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  • Duration: 23 pages
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  • Western Carolina University
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  • HL_MPML_Moore_Mincey_2016-05-31_transcript

Mincey 1 Subject: Jack Mincey (Former Shop Teacher, Fly Fisherman) Interviewer: Juan Moore Location: Cullowhee, North Carolina Date: May 31, 2016 Juan Moore: Well, if you don’t mind, just for the sake of the recording, if you could state your name? Jack Mincey: Alright. My name is Jack Mincey. I was born and raised in Cullowhee. Born in 1960. Been here fifty-six years. Juan: Not too much older than my dad is. My dad was raised around here. Jack: Yeah. Juan: Your parents are Wymer and Jean Mincey? Jack: Yes, they are. Juan: Are they from around here, or…? Jack: My mom was raised here. She was born in Ela, but they moved here when she was just three or four years old. My dad was raised in Macon County. Juan: Just over the mountain? Jack: Yeah. And he joined the Navy, and he met my mother when she was hanging out at what used to the Town House in Cullowhee. Over here, it’s now tore down where they built all that stuff there on campus, but that’s where he met her when he was out on leave or something. I guess he came over to the college to meet women, but that’s how they met. Juan: Well, that’s one way to do it. Jack: Mm hmm. Juan: You have some siblings? Jack: Yeah, I have… I had two brothers and two sisters. I lost one brother to cancer so I just have one brother remaining. But my two sisters are the oldest, and they live in Pensacola, Florida and Texas. My one sister is probably floating right now. She lives north of Houston where all that rain’s hitting. And then my brother just lives down the holler from me. My other brother, he had moved to Greenville, North Carolina when he passed away. Juan: Well, you have my condolences on that. Mincey 2 Jack: It was tough. He was about a year and a half older than me and we were pretty close. Juan: So, while you were growing up around here what were some of the things you liked to do? Jack: Well, we loved to hunt and fish and just go camping. I mean, that’s… every weekend we were packed to go somewhere, either fishing, or hunting, it seemed like. And we had it where there were kids that were packed up hoping we would ask them to go with us, because we had several neighbors that would go on those trips with us. But Dad just… We had property in Glenville where we would go to. We’d go to the lake and stay. Deer season we’d go to Standing Indian or Shining Rock Wilderness and stay in a camper, and that’s just, every weekend we were out in the woods doing something. We only got two TV channels. I mean, there wasn’t video, no video games, so I mean, you stayed outside. We played a lot of softball out in the field. A lot of football with the neighborhood kids. Did all kinds of neat stuff. Juan: I get to hear my dad talk about that kind of stuff a lot. What was the area like, the people, the community? Jack: Well, you know, the sad thing is when I used to go to, like we’d have auctions at Cullowhee High School, it was K-12 then, and we’d go over to Cullowhee and they’d have auctions and when you were in school… You knew everybody. You knew the parents, you knew the kids, you just, I mean, you knew everybody in the community. That’s not like that anymore. I go to Cullowhee and I know ten people. It’s kind of sad that our little community has grown so much that we’ve got away from knowing each other and knowing our neighbors as well as we used to. And the neighborhoods, we’d always have a party or two every year. The whole neighborhood would get together and we’d cook hot dogs and hamburgers, the kids would play. So, you don’t do that anymore. Juan: A real old-style cook-out. Jack: Yeah. Juan: You named… What’s the biggest thing you think that’s changed outside of that? Just what have you really seen that’s a change in the community around here? Jack: I don’t know. The best change I’ve seen since I been here is fraternities moving back on, putting them on campus… This is old junk building that’s down at the end of our driveway? Juan: Yeah. Jack: Across the road? It used to be a fraternity house. It used to drive us nuts. They partied until three or four in the morning. They trashed… park in your yards, park in the field, park in your driveway. It was a problem. I think our community has improved in that way. This used to be a main road that goes down in front of our homes too. It was 107 before they built the new road about 1982, over across the river. And the traffic’s a lot less than it used to be. It used to be more traffic down here on this road before they built that by-pass into Western, which I think is an improvement. But really there’s not a whole lots changed on this side. We’re kind of the old side of Cullowhee. I… there’s been one or two new houses built close by here in the last thirty years, Mincey 3 but not many. It’s pretty much the same as it’s always been. This is the newest house, I guess, built on this side, in this area. And I designed this and drew it up on CAD program when I first started teaching CAD, and helped the crew build it. And then, I did all the insulating, and wiring, and plumbing on it myself. So, I kind of built the house. Juan: It’s real pretty. Jack: Well thank you. Juan: You talked about teaching there. You used to teach at the high school? Jack: I taught seven years at Waynesville Junior, and then I taught twenty-three years at Blue Ridge. I taught carpentry at Blue Ridge High School, and drafting, and cabinet making. They even had me teach Applied Physics one year, which wasn’t very good. I never had a physics class in my life. I don’t know why they thought I could teach it. Juan: What got you into teaching? Jack: Well, my mom was a teacher, my grandmother was a teacher, my great-grandfather was a teacher, and I didn’t really want to go into the industry because I didn’t want to move away from Cullowhee. And I saw teaching… When I graduated from college they had what they called an Industrial Arts, or Industrial Technology Education degree, so that qualified me to teach vocational classes. But I really wanted to be a pilot in the Navy, and it was about a year after college that I went through the physical, a couple of physicals trying to get in. I couldn’t pass the colorblind test so, I got, I got washed out being accepted into the Navy in their pilot school. So, I come back home to teach and that was about the time I met my wife. We were married, and everything worked out good. I enjoyed being around the kids, I enjoyed teaching. There was a lot of stuff