By Phil Bloom
First in a series
Do a Google search on quotations about history and you’ll find plenty of people reflecting on the subject. For instance, British statesman Winston Churchill said, “The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see.”
Poet and civil rights activist Maya Angelou said, “The more you know of your history, the more liberated you are.”
Science fiction novelist Michael Crichton: “If you don’t know history, then you don’t know anything. You are a leaf that doesn’t know it is part of a tree.”
And as perhaps only he could, humorist Mark Twain said, “History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme.”
Accurately chronicling OWAA’s past has been challenging for anyone who ever tried. Inadequate records from the early years; an occasional reliance on sketchy memories; the likely loss of documents and photographs during office relocations; and, perhaps, indifference contribute to holes in the OWAA timeline.
Even from the outset, there was scant reporting on OWAA’s formation. The only known account was a four-paragraph item in the May 1927 issue of The Sporting Goods Dealer one month after OWAA was founded at an Izaak Walton League of America convention in Chicago.
No single document has more significance to OWAA than a menu from that event.
If not for Morris Ackerman and George Robey Sr., even that piece of paper may have remained stuffed in a box or even discarded, thus preventing OWAA from knowing without doubt who its founders were.
It was Ackerman, a newspaper journalist from Cleveland, who penned the words that formed OWAA during a dinner at the IWLA’s convention in 1927 in Chicago. He used the back of the dinner menu to write:
“We the undersigned, being agreed that an organization of recognized outdoor writers should be formed in America, for the purpose of bettering our profession, to give more stability and standing to the same, and to eliminate untruths from stories of the outdoors, do hereby form the Outdoor Writers Association of America.”
It was Robey, a longtime outdoor writer for the Columbus (Ohio) Citizen-Journal and OWAA board member in the 1930s, who somehow obtained the document and other materials from Ackerman, who died in 1950.
Above: Morris Ackerman fishing with Spanky McFarland
Robey rediscovered the menu in his files in 1965 and offered it to OWAA, but he died before he could make the exchange. His oldest son, George II, followed through with his father’s intentions and presented the document to OWAA a year later. It is framed and currently resides with Executive Director Chez Chesak.
The words Ackerman scratched out on the banquet menu confirm who was behind OWAA’s start. Eight people, including Ackerman, signed the menu. Some, like Ackerman, Cal Johnson, and Edward G. Taylor, were well-known outdoor writers at the time. Jack Miner operated a migratory bird sanctuary in Canada and was a frequent lecturer on birds and conservation. Buell Patterson had a radio show in Chicago and wrote a syndicated column on dogs.
Two others – Peter Carney and Mrs. Hal Kane Clements – were mysteries because they never appeared again in OWAA records.
Equally mysterious was the signature El Comancho, whose real name was Walter S. Phillips, a self-educated writer and lecturer who spent his childhood among Native American tribes in Oklahoma. It was Sioux chief High Horse who gave him the nickname “Comanche,” and Phillips tweaked it for his byline.
Another 30 names are listed below the signees, of which about a dozen presumably became charter members.
OWAA met again om 1928 in Cleveland, Ohio, before returning to Chicago in 1929; both times in conjunction with IWLA conventions.
Officers and board of directors kept things limping along, but was “somewhat like a stagnant pond” by 1936, according to long-time member Henry P. Davis in a presentation at the 1958 conference in Hot Springs, Arkansas. When members did convene, he said it “consisted merely of a dinner meeting, with informal discussion, election of officers and the consumption of considerable liquor. Sometimes we had a ‘speaker of the evening,’ usually some top banana in the conservation field who had an axe to grind.”
A consistent instrument for tracking OWAA affairs didn’t materialize until 1940 when Outdoors Unlimited was launched. It was one sheet of legal-sized paper, mimeographed and mailed to members.
J. Hammond Brown, a newspaper reporter with the Baltimore News and News-American, started OU and oversaw its content for the next 15 years.
“This is your newspaper, and it will be just as interesting as you yourself make it,” Brown wrote in the first issue. “Its primary reason for existence is to bring about a better comradeship among the members of our association.
“Meeting once a year does not make for any great amount of understanding between us. This little journal can do the job if all of us pull together. … What we want are simple bits of personal news about yourself. Tell us where you are going, what you are doing—just bits of personal chat.”
Brown filled OU with tidbits about members, from their work in books, magazines, and newspapers, as well as engagements, weddings, birth announcements, death notices, and who was fishing or hunting and where and with whom.
Elected OWAA president in 1941, Brown used OU as a platform for pushing members to support assorted conservation issues. He was re-elected president repeatedly, filling the post 14 times in a 15-year span. Seventy-some others have served as OWAA president, including six women: the first being Sheila Link in 1981-82.
Bent on turning OWAA into a conservation advocacy group, Brown capitalized on his dual capacity as president and executive director to loosen qualifications to grow the ranks. By 1950, OWAA had a reported 1,400 members, but such unbridled growth didn’t meet with everyone’s approval.
In a letter to Col. Louis B. Rock, publisher of the Dayton Journal-Herald and OWAA president in 1946, former OWAA president Jack Van Coevering wrote: “Seems to me I have heard the remark that even a plumber with $3 can become a member.”
In 1948, OWAA approved its first constitution and bylaws, and became incorporated in 1953 in Maryland.
At conferences during the 1940s and 1950s, attendees often voted on resolutions on various topics. Some were only tangentially related to the outdoors or writing. One, for example, called on cigarette manufacturers to label each packet, not with a warning about the health dangers of smoking but with a warning about tossing butts out the windows of vehicles and causing fires.
