I guess it started with my parents and my grandma. They, all three, were pretty artsy in their own ways and creative. It just got instilled in me, and this is just the way that it all came out. It all started very young.
When I was 10 years old or so, I was drawing Woody Wood Pecker and trying my hand at sketching. I can remember when I was 11, maybe 12, if I was a good boy during the week and took the garbage out and didn’t fight with my sisters too much, my mom would let me have a bar of ivory soap on Sunday afternoon. She’d set me down at the dinner table, and I’d get a bar of ivory soap and a paring knife, and I could carve a seal or a polar bear or whatever. My dad did custom gunstock work and my mom was into painting and fabric, crocheting and knitting. My dad worked two jobs and he wasn’t always around a lot, and I didn’t have any brothers, so I just had to learn to entertain myself. I spent a lot of time in nature. My mom got me watching birds and identifying birds when I was probably 6 years old. I just grew to love the natural world and always wanted to have it around me to some degree. But realized, at a young age, that I couldn’t always have a critter alive, and so I just had to come up with a means to preserve them. A friend of mine had an old correspondence course on taxidermy. It was missing a couple of chapters, but it was one of the initial texts that I had read. Back then, information on taxidermy was extremely difficult to find and nobody wanted to teach it. It was a really obscure thing. But I happened to find a book in the library by John Moyer, called “Practical Taxidermy”. I can still visualize the cover on that as if I had seen it yesterday. Those two sources carried me through a lot of trial and error and a lot of years. It wasn’t til the advent of VCRs and all that I was able to see other information. But a lot of this is just learning from my mistakes.
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