with education that I didn’t like. It wasn’t the kids or the parents, it was the politics and the stuff that came from Raleigh. Pause for phone Juan: What was your favorite class to teach? Jack: My favorite class to teach was the furniture manufacturing or making furniture. And we actually built gun cabinets, we built like, that entertainment center, built stuff like this, book cases, all this stuff I built and my kids built stuff just like it. So, I really enjoyed that class. Second most favorite was probably drafting. I enjoyed teaching drafting. I did some, two summers at DAYCO Corporation when I was in college as a draftsman, and I enjoyed teaching that. And the kids, I had several kids that went on to NC State to engineering degrees and they started in my drafting class, getting interested in it, so I enjoyed that. Carpentry, I enjoyed carpentry work, but I really couldn’t teach it in a school setting because you don’t have time to go out to a building site and build a house. You end up building little storage buildings and stuff, rinky-dink stuff. So, my carpenter class I really kind of taught furniture manufacturing in it, during it too. Mincey 4 Juan: My dad does a lot of furniture, or used to do a lot of furniture making. A lot of our furniture in our house is… Jack: Well, actually the favorite thing I taught, really not even in the curriculum, I used to tell them it was… the skills were transferable to other areas, but I did wood-turning with the kids. Like wooden bowls and stuff? And the kids, you know, fine motor skills and if they can do that they can be a finish carpenter. It was a transferable skill. If I hadn’t been teaching for twenty-three or twenty-four years when I started that, they’d have probably had a cow. I guess they let me get away with it. Didn’t teach curriculum. Juan: Now, you still make these bowls and pots and pans? Jack: Yeah, and I make turkey calls and crow calls, but I mainly do bowls. I sell a few turkey calls and crow calls now, but, maybe fifty or sixty a year. Bowls, I build about ten, fifteen bowls a year, but they sell for a whole lot more than the calls do. I got some out in the shop. We’ll have to go up there and look at those in a little bit. Juan: Oh yeah, that’d be a pleasure. Jack. Okay. Juan: They’re real pretty. A lot of stuff I’ve seen, I looked up online some of the things you’ve made and they’re very nice looking. Jack: It’s crazy you can Google my name and it goes to these sites that has all this stuff. Juan: Yeah. Jack: The game calls - crow calls - has just been phenomenal the success I’ve had making those. I want to… A handful people in the U.S. that actually make the mouth piece for the crow calls. Most everybody just buys a mouthpiece that’s injected plastic that you stick in them, but I actually make the wooden mouthpiece, which makes mine a little bit better I think. And a whole lot more unique. Juan: My dad’s got a lot of calls. He mainly . . . when it comes to the turkey calls though, he mainly uses the box calls. Jack: Yeah, I’ve traded – I don’t make box - I made a box call once, but it wasn’t very good, but I’ve traded some of my calls for box calls these guys made. There’s some guys out there that make some phenomenal stuff. And wing-bone calls, I don’t even like wing-bones, but I’ve traded for two or three of those. People, they contact me and say, “I want one of your turkey calls.” So, we’ll just swap. It works out good. Juan: That’s an interesting way of commerce. Jack: Yeah Mincey 5 Juan: Keeps things personal. Jack: The barter system. Juan: Yeah. The tools that you use, I’m wondering how have you seen them change since…? Jack: Well, when I was a kid, I got into wood turning when I was in high school, probably my ninth grade year. I had Jack Galloway as my high school shop teacher. He was my favorite teacher I had. I mean, I had him my senior year four periods a day. I took him and English and history class, that was all I had my senior year. But we had antique, antiquated wood turning tools. Even the ban saws and the table saws and that kind of stuff were just old, old. It was cool. The new stuff, the new lathes and stuff are just incredible. Variable speed, much more precise. I’ve got an old table saw here, but the table saws I had at Blue Ridge and I taught some at the HUB, half a year, at the HUB a few years. We had the computer on the table saw, so if you touched the blade with your finger it cuts it off, the blade, cause the saw to stop. It would just nick you, it won’t cut your fingers off. So, that’s pretty incredible. They didn’t have that technology when I was a kid. And I guess the thing I’m most proud about in thirty years of teaching in a wood shop situation, that I only had two… I had like, two injuries on the machines that just was the tip of a finger where it grew back. It didn’t even cut the bone, just the tip, and that’s pretty incredible not to have a serious injury in a wood shop in thirty years. Juan: Yeah. That’s something. Jack: Yeah. Juan: In my short time, I’ve seen some a couple injuries at the shop. Jack: Oh they’ve had some bad ones out at Smoky. I know Chris Ray’s boy, Adam, cut his finger so bad that they had to do surgery on it to repair the nerves and stuff in it. He was on the bandsaw I believe. Bandsaw’s probably the most dangerous tool in the shop just… Everybody thinks it’s safe, but it…That’s where one of my injuries was, and the other one was on the joiner. I didn’t even let the kids use a joiner after that injury. Juan: Yeah. You ever hurt yourself while working with tools? Jack: The only… I’ve had two injuries in the wood shop in my life, and one of them I was doing my student teaching, and I was pushing a board through a planer for a kid and we were… doing… it was on the planer over at Pisgah, I did my student teaching over at Pisgah, wasn’t in very good shape. So, it bowed the board up into the blades and it kicked the board back, and it took the skin off those two fingers. I thought it had cut my finger off, the board had gone back, but I done… it just, you know, Band-Aid injury. And the other injury I had was on the wood lathe. I put a lathe tool in it, I was going to sand a handle, somebody had the lathe turned wide-open, so when I cut it on it bent the metal half inch, or five-eighths inch, and that hammer came around and hit me in the arm two or three times before I could get away. It didn’t break the bone, but I had big hematomas on my arm. Go up to the emergency got the X-ray, doctor said, “You Mincey 6 know, you must have pretty strong bones,” because he said, “I thought you had a broke arm, but you don’t.” That was it. I’m very fortunate. You know, sawdust in