothers concert that Mindy and I attended in Dayton in 1983…a photo of hunting with Dad on one of the last holidays when he was alive and able…or an old moment from college baseball. Guaranteed, all of those things make me appreciate the journey more than I now appreciate the destination, and a quarterly tax bill to pay for people I don’t know – for politicians whose decisions cost more than they yield. Our fair share, as they like to say.
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That’s how far I’ve come…we’ve all come…since the day that an old black and white photo of Dad was taken on a rabbit hunt during the Christmas season in 1986. I was thirty five at the time and we enjoyed getting together with my uncles Dan and Ross to chase rabbits in the hills back of Gallipolis, Ohio. Trust me, in a day long before cell phones and horrible headlines on the news, it was fun. And it was simple, and safe.
Uncle Dan had beagles and hunted nearly every free hour that he had, when he wasn’t working at one of the plants in Huntington. Uncle Ross was just fun to be around, always with a lit Camel in his mouth or a wad of Levi Garrett in his jaw. And the four of us, on this particular day…with my cousin Dean Fulks, who’s now a well-known pastor in Columbus…tramped the hills and kicked the brush piles in Gallia County, laughing and runnin’ cottontails with Honey and Mindy (yes, he named his dog Mindy), Uncle Dan’s pair of beagles.
My dad, circa 1986, on what would be his last holiday rabbit hunt.
I recently got a note from a reader who commented about his own memories of hunting at holiday time…about how gun powder smelled when you broke those old double barrels open and pulled out the spent shell – how the smoke curled from the end of the barrel. I still have the 20 gauge double barrel that Dad is holding in the photo seen here, unfired since he hunted with it on that day…December 26, 1986.
It had snowed the night before, the temperature was below freezing, and when the sun came out that morning so did the rabbits. It seemed like there was one in every brush pile you kicked…huddled up soaking in the warmth of the sun. Dad had grown up with eight brothers and they all hunted as kids, but Dad, along with my Uncle Charlie and Dan, were by far the best shooters of the bunch. Uncle Charlie used to compliment him by saying, “When the rest of us got tired of missing your dad would always shoot last and kill the rabbit.”
It was late in the afternoon that day when we had just about had enough, and we certainly had enough rabbits, a dozen at least. Uncle Dan always knew people in the Huntington community who didn’t have enough to eat, and he would give them the rabbits for meat during the holidays. Anyway, we were on our way to the barn when Honey and Mindy kicked out one last bunny on the side of the hill and it took off through the brush with the two tired dogs doing their best to keep up and make as much noise as possible. The rabbit went out of sight, of course, and within a few minutes the dogs were out of hearing range. Nobody knew where they were.
And it went on like that for another ten minutes, a long time for a dog to chase a rabbit…because rabbits always run in a circle and eventually the dogs will chase them back to the spot where it first jumped. The trick was for the hunters to spread out and try to intercept it along the way. But this one never came back.
I was standing alongside Dad when suddenly he poked me with his elbow and pointed to the top of the hill. He had spotted the rabbit running by itself, but no sign of the dogs. It was at least a quarter mile away, but Dad followed the rabbit and its path that would carry it past the other hunters…Uncle Dan, Uncle Ross, and Dean. Still, there was no sign of the dogs, and the rabbit stopped to look around. Finally, Honey popped over the hill, so tired she could barely trot down the hill. But when she spotted the rabbit she found another spurt of energy. And about that time Mindy popped over the hill and the chase was on again.
Dad and I were standing on a little rise that gave us a panoramic view of the scene. And one by one they all emptied their guns and missed as that rabbit streaked by. The gun shots seemed to invigorate the dogs and their howls echoed up and down the hollow. I was trying to take pictures. Dad was trying to gauge the range for that little 20 gauge. And when the rabbit finally reached a clearing at the bottom of the hill he touched off the left, full-choked barrel. 50 yards is a long, long shot for a 20 gauge, but at the boom of the gun the rabbit literally cart-wheeled and came to rest in a thorn thicket. I looked at Dad as he broke open the gun, and he looked at me, wearing a grin that will never fade from my memory…or the smell of the powder, the curl of the smoke from the end of the barrel. It would be his last rabbit, as he never hunted again after that day.
I still have the gun, and Pop’s been gone since 2011. But for those who have their own envelope of old pictures, it always makes me appreciate someone saying, “You know, I used to hunt rabbits and pheasants with my dad, and I like it when you write about it.”
Even better, I recently met someone who shared a picture, he claimed, from 1966…of himself, his dad, his uncle, and a cousin at Christmas time. He was holding a new Remington 1100 shotgun he’d gotten that morning. He was my age, and said, “If you’re ever in Minster, stop by. I’ll show you that gun. You can still smell the smoke in the barrel.”
I promised him I would.
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