Becoming a 501(c)3 tax-exempt non-profit diluted Ham Brown’s ambition to turn OWAA into a powerful lobbying force on conservation issues. By the end of the 1950s, OWAA had revamped its constitution and turned its focus away from resolutions and policy statements and more toward providing skill-building resources for its members.
After Brown died in 1955, Lew Klewer of the Toledo Blade succeeded him as president and the OWAA Board of Directors turned to long-time treasurer E. Budd Marter III to serve as executive director.
Marter, a municipal court judge from New Jersey, wore the ED and treasurer hats until 1963, when Don Cullimore was hired on a part-time basis as OWAA’s first paid executive director.
Cullimore’s hiring was one of several recommendations outlined in the Johnson Report, a study of OWAA governance done by a Chicago marketing firm.
Ed Hanson succeeded Cullimore in 1972, and both men were later linked as chroniclers of OWAA history.
Hired to prepare a book celebrating the 50th anniversary of OWAA in 1977, Cullimore expressed doubts over the challenge he faced in a letter to a few of the group’s most veteran members, including charter member Nash Buckingham.
“Since the early members still remaining are few in numbers, and inasmuch as some recollections conflicted or were nebulous as to specifics in terms of time, place and persons; there was some question in my mind as to whether a documentarily accurate compilation could be achieved,” Cullimore wrote. “Now, through a sequence of events, I think we can begin to piece this together in chronological form and fill in many gaps.”
The result was a 96-page paperback. A few years later, Hansen and Cullimore collaborated on an updated version.
The saving grace for their efforts included reams of correspondence – typewritten and sometimes handwritten notes and letters between executive directors, presidents, board members and members at large. Board agendas, meeting minutes, and an evolving Outdoors Unlimited added background.
From the past to the present, OWAA’s ranks have included prolific writers and broadcast personalities, celebrities, conservation icons, outdoor industry innovators, Pulitzer Prize winners, a cadre of colorful characters and curmudgeons, and a baseball legend, not to mention freeloaders and perhaps a scoundrel or two.
Membership has come from newspapers small and large, from the Clinton (Indiana) Daily Clintonian and the Tabor City (North Carolina) Tribune to the New York Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Miami Herald, etc.
From the outset, OWAA members were associated with magazines as writers and editors for “The Big Three” – Field & Stream, Outdoor Life, and Sports Afield – not to mention dozens of other periodical publications. TV and radio broadcasters joined the fold, including the likes of Curt Gowdy, Jerry McKinnis, Tony Dean, and Grits Gresham.
Leaders of national organizations – Izaak Walton League, The Wilderness Society, Wildlife Management Institute, Ducks Unlimited, National Rifle Association – gravitated to OWAA, including such icons as “Ding” Darling, Olaus Murie and Sigurd Olson.
After its formative meeting in Chicago, OWAA has met all across the United States, plus trips to Mexico, Ontario, Saskatchewan, and Quebec.
The Covid-19 pandemic resulted in a virtual conference in 2020.
Although a permanent headquarters was often a topic of discussion, OWAA bounced around to rental properties where executive directors lived – Baltimore; Columbia, Missouri; Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Phoenix; and State College, Pennsylvania.
Finally, in 1997, OWAA members approved a move to Missoula, Montana, where it built but later sold its interest in an office condominium. With dwindling onsite staff and a string of executive directors working remotely from their homes, OWAA physical presence in Missoula was reduced to a UPS mailing address.
Membership records are incomplete until 1971, when OWAA reported 1,228 individual members. The roster grew in fits and starts until peaking at 1,944 in 1993.
A decade or so later, the membership splintered over a Board decision to send a letter to then-NRA president Kayne Robinson for his speech at the 2004 conference at Spokane, Washington, in which he criticized the Sierra Club. The Board’s letter recognized Robinson’s free speech rights but called some of his comments “inappropriate in light of the spirit of cooperation which is the hallmark of our annual conference.”
Some OWAA members saw it as an assault on the NRA and the Second Amendment. Others saw it as attempted censorship and a violation of the First Amendment.
The controversy – not the first but maybe the hottest in OWAA history – boiled for more than a year before hundreds of individual members and outdoor industry supporters, including the NRA, dropped their affiliation.
OWAA survived and remains the largest organization in the world devoted to outdoor journalism.
As OWAA approaches the century mark, interest in its history is accelerating. This article is the first in a series to be published in Outdoors Unlimited over the next couple of years.
Future articles in the series will explore the careers of OWAA’s eight founders; women in OWAA; assorted traditions and awards; conference locations, meals, and keynote speakers; the pendulum swing of organizational focus; missed opportunities; controversies and squabbles that threatened to rip the organization apart; memorable pranks and stunts; the impact – both good and not-so-good – of long-time leader Ham Brown; other influential members and some surprising ones; plus other topics.
The hope, nay, intent, is to provide OWAA members with an understanding of where we’ve been and how we got here.
In addition, Colleen Miniuk is chairing an ad hoc committee exploring ways to celebrate our 100th anniversary in 2027.
“Our committee is already actively developing, discussing, and implementing an abundance of ways to celebrate this momentous occasion,” Miniuk said. “In 2026, the year leading up to our birthday, we plan to focus our efforts on celebrating OWAA’s century of leadership and innovation in outdoor communications and conservation.
“In 2027, the year following our big day, we’ll shift to ‘breaking trail for the next 100 years.’ ”
Next: Who were OWAA’s eight founders, and what did they do?