your eye a time or two that you have to wash out, but nothing major. Juan: Yeah. So you taught for thirty years, and now you do some fly fishing? Jack: I’m a fly fishing guide full time, and I still sell some wood turning. The fly fishing is what I make most of my money on. And, you know, I don’t work every day. I work probably three days a week. Around July fourth though, I work probably five days a week for two or three weeks there, but all I want is two or three days a week. But I make more per day than I ever did teaching. Guide, I mean a guide trip, a full day, get a good tip, you’re talking three hundred, three hundred fifty dollars a day. I mean, not many jobs you can do that and do something you love. Juan: Nah. Jack: And fishing is dearly something I love. I just bought a raft, my wife’s about to kill me, junk trailer, I just built a deck. I’m building a deck for the raft trailer because I bought this trailer and raft, and the guy had an absolutely ghetto-rigged trailer on it. So, I made the trailer usable now, it’s a lot better. I don’t know what he thought he was doing when he, the way he designed it. I just tore it apart yesterday, and I built that today. Juan: Do you fly ties, or do you the…tie flies? Jack: Yeah, I tie flies. And I say fly tie a lot. I’m going to fly some ties instead of tie flies. It just always does that. Yeah, I tie some flies. I used to… My first fly rod, I tied flies and sold them in Cullowhee. They had a trading post over in Cullowhee Gary [Ridout] and I would sell flies there, and that’s how I bought my first fly rod. And then my second fly rod, Time Flies in Highlands for people up there, but I’ll tie ten dozen a year now instead of a hundred dozen. I just don’t have time to tie that many. I’ve got two or three specialty flies that I’ll tie just for my guide trips to help my clients catch a few fish, because they’re not commercially available. But I’ve got, all my fly tie junk upstairs. That’s my out… my outdoor kingdom’s upstairs. Juan: Everyone’s got to have one of those. Jack: Yeah, it was a bonus room at one time, it was a garage, but I kind of made it into a nicer little den for me to keep all my junk. Keep my wife happy. Juan: Happy wife, happy life. Jack: Yeah. Juan: With your business, how many people do you normally, would you say that you see or take? Jack: Clients in a year? Mincey 7 Juan: Yeah. Jack: Gosh, I will probably take seventy or eighty people out a year, because I have groups of two to three. I very seldom take one person. It’s almost always two. I’ve really enjoyed guiding just one person, because I give them a hundred percent of my attention. And if I guide two people they get about thirty percent of my attention, because thirty percent of the time I’m walking between them. I cover a lot of ground on those days. Juan: How long have you been doing the fly guiding? Jack: Guiding, it’s about thirty-two years now I’ve been guiding. I just guided on weekends and summers when I taught in school, and now that I’m retired I just do it, you know, whenever they need me. There’s four guys that work out of our shop full time and they make their living at it, so they get all the… they get first choice. And then there’s about, I guess there’s about eight more guides that get the flow – overflow, and we’re just temporary. I guess you’d call it subcontractor, so to speak. Because I think the four guys that work full time actually have insurance covered and all that. All we have is workman’s comp on ours, the temp work. We get, we got hurt on the job or something we’re covered there. We had one of the guides, full time guides, he slipped at the ramp trying to put a raft in, here a while back, and his leg went down in between the raft… or the steps and came back, and [grunts]. He was out of action for about a week for that to heal. Not good. Juan: Do you still leisure fish? Jack: Oh yeah. I try to go at least once a week. I haven’t been last week or this week, and I’m working on that trailer, but when I get that trailer done I’ll take one day this week and go on my own. I like to go to the Smokies, or White Water, or Thompson River when it’s, when I’m all alone. My favorite probably on my own is just go to the Smokies. The fish aren’t big, but it’s beautiful over there, and I don’t see many other people fishing. I can walk a mile or two up. My legs aren’t as young as they used to. Some days my legs hurt when I walk too far, so I try not to walk more than a couple miles. I walked about four miles here a while back up there on the creek. I was sore for a few days after that. Juan: You have any stories that you could share with us about the… while you been fly guiding? Jack: Well, not really. I mean, my trips are… they’re kind of generic. I had , you know, a lot of guys I take out never have fished before. So, those are tough. I mean, you know, we’ll catch a few fish, but then I take some guys out. I had one guy out here a few years back, we caught like fifty-something fish in a full day guide trip up Caney Fork. It was just crazy day. And then you have some days you go out where you catch two fish. And it’s the same fishermen sometimes. It just… if you’re there when the fish are hungry, it makes you look like the best guide in the world. If you’re there when the fish are not hungry, doesn’t look very good for you. But, I guess the most interesting thing I had happen in the last few years was my nephew, Mitch, he wanted to fish below the High Falls on Thompson River. Thompson River’s between Horse Pasture and White Water. Not many people know that Thompson exists. And we had to walk an hour and Mincey 8 forty-five minutes as hard as we could walk to get there. So we figured we were seven miles back to get down by the falls. You used to be able to drive a little more than three miles, but now you have to walk just forever to get there. And we were coming across the top of the high falls, and the reason I went was because his dad’s got an artificial ankle and he can’t walk that far anymore, and Mitch was wanting to go in there. We got to the top of the high falls and there was a rope we used to have on this big, long, slick rock, but the rope’s not there. So, I took my… my wading shoes wouldn’t stick on that rock, but my felt socks did somewhat, so I went to my sock feet and tried… We’re three hundred feet up on a water fall. I mean, there’s a little ledge down there about this big, where if I’ve missed the ledge I’m going to bounce another twenty feet to another big ledge, I miss that ledge I’m you know, bounce for two hundred, three hundred feet. It’s not straight off, but it’s pretty steep. Well, I get right, just about thirty feet and I’m right