Tales of an East Side Hunter: My Dad Shot Bambi

When I was growing up on the East Side in the late 50s and early 60s, supermarkets like Cub and warehouse stores like Costco hadn't yet come along. We had local chains like Red Owl, and there was an occasional IGA and Kroger, but for the most part people shopped in smaller, locally owned stores. If you lived on the East Side most likely you got your bread and pastries from Jacobsen's Bakery on Payne Avenue. Old Home Dairy delivery men brought your milk, cottage cheese, and butter. The freezer in our basement was full of paper milk cartons containing dressed fish preserved in salt water. And you could get live chickens slaughtered for you at the farmer's market downtown St. Paul on Saturdays.

And for red meat? Well, there were the butcher shops (we called them meat markets then) on Arcade and Payne, but many dads - like mine - went hunting and fishing to fill their chest freezers. Some (like mine) even had a space at a local meat locker like Westlund's to store their game. Going there to retrieve some of our stored meat was always an adventure. I think I was in junior high school before I realized that it was more common for people to buy meat at the grocery store.

I think hunting as a way to supply your family with food is rare. My son recently recounted an incident when he was standing in line to check out at the local supermarket. He had on, as usual, one of his 'I live to hunt' sweatshirts, and the woman in front of him in the line turned to chastise him for being a criminal for killing innocent animals. He asked her where she thought that massive stack of pork chops and bacon in her cart had come from. Flabbergasted, she said, "I got it here, not from some savage that went out and shot it!" I sure am glad my kids were raised to know how meat actually gets to their plates. He worked in a butcher shop as a young teen, and occasionally I filled in when they needed help during deer season. We raised plenty of animals for meat on the farm where my husband and I raised our kids, and even the little ones got involved during chicken butchering.

For years I thought this is what everybody's meat packages looked like.

To my mind - as well as to many of my era - eating wild game was a regular occurrence. It was a relatively economical way to keep your family fed. (Nowadays, though, it's become an expensive hobby. With the cost of the deer tag, and ammo, target practice, and processing, we figured out my son's first deer came out to about $19 a pound of edible meat. That doesn't include the cost of either the rifle or preserving the hide, which he insisted on to mark the milestone.)

Although it might surprise some of my nieces and nephews, Grandpa Tom was quite the outdoorsman when I was a kid. He sometimes took me fishing with him, but most of his trips were with his friends. Those same friends also banned together for hunting adventures at Camp Ripley every fall. And we ate well. In addition to the walleye and sunnies, our freezer contained a variety of wild game, mostly venison, but occasionally a few rabbits or squirrels, and one year even bear meat. (The bear was an unintended harvest, having the misfortune of trying to make off with his big doe hanging in a tree at deer camp. Both the doe and the bear found their way onto our plates.)

Usually the deer was taken to a butcher shop for processing, and the carcass itself never made its way to our home until it was nicely packaged for dinners. But one year stands out to me. I'm not sure why, but after one trip the big buck was strung up to hang in our garage for a couple of days. I was fascinated, being already somewhat familiar with hunting and how we got our meat. I stared in awe at that creature hanging from the garage rafters, dripping blood onto a puddle on the concrete floor. And I just KNEW my friends would want to see this.

Being the budding entrepreneur that I was, I invited the kids in the neighborhood to come see the deer - for a nickel. (Why does this suddenly sound like a circus side show to me as I'm writing this?) My friends didn't react at all like I thought they would. Instead of showing the same fascination that I had, most of them went running from the garage, crying and screaming, "Mr. Ray killed Bambi!"

And of course my parents got calls and even personal visits from more than one set of terribly annoyed parents. I have to laugh at the irony of this now, because many of those dads were hunters just like mine, but they had never brought any evidence home. My mom was appalled, but I think my dad was secretly pleased. I got no punishment, but we agreed that any further discussion of hunting with my neighborhood pals would stop. I think for awhile some of the parents didn't even let their kids come anywhere near our house for fear of what else might be lurking there.

Today I Iive far away from Minnesota, residing in western Washington on Puget Sound, the land of fervent animal lovers. People feed mangy coyotes out of a misguided sense of obligation. Even cougars seem to have no fear of civilization, because one news program showed a cougar taking a nap in the planter outside a shopping mall. The local mule deer run rampant over gardens and eat from our fruit trees. The ones in our neighborhood are so tame they have even started to come up on the deck. They pluck the apples from the trees, not waiting for them to fall. They've become so urbanized that occasionally one will even wait at a pedestrian crossing if the street is busy. Local game wardens have begged people to stop feeding them but it's pointless. There was at one point a move to license people to harvest deer in town eating their landscaping, but I think public outcry squashed that.

Recently I sent my son this picture of a regular visitor to our yard. He and his abundant harem eat from our fruit trees and nibble at our landscape plants. Andy wanted to make a trip out with his bow to take care of that problem for good. I can just hear the uproar around our block - "The Schweiss's son killed Bambi!" The locals would be stringing him up and not the deer. Yeah, he's turned into an avid hunter and fisherman. Grandpa would be proud.

A somewhat ironic side note here: Andy's daughter (appropriately named Hunter) has inherited my fascination with the outcome of a hunting trip. She's only too happy to inspect her dad's kills. Can't wait to hear what happens after he hangs his first deer to age in the garage.