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223 Introduction: Complete Escape from High-Velocity Living Shunned by the Wilderness Society, Carhart made a virtue—and a career—of being an increasingly curmudgeonly outsider. In early 1955, Carhart received an invitation to become a director of the Citizens Committee on Natural Resources. After mulling it over for a month, he accepted, joining a prestigious group that included Sigurd Olson, Joe Penfold, Howard Zahniser, Olaus Murie, Alfred Knopf, Ira Gabrielson, Newton Drury, J. N. “Ding” Darling, David Brower, and Horace Albright. In spite of chronic poor health, Carhart maintained a rigorous writing schedule that kept him both cantankerous and happy.2 He reveled in the role of curmudgeon. Although the freelance market was somewhat dry, Carhart’s books sold well, including his fiction such as Son of the Forest, which appeared in 1952, a year when he also spent a short time in the hospital because of heart problems. A Perverse Habit of Calling the Shots in Any Direction I’m rather flattered at being asked to join in with this group. As you may know, it has been my policy, rather strictly adhered to, to not join up with a number of groups for which I have the highest regard, so I might be an independent individual in a position to pitch in and carry the ball when such groups were prevented from action by various limitations. Being a free agent, I could start slugging without involving [the] organization in embarrassment over what I wrote or said. This looks like a fighting group, well thought out. So I judge it is the exception to the policy I have followed. —Carhart to Zahniser, 19551 Ch a p t e r t hi r t e e n A Perverse Habit of Calling the Shots in Any Direction 224 Carhart was valuable to the Citizens Committee on Natural Resources because of his high national profile and also because he had excellent connections in the timber, automobile, and pulp industries. As he told his friend Arthur Van Vlissingen, the public relations man for the Pulp and Paper Information Service: You don’t see why I haven’t been thrown out of the “lodge” of the conservationists and outdoor writers? Sometimes I wonder, too. It may be because I’ve got such a perverse habit of calling the shots in any direction, and the lodge members know it, that they could be a bit leery of tangling [with me]. . . . You can sense honesty; you sorta smell it. . . . And that’s why, I guess, you find me as much on “your side” as any.3 Carhart wrote positive articles about industries whose support was critical for conservation legislation. During the 1956 political season, Carhart queried Sports Afield about an article on the Weyerhaeuser Corporation: “It’s a story I’ve wanted to write; it’s on the positive side and it’s constructive. I’ve torn into enough bad situations. It will be swell to crusade a little for . . . ‘The BuilderUppers .’”4 It was also rewarding to have personal access to the Weyerhaeuser family, which included lucrative consulting contracts and connections to important policy makers in the wood fiber industry. All this led to publication in 1958 of trees and game—Twin Crops. In 1952, national radio personality Arthur Godfrey did a show on Carhart’s book Hunting North American Deer. When Carhart wrote to thank Godfrey, they developed a relationship based on their shared conviction that “Hunting and Fishing is Big Business,” as Carhart had described it in a 1947 article for Sports Afield,5 in which he put dollar figures on outdoor sports. Carhart had obtained his 1947 results working alone. But in late 1950, when he updated his study for the same magazine, he had financial support from Joe Penfold of the Izaak Walton League and Ira Gabrielson of the Wildlife Management Institute, who needed such ammunition as they geared up for the 1952 political season. Carhart and his staff sent out 1,500 questionnaires to readers of the magazine. When the results came in, they confirmed his conviction that the “15 Million Club” of the nation’s sportsmen represented an economic force that could be translated into political power—by the right person, of course. Carhart had been dreaming of such power since 1920, when he had proposed a national conference on recreation. Now, after many years of laboring in obscurity , he became a board member for the Izaak Walton League, the American Wildlife Federation, and the Citizens Committee...

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