at the top of that wet thing like that, and I, my feet go out from under me. So, I just turn around on my backside, and start sliding, like going on a water slide, and Mitch is a big boy, and I said, “Catch me.” Well, he caught me on that little ledge about two feet wide, before we both bounced down through there, but he’d laid his fly rod down on the rock to catch me, and slid across his fly rod and I made it into about six or seven pieces by the time I’d gone across it. So, we ended up fishing out with just one rod that day. The second trip I made, then I cut a tree limb and held it down for him so he could come up safely, but that’s the most… the scariest thing I’ve ever done. And I told him when we to the top there, there’s another high falls above that one, and I got up to go to that one and I looked at Mitch and I said, “I’m glad I brought you in here, but I’ll never be back. Too far.” The fishing wasn’t that good until we got above the second falls anyway. But Thompson’s a unique river. It’s a hidden jewel. It’s part of the Jocassee Gorges State Park now. But it’s not got any trails on it like they have over there. Duke owned it, and I don’t know how it became part of the park, but I’m really glad it did because they were talking about building one of those Bad Creek-type dams in there, and that would’ve ruined it. It would’ve been all fenced off and stuff, and it’s my favorite spring to fish. Juan: Wow, that’s just, an interesting story. That’s scary though. Jack: Well, you know, I’ve had a lot of clients fall. Well, not a lot, but I’ve had some fall and bang their knee up. I’ve never had a serious injury. Not that I can think of. I had two guys fall once that I thought killed themselves, but we fished three or four miles further that day, so they were pretty tough. They didn’t come back for another trip. The worst thing we get into was bees. Last year - usually I get bee stung - last year I got into four bees nests fishing, and they just eat you up. And I didn’t have a client get stung last year, but they zeroed in on me last year. The year before that my brother got stung every time he went to the river. This year I haven’t gotten into a bee’s nest. I hope I can stay away from it. Somebody told me once that after you get stung real bad one time your skin, your body secretes some kind of pheromone and it draws bees to you to sting you. And I kind of believe it because I got stung bad. I got like twelve stings the first time last year, and then every time I got near bees they stung me. It was weird. Mowing the grass they come sting me. It was a strange, strange year. Juan: Bee stings don’t feel too good either. Jack: Nah. Nah, not when you get seven or eight of them. The first time I got stung last year I had this old guy couldn’t hardly wade, and that’s a hard one. You got to keep holding these old Mincey 9 guys’ hands and leading them up the creek. They’re slipping and sliding, it’s pretty hard on them some days. But I pushed a limb back so he could fish a hole, and it had a little bees nest about as big as my fist on it, and they just covered me up, hit me right here on my left shoulder. I jumped across the hole where’s he at, you know, splashing, saying, “Run, run, run!” He was just standing there because he couldn’t, you know. They never did sting him. But I got him out of there finally. Then, we found two or three more bees nests that same day, but we didn’t get into them. We saw them before we got to them. I always carry Benadryl in my vest just in case I get stung I can take a Benadryl or two. It helps keep you from swelling or itching as bad. Juan: Right. What’s your, what do you think, some of your favorite fish to catch? Jack: Well, my favorite fish to catch is brown trout. We’ve got rainbow, brook, and brown in the area. And I love catching brook trout because they’re pretty, but they’re pretty easy to catch and they’re not very big, so they don’t fight. But brown trout are harder to catch, they get bigger than the other trout, they live two or three times longer than a rainbow or brook, and when you’re in brown trout water, like Thompson is or Whitewater, you always have a chance of catching a eighteen, twenty inch fish. If you’re brook trout water, you have a chance of catching a ten inch fish, maybe eleven if you’re lucky. Rainbow, you can catch big rainbow at times, but most of the rainbow are six or seven inches I catch them in wild water. They run a little smaller. I’m not sure why. But if I had to guide on brown trout water it’d be hard, because brown trout are either easy to catch or impossible because they just, really smart fish. And they’re from Europe, Germany. We called them German Brown when I was a kid. When the loggers wiped out all the native brook trout that was in this area, they went out west and brought rainbow back from the Rockies and stocked. And they went to Europe and I guess brought eggs across, and hatched them out somewhere in the process. And they introduced brown trout are actually a European trout. They’re not native to this area. Juan: Hmm. I didn’t know they were European, a European species. Jack: Yeah, German. Germany, I always called them German Brown. That’s where they came from is Europe. I wish they had brought some of those from Russia. They got some up there, like a dang, I don’t know what they call them. I can’t remember, but they’re huge. They’re like sixty inches, some of them. Juan: That’d be a scary trout. See that swimming around. Jack: Yeah. That’d be pretty bad. I can’t think of what they’re called. Now what my niece tried and caught though was a tiger trout. It was in the wild water on Chattooga River about four years ago in the fall, and a tiger trout is a cross between a brook and a brown. And it’s very unusual looking trout. What happens when the… they spawn at the same time of the year, and the milk from the brook trout will get on the brown trout eggs, or milk from the brown trout will come down and get on the brook trout eggs. I think the tiger trout is the… the mother is the brown. There’s leopard and tiger. I don’t know, but… Most tiger trout, you know, you catch them occasionally like that. They… mine was fourteen inches. They’re huge. Now they stock some. They purposely did that in the hatchery. They stocked a few in the delayed harvest streams this Mincey 10 year, but I haven’t caught one. Most of the people have caught one, but I haven’t caught one. They’re pretty fish. Juan: You ever had any that you thought about stuffing or putting up? Jack: I mounted two when I was in college. I caught two brown trout, the same day, and they’re upstairs. The mounts are old, but they’re pretty good size. I’ve