News from 50 Years Ago

I didn't know he was a hunter, but Bob Wilder once bagged a couple of Canadians for Thanksgiving Day.  Here's what the Anchor reports in their Early Files of November 23, 1961:

Bob Wilder in Class

Robert Wilder, N-K industrial arts teacher, bagged a pair of Canadian Honkers Saturday near Silver Lake.  The geese weighed eight and ten pounds with the larger bird having a 67-inch wingspan.  It was two geese with two shots for Wilder after sneaking up on the small flock.


And he would have been using lead shot, for sure.  Two for two with steel shot would have been difficult at best, though we give him credit for his expertise in this shooting and I'm sure the birds were delicious.

Wilder was also a JV basketball coach for at least a couple of years, including our freshman year, the only time I think I ever played organized basketball, but I dropped out due to my inability to shoot or handle the ball.  Or play defense.  The one basketball memory that I can report is that Wilder reneged on a promise made to me in practice one night.  When I found myself in a jump ball situation with the much taller John Roberts Wilder declared, "If you outjump him, you start at center tomorrow night against Glenville."

I won the tip but Wilder took back his words, and I started on the bench, where I belonged.

JV Practice was held in the new elementary gym when it became available, the latest in a line of gyms we used.  You will recall from an earlier posting that the arched gym we used was 25 years old in our senior year.  Prior to its construction the gymnasium had been located in the lower level of the original building, later to became the home of Wilder's industrial arts classes, Ag, and Band.  That same gymnasium doubled as our lunchroom until the new elementary was built in 1953 or 54.  I have a memory of standing on a walkway next to a railing, overlooking the lunch tables of the basement gym below, and smelling the school lunch.  When the new gym/lunchroom was built, the memory is of the footrace to be first in line for lunch.  The lunch smell probably did not change, and to this day has probably not changed.

All these memories because the Anchor reported Bob Wilder shot two geese.