Ted Conrad: Through It All

From an early age, Ted was always interested in hunting and fishing.  His dad took him out cane pole fishing and taught him how to dig up worms, how to bait a hook, remove a fish from the hook, put it on a stringer, how to clean the fish, scale it and fillet it.  His dad’s lessons were to teach Ted how to become a fisherman, not just how to fish, and these were instructions that gave Ted the knowledge to do things on his own, and to understand the process of fishing.  Ted understood from an early age that there were things that went on before fishing as well as after it.  His dad’s intention was to make him a fully-capable fisherman, not just someone who knew how to fish.  This came from the idea that success on the water was often the result of success and preparation off the water.  As Ted would learn over and over again, the work you did behind the scenes, before the event, would always make the actual performance that much better.  It is said that practice makes perfect, but preparation most often makes the practice and the performance that much better.

 Hunting was another experience that was taught seriously to Ted by his father.  With a loaded shotgun in a young boy’s hands, this was no time for him to be unaware of how to safely carry a gun or how to carefully load and aim it, and his dad stressed the importance of these procedures.  It was not just a carefree time to walk through woods and meadows, to cross streams, or to sit on a fallen tree and observe the intricacies of nature all around them, but a chance to learn how animals live, and how to respect them as you found them in their natural habitat.  When they got back home there was always game, as well as the weapons they had used, to be cleaned and put away.  It was a complete lesson from start to finish, not just the highlights that made it easy and fun.  Teaching him the hard parts, both before and after hunting, made the process complete.

 Ted even found more to his hunting and fishing exploits than fun and food.  He remembers wondering how anyone who looked out upon the beauty and harmony of nature could ever doubt that there’s a God who made it all?  The splendor, the majesty, the interrelationships between sun and rain, night and day, the seasons, the cycles of life, and the availability of food for each and every bug and animal testified to the plan of something much bigger and all-encompassing than just an unplanned, unguided occurrence.  Surely when standing in the midst of a meadow, with the magnificence of the natural land all around you – birds flying in the air, rabbits and squirrels darting among clumps of underbrush, deer treading cautiously as they looked for food – there was no doubt in Ted’s mind that this was a plan of God.   

 In later years, Ted became a more accomplished hunter, buying his own rifle, and even adding a crossbow to his hunting arsenal so that he could go out before the firearms season opened.  His favorite rifle became the 270 mm Winchester he bought, and for thirteen years in a row he got a deer with just one shot.  Because of his accuracy and the string of successes, his boys and others who hunted with him began to admiringly, but playfully,  call him “Dr. Death”.  As with many things in his life, when Ted took aim, he often scored a bullseye!