caught much bigger fish since that I’ve turned loose. These were like twenty-two, twenty-three inches, and I’ve caught thirty inch fish a number of times that I’ve turned loose. And one of them was a wild trout and I turned it loose. It was over in the Dav…well it was catch and release water. It was a wild fish and I had to turn it loose. Skin mounts. People catch the huge fish for trophies. They really should just measure them, turn them loose, take a picture, and then have a fiber glass replica because a fiber glass replica is good forever. The skin mounts, the oil and grease comes through the paint and messes them up after a few years so, I, you’re better off, I think, just doing a fiber glass replica of your fish. Get the circumference around it, and get the length, and take a good picture. A good taxidermist can do a better job with fiber glass than he can with skin. Now, I’ve mounted a few deer. I’m a big deer hunter. Turkey, I haven’t mounted a turkey. I’ve mounted their fans 39:58, but turkey mounts takes a lot of room. I mean, you ever been to the Frontier Trading Post, or Frontier… or Outdoor Center down in Barkers Creek? Juan: Yeah. Jack: Let’s see, what is, Frontier or, just the Outpost. Juan: Yeah, I just know it as the Outpost. Jack: He’s got those big turkeys all around the top there. Those cost about twelve hundred a piece to mount. I just can’t see putting that kind of money in a mount. Juan: How long you been deer hunting? Jack: Since I was about twelve. And I keep going. I kind of calmed down a little bit. My dad passed away years ago. He was my hunting buddy, and my other hunting buddy moved down towards Winston so, I haven’t had anyone to hunt with for a few years. My little boy started hunting with me a couple years ago. And he killed a huge deer. His first, his first deer was a huge buck. He killed it at eleven years old, and I, just luck. Because we hadn’t planned, planted a food plot, we hadn’t fed the deer, we hadn’t done anything. We got property in Georgia we own and it just, the first day I took him out, when he was eleven, it came out there and walked right out in front of him. Gave him the shot. He made a good shot. Last year we just got a couple does. I got a pretty good herd right here around the house I watch. I won’t hunt them, but I see deer three or four times a week right here. Kind of cool. Juan: What’s the biggest deer you’ve … had the opportunity to…? Jack: Well, it was about the size of the one my little boy killed, a little less. His was actually bigger than anything I’ve killed, but one. The biggest deer I ever killed was off Shining Rock. It Mincey 11 up was off the Blue Ridge Parkway, it was called Black Balsam. We used to go in there and we’d take a transfer truck tarp and PVC pipe and go off two miles down. We used mules and donkeys, or our backs to carry all that stuff in there, and set up a tent for three weeks, made out of transfer truck tarp. And we would actually… I stayed in there for two weeks without coming out one time. But, I killed two that same weekend. I’d hunted for years, I’d killed deer, and I killed a little eight-point then, the next morning I killed a huge eight-point. So, when your luck’s running good, I guess it’s running good. But the deer we killed up there, we couldn’t ever eat one of them hardly. They ate rhododendron leaves, and the browse. They weren’t fit to eat. Of course, the deer in Georgia are very good to eat. Even the deer right here are good. Up there, you could stoop down and where the rhododendron were like a wooly head and you could see two hundred yards because the deer had ate every leaf off the rhododendron, and they weren’t very good to eat because of that. And there were a lot of rattle snakes up there in bow season. We used to go …. We all wore snake leggings so, we killed three in one weekend up there. Just three or four guys hunting and kill three rattle snakes, that’s a lot of rattle snakes. Juan: Yeah. You work up what you get in Georgia? Do you work it up? Jack: I do, unless I’m going to have summer sausage made. If I want summer sausage I take it over to, I can’t think of the name of them, there on Needmore Road over in Swain County? They do a really good job making summer sausage. But I work it up myself, I’m a traditionalist. And I also make my own jerky. I’ll grind, I’ve got a meat grinder and I’ll grind it up and make deer jerky out of grinding venison. It’s good. Juan: Summer sausage though. Jack: Oh, summer sausage is hard to do. Juan: That’s, I’ve only had it a few times, but it’s always been good when I’ve had it. Jack: This last time I had it with pepper jack cheese and jalapeno peppers. It was even better. Juan: Speaking my language now. Jack: Mm hmm. Juan: Do you… You said you ain’t ever mounted a turkey. Still, you hunt them, much or…? Jack: Yeah, well, I’ve hunted them. I say I hunt them, but I’ll say I won’t kill them that much. They’re hard, they’re… I’m a pretty good deer hunter, but turkey hunting, even though I make turkey calls, they’re harder to mess with. I think our season’s a little late here in North Carolina. I think they’re doing a lot of their mating and stuff weeks before season. Now, this was the first year I went [inaudible] 35:50 hunting the first morning. I took my little boy, and he’s thirteen now, and he’s big enough to shoot a shotgun. And I know a lot guys take their kids out when they’re six years old. It showed them on the newspaper, a six-year-old killed a turkey. I’ve never seen a six-year-old that can hunt a shotgun. I’m being honest, they can barely hold a bb gun, they can’t hold a shotgun and shoot a turkey. So, something’s not kosher. But my little boy, I actually Mincey 12 took him skeet shooting, clay targets, and he did pretty good shotgun so I said, “Maybe you’re old enough now to go turkey hunting.” We set up a blind so, we were, and he moves a lot, and down there of the morning we had a hen come by. So, then I, I heard some gobbles at the other end of the field, and I made a few calls on my call, and they started down the road toward us, you know, through the field. And I had a decoy, it looked like a little [Tom], a little jake. Well, they saw it, three gobblers came in, just, I mean, from here to that doorway, right in front of us, so he just chose which one he wanted he could have it. And it took me two and a half weeks to kill mine after the after the [inaudible] up. I ended up not even calling, I ended up crawling up the little creek that’s all grown over, and just popped, a couple of pop-up over the bank there. There was three gobblers that day too. They wouldn’t respond to my call and wouldn’t respond to my call. I said, “Well, I’ll