BOISE, Idaho – Patrick F. McManus, a prolific writer best known for his humor columns in fishing and hunting magazines who also wrote mystery novels and one-man comedy plays, has died. He was 84.One of my absolute favorite writers. . .
BOISE, Idaho – Patrick F. McManus, a prolific writer best known for his humor columns in fishing and hunting magazines who also wrote mystery novels and one-man comedy plays, has died. He was 84.One of my absolute favorite writers. . .
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When I went back to college to get a graduate degree, during finals week all my tests were finished by Tuesday, but I still had an engineering lab that I had to go to every day in the morning and afternoon.
I was commuting about a hour back and forth at the time, so I had a few hours of free time with nothing to do between labs. After wandering around the college library looking for something to read, I found a whole row of bound copies of about 30 years worth of both Field and Stream and Outdoor Life.
I spent the rest of the week reading almost every column that McManus had written. It was a weird feeling to be reading those stories and laughing once in a while while being surrounded by college students that were desperately studying for their finals.
That might be one of the happiest memories of my college days.
I first read McManus in an issue of Field and Stream that my father brought home.
We didn't subscribe to Field and Stream, which is surprising as outdoorsy as we were. But my father must have bought an issue and brought it home. It was in the summer and I must have been about twelve years old.
In those days we did not have air conditioning (and indeed, that house still doesn't). It was a hot summer day and I can vividly remember reading the article in the kitchen, which was also our combination dining room in those far off days. My mother was cooking dinner, my father was there probably working on something he brought home from work. I picked up the article and read it on the back step due to the intense heat of the house, added to by the kitchen. It was an article about McManus, as a boy, going out pheasant hunting when there were not supposed to be pheasants where he lived. It was hilarious. I must have learned shortly after that about his books and devoured them all.
In some real ways, McManus seemed to be writing about the life I actually lived. I realize they have a nostalgic element to them but his youth was close enough in time to my own, even with 30 years in between them, that this wasn't all that evident to me when I was a teen. A lot of the stories had extremely familiar content. . . big clodhopper boots all winter long. . . being left to hunt and fish on your own. . . hunting and fishing mattering more (a lot more) than school. . . and so on. Only when I was probably in my late teens or twenties did the nostalgic elements begin to occur to me, but they were still pretty familiar.
If you haven't read the book that he co-wrote with his sister, which is a combination cook book and memoir (he wrote the memoir part), I highly recommend it. That book goes into a little detail about the real life personalities that his short story characters are based on. It's frankly a little sad and his youth was a little sad, but by the same token one of the oddities of living a somewhat sad childhood (or teen years, in my case) is that it doesn't really occur to you until later that they were that way, whereas a sad adulthood is pretty darned apparent in real time.
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