The Outdoors World of Charles Robert Reynolds and family -- back in the "good ole days...."
From an early day Grandpa Charley earned a reputation for loving the "outdoors" and taking an annual fishing or hunting trip to favorite Utah hinterland spots to pursue the sport. Bringing home "the bacon," so to speak, was of course always beneficial but mostly it was about the social, fraternal nature of things. Grandpa cultivated lasting and loyal friendships with a few of his childhood chums, neighbors, and extended family members. First, it was hunting for sage chickens in the Uintah Basin, then for ring-necked pheasants in the farmlands, or jackrabbits in Ceder Valley. Then it was an annual trip to the Strawberry country and to Current Creek for trout fishing. In the 1930's Charley took his sons and friends to the Aspin covered headwaters of Corn Creek, east of Kanosh in Millard County, for what would become a three decade tradition of annual deer hunts. Anticipation of this annual event often exceeded the fun of the actual hunt as the male members of the family met together often in the fall of the year to gulp down voluminous amounts of ice cream, talk and laugh about past experiences, and plan for the upcoming event of the year.
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Old chums and buddies...
This old blacksmith shop was abandoned, except for it's tools, by the time I came along, but I remember it's fascination as a boy, and since it was moved to a location just two country blocks from my home, I would often peek in and look at the billows, anvil, and iron working tools that were still there. I remember Ed Harper and Wilford Bowthorpe, second and third from the left, and Matt Schmidt, fourth from the left. Ed ran a fruit stand in Holladay in later years, and Wilf was grandpa's nephew, son of his oldest sister Christina Elizabeth. Wilf ran the feed store in Holladay when I was boy and always treated me as family, which I was. Later I learned that he was one of grandpa's fishing buddies in the earlier years, though he, like George Labrum, was twenty-two years younger than Charley. Each summer my dad bought hay for his milk cows from Matt Schmidt who had a small farm on Wander Lane. I was fascinated by Matt's large barn, mostly because it had a large pulley-hoist system for moving hay, and his grandson who lived close by lost his thumb when it got caught in the pulley. Those are the kind of things kids remember.
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