sneak up on them,” and that’s what I did. Juan: Do you hunt anything else around here? Jack: I used… Well, we do a little squirrel hunting. My boy, he loves to shoot squirrels. I used to be a big squirrel hunter, and I like to eat squirrel. A lot of people think that’s gross, but they’re… my mom makes the best dumplings in the world out of squirrel. They stink your house up when you first cook them, boil and cook them, but when you make them into dumplings it’s some of the best dumplings you’ll ever eat. And I used to hunt rabbits. That’s the biggest change I guess I’ve seen in the area. We used to have all this property that was vacant up Speedwell, up Tuskaseegee, we’d go get permission and take our beagles and hunt rabbits. And that… We got rid of our… we let our dogs die, just didn’t get any more beagles because there was nowhere to go. Every time we’d go somewhere one of the beagles would run a rabbit on to somebody else’s property next to where we had permission and they’d call the game warden or sheriff’s department on us for hunting on their property. We couldn’t control where the dogs went. People just kind of… I don’t know. We just… we couldn’t do it anymore. And then Macon County really changed because we used to go over and dove hunt. I don’t really like to eat dove. It’s edible, but you got to wrap it in bacon to get enough grease in it to where it’s not too dry. But we used to dove hunt over there, but all those dove fields are developments, housing developments and manufacturing plants. We lost all that opportunity so, our flat land in the mountains up here, there’s not much of it left. It’s all got something built on it. Juan: Yeah. You ever hunt grouse, or…? Jack: Yeah. I’ve killed a few grouse hunting before in my life. Jack Galloway, my high school shop teacher always had a bird dog. I used to hunt grouse with him, but I haven’t heard of grouse in years, other than just walking and to see one if I get out there. And I think they’re probably the best eating game we have. If you have an opportunity to eat a grouse they’re very good. Wood duck’s good. I’ve never killed a wood duck, but a friend killed one in Georgia. Brought me the whole duck because I tied some flies with feathers so, I went ahead and plucked the feathers out, and my dad cooked it because he kept it in the cooler, and it was awfully good to eat. And my dad killed a goose once, one of those big Canadian honkers? If you’re hungry I guess you could eat one. But I guess I could eat my shoe if I was hungry, but it’s pretty bad. I talk to some duck hunters on my guide trips and they said, one of them said he likes goose, but the only way he can eat it, he cuts it up and makes it into jerk. But I guess you can make anything into jerky and make it edible. Kind of like a goat. A friend of mine killed a wild goat once and he ended up Mincey 13 making it all into barbeque. We couldn’t eat it any other way. It was pretty rank meat, but if it was barbeque it was edible. I don’t know what the Spanish population sees in goats. One of their favorite foods is goat meat. Now, this was wild goat, so maybe domestic goat is a little better, but that wild goat was pretty bad to eat. Juan: My dad had a goat, and he used to talk about when they fixed it, and said it was something else. Jack: So he liked it? Juan: I don’t know if he liked it or if he just found it… Jack: You are what you eat. Because I know a guy that he kills a beef every year, and he puts his little steer up in a stall and he feeds it nothing but like corn, for like, three months before he kills it. And his steaks, if you ever get out there to get one, it’s actually the best meat you’ll ever eat in your life. We never did work, you’d [inaudible] raise beef as a kid. But I can remember my grandmother, you know, milking a cow, and we had a big churn that was electric, but we’d churn and make our own butter and all that stuff, until I was about five or six years old, she got rid of the milk cow. She got too old to take care of it. Juan: Do you still have any animals? Jack: I’ve got chickens and a dog, that’s about it right now. My brother, he’s got three horses, and goats, and chickens. He used to have an emu at one time. It’s like an ostrich. Juan: Yeah, that’s a… Jack: My dad was down here gardening and heard this [makes bird sound], and he looked up and here’s this bird looking at him eye to eye, you know. I don’t know how they got it over my brother’s goat pasture, but they got it over the goat pasture somehow. Bulldogging it around. And it took us two weeks to find the owner, and Mickey Luker was the owner, owns the, runs the Caney Fork grocery store? And Mickey saw it and… “Just keep that thing. I don’t want it anymore.” So, when somebody offers to let you have something like that, there’s usually a reason. You couldn’t turn your back on it, it’d try to kick you. It was crazy. They didn’t have any…Only good thing about it was it was in their chicken and their grit box. They didn’t lose a chicken to a hawk or a bobcat for years while they had that emu. And then finally somebody wanted it, and I’m sure they killed and tried to eat it. I don’t want… It’s just a big drumstick. Don’t got no breast meat so I don’t know what it’d be eating like. I was hoping it’d be a female and lay some eggs because the eggs are about as big as a small cantaloupe, but that never happened. Juan: Do you raise chickens to slaughter or do you get eggs from them? Jack: Just eggs. My little boy won’t let me kill them. I’ve killed a few over the years that got injured, broke a leg or something. Or just were sick, bury those, but I… He can shoot a deer, but he can’t shoot one of his pet chickens. Mincey 14 Juan: It’s the bond. Jack: Yeah. Juan: Do you ever miss teaching? Jack: No. [Laughs] No, I’m so busy I don’t have time to miss it. And I teach fly fishing now. I kind of transferred my skills into that world. But I taught… When I first started as a guide, I did the, they had a Orvis two and half day school, up in Highlands, that was Orvis certified, and I taught there for seven years on the weekend and the summer. I get the… The only thing I miss is the personality of the kids. Sometimes you get a group of kids that come through that’s just really special, a lot of fun. And I miss that, but I don’t miss all the…some of the other stuff. I mean, I had one of my former students just got killed in a traffic wreck here about a month ago. Broke my heart. I always figured he’d get in a traffic wreck and kill himrself, but it was some drunk driver run into him. He got his life together, was doing well, getting his captain’s license. Being a guide in Saltwater… and I think he was married, but I don’t think he had a child yet. That’s just terrible. Headed home one night and some drunk driver killed him. And I’ve had several students that committed suicide after, you know, years later. You just never understand that. Drug related most of it, I guess they get, get the a high and they come down, and then they can’t get on the high again and they just lose hope. Sad. Juan: Have you kept in touch with any of your students? Jack: Yeah. Yeah, a couple of them… Well, one of them, we don’t do anything together, but we’ll just call and talk occasionally. And I run into them in Cashiers quite frequently and talk to some of my former students. Then, I’ve got one of my favorite, he was a special ed kid, but he’s one of the sweetest kids in the world. He comes down and works for my mom occasionally. He needs work occasionally and I’ll give him a call and he’ll come down and we work together. He’s a good kid. He’ll need a trip paid or something so we’ll find something to make him so money. You can’t find it in Cashiers. About a week or two ago one of my clients, they live in Cashiers. Part of the year they were needing firewood, so I gave them his number so hopefully he’ll make some money off selling them firewood. It’s amazing how much they charge for firewood in Cashiers. Down here it’s like, seventy-five, eighty dollars a load. Up there it’d be two hundred. Same truck. It’s crazy. That’s the reason the houses up there cost so much. If I built this house in Cashiers it’d be a half a million dollar house. I built, when I built this it was only ninety thousand dollars when I built it. My cost. You couldn’t…. I don’t know. I couldn’t do it now. Juan: Do you still do any drafting? Jack: No. I draw up, you know, just little sketch of trailers for a raft and stuff, but I never got it made. I just, I bought the raft with this old trailer on it. I’m just making it work. It’ll work for three or four years and then I‘ll get me another trailer made, until this one falls apart. I don’t know how I’ll get rid of it. I’ll have to take it to a junk yard when I get through with it, or sell it to some guy that wants a raft trailer. Mincey 15 Juan: Do you… When you’re fishing, do you do a lot of, or have you ever done fishing from a raft, or…? Jack: Yeah, I’ve guided several, I did several guide trips last year and I’ve fished out of them for several years, but last year I did I think, four or five float trips with clients, and… I bought and sold one. But the thing I like about the raft is, I bought it for my personal use more than anything, is you can go way down toward Bryson City and float the lower Tuckasegee, or go Needmore and float through the Needmore on the little Tennessee. Or go north, or around Asheville and float the French Broad and you have great small-mouth bass fish. So, that’s what I really bought the raft for. I’ll guide a half a dozen trips out of it a year, and… But just mainly for my personal use. I like rowing a raft. I’d rather row it as fish out of it. I don’t know what it is about it, it’s just a lot of fun rowing down. It’s a challenge because you’re trying to dodge the rocks. Because the raft, if you touch a rock it’s going to stick there. You got to get it off. It’s crazy. But I really bought it for my personal use. I’ll be able write it off on my taxes because I will use it for guiding, but we’ll see. I might need to do a small-mouth trip or two out of it this year, we’ll see. I’ve never floated the lower Tuck. I’ve floated every square inch of the Tuck in canoes, and fished every square inch of it. From Cedar Cliff Dam all the way down to Cullowhee Dam, I’ve fished all that wade fish. And then I’ve floated everything from there down to Dillsboro Bridge, there at Dillsboro, but I’ve never… I’ve only floated once below Dillsboro down to Barkers Creek, where they have those rafting companies? Juan: Mm hmm. Jack: But I’ve never floated any of the Tuckasegee below Barkers Creek, so. But I’d like to camp on the river. Somebody in my family used to own an island down there in Ela. There’s somebody said that NOC now had a [inaudible] and bought it from. I’d like to get permission to camp on that island and float from the head all the way down, and camp on that island and then go on in to Fontana the next day, and do a two day trip of it. I noticed a couple on the news the other night and they were doing the French Broad. I don’t know, three hundred miles of the French Broad. They were floating from Rosman all the way down to where it goes into the first big lake, and that’s what they do for their vacation. They figured it’d take them two weeks, two and a half weeks to float it. And they had everything a raft just like mine almost. So, it’d be interesting. My little boy likes camping I guess. So, we’ll see. Might do it. I think a trip I’d like to do before I get to old would be to go to Maine with a canoe. I got a canoe. Do those rivers there, you can go for weeks back in those, you just, they’re real still rivers so, you can paddle upstream or downstream, and they’re connected to lots of little lakes. But the only problem up there, the mosquitos are supposed to be something fierce. Juan: Big enough to carry you off? Jack: Yeah, they’re supposed to be really big like Alaskan mosquitos. I mean, they say their bite’s not as bad as a Southern mosquito, but they say, you know, they just, so many of them. They’re a problem. Long sleeve shirts and a mosquito net. See how that works. Juan: You ever thought about going across, out of the state, out west to hunt any, or…? Mincey 16 Jack: Well, I’d like to someday. My little boy gets a little older maybe I’ll get out there. I got a friend that owns a house in Montana. It’s probably, he said I think about twenty-five miles to Yellowstone, and he has access to all the public hunting land there from his house. So, I might go out with him someday and hunt for elk. My dad killed several elk when I was a kid. Elk’s pretty good. Now, the best big game like that I believe is moose. Dad didn’t kill it, but he had a friend that did, and he brought moose steaks deer hunting one time that we cooked on the grill. I’m talking sirloins that big. They’re bigger than a cow, I mean they’re huge. They’re a thousand pound animal. Absolutely wonderful meat to eat off the moose. Juan: That’s always been a dream, going out west. Beautiful land. Jack: Well, my little boy’s getting old enough now to go up there and fish. I’d have to get a better raft trailer so I can trailer my raft out there, but I’d love to go out there and fish sometime. I’ve never fished anywhere but North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia. A little in Florida, you know, salt water. My sister lives in Pensacola and her husband had a boat for years and we used to go down there and go out in the Gulf and fish, and that was fun. We used to go to Nag’s Head, you know, when I was a kid. We had a twenty-three foot boat, and we’d go out and fish. I mean, we’d fish from daylight to dark for two weeks. I don’t know how we used to do it. Juan: That’s, that’s my family’s trip, is to Nag’s Head and we’ll spend time out on the piers. Jack: I haven’t been there in so many years I wouldn’t recognize it. You know where Cahoon’s grocery is? Juan: Yeah. Jack: Jeannette’s Pier? Cahoon’s grocery? Juan: Yeah. Jack: See, Ray Cahoon and his wife, they were good friends and we always stayed right behind in them, in one of them little cottages. And they used to come up here and visit us. I mean, they’d drive all the way… This in a state…when… and Ray and his wife…would… they’re all dead, but the daughter’s running - one of the daughter’s - the whole Cahoon’s Grocery, the rental. I guess Renee does, but I haven’t seen them in fifteen years. A long time. We used to go down there and stay. We had a trailer down there in Manteo for years too, on a canal so we could keep our boat just tied up at the, at our trailer. Juan: Yeah. Jack: We didn’t have to load it and unload it every day. That was a neat place. But now, Nag’s Head I wouldn’t recognize it, I’m sure, now that it’s grown up so much. Juan: It’s, it’s something else. In the nine years I’ve been back and forth it’s changed a lot. Mincey 17 Jack: Yeah, it’s commercializing more. Back when I went, they just got a strip mall back off, you know, two side, two streets over from the beach. But still, the beach had a couple hotels and a bunch of cottages. Now, I’m sure… Juan: Oh, it’s every few feet there’s a house and a… Jack: Dad, we looked at buying property on the beach, just south, you know, just south, of the Jeanette’s Pier come up for sale. It was a thousand dollars a foot, you know. But now, it was probably two, three hundred feet to the beach. So, it was a…you know, if we bought sixty-thousand dollar worth you’d have sixty foot of beach front. You could put a cottage on that sixty foot. That’s right where they built this huge hotel, right there at the south of Jeannette. If we had won the lottery or something back then, but they didn’t have the lottery back then. If we would’ve had that…we might’ve bought that… Dad, the reason we went, anywhere we put our trailer, he didn’t have to worry about air tanks too much. We had an air conditioning unit, it was on the ground. It got flooded once with the tidal surge. Actually, Mom and Dad were down there and a boat floated in the yard between the two trailers, and they had to get out there and push it back in. And then, the surge left and the boat was sitting on the canal in the mud, because all the water got… It was just weird. That surge came up, and then when it left it just, all the water left, even the canals and everything. Like extreme low tide, strange. Juan: Do you think you prefer fresh water fishing than you would salt water, or …? Jack: It’s hard to say. I like salt water and I like fresh water. I don’t do salt water enough to get bored with it, but fresh water fishing, it’s fun. But salt water fishing, the best thing about it, the fish are better to eat. I like trout, but give me a grouper, or red snapper, or Mahi Mahi any day over a trout. Juan: Oh, Mahi… Jack: Yeah. Mahi Mahi are good. The last trip I went to the beach, the guys that bought our old boat, or the guy that did, he invited me to Hatteras. And he had a condo, all we had to do was pay gas down there and put gas in the boat. We went of Hatteras to the Gulf Stream, that twenty-three foot boat, four days, and I think we brought maybe a hundred Mahi Mahi back. And two of the guys that went with us didn’t eat fish. It was just two of us that ate fish so, we had hundreds of pounds of Mahi Mahi for a year. It was very good. Juan: That’s something. Well, when it comes to questions, that’s a lot of what I’ve got. Jack: Okay. Juan: You told me a lot. It’s very interesting stuff. Jack: Okay. Now, what is the…this project do? You have to write a paper on this, or do a little narrative of it? Mincey 18 Juan: Well, what they’ll do is they’ll take our recording, and then they’ll go and they’ll transcribe it down onto paper, and then they’ll put it up on the Appalachian Oral History’s website. And then the recording itself will be on the website. You’ll be able to go back and listen to that at any point. I think we’re going to end up going back and looking, they’ll send us links to all of our recordings so that we can see whether it’s… Jack: You won’t have a whole lot of time left. You all will be finishing up here in a week or so. Juan: Yeah, we’re getting close. Jack: I guess, do you all, you all don’t start EOCs yet, you… Juan: No, we’ll start on Monday. Jack: Junior, my little boy starts tomorrow, EOGs. Not the EOCs, they’re a little later. That’s the thing I hate at Blue Ridge the most. It was a K-12 school, pretty much. So, I ended up having to proctor or administer tests for two weeks. Because you had EOGs, and I’d have to help the junior high, and somebody’d have to cover my classes. And then the high school comes along, then I do the… two weeks of testing. I hated giving the tests. They didn’t mean anything. I had to test carpentry students, and drafting students. State test. I always thought that was crazy. Art didn’t have a state test, music didn’t have a state test, vocational classes did. Juan: I took a foods class so I had to take a vocat test. Jack: You had the vocats. And they’re not an easy test. Juan: No, it’s definitely not. Jack: I mean, some of the questions on that, and you know, the thing that I used to argue with my administrators about, I’d say, “Alright. I had fifteen kids take this test. I had fifteen kids all miss that question.” I said, “Okay, either it’s a bad question or I’m a terrible teacher.” Because I said, “The chances are if I didn’t teach the subject out of fifteen kids, four of them, or five of them would’ve got it right, guessing.” I said, “All the kids missed it, something’s wrong with the question.” And they didn’t understand that. I said, “You know, if I didn’t teach it, they’re guessing. If they guess, they ought to get one out of four. One out of four of them ought to get it right.” And they never did understand that. I’d get so mad. I had like five questions on every one of those vocats tests that everybody in my class missed. And I’d say, “There’s something not right with that question.” But I had some kid, I had one kid, I had carpenter, Blue Ridge was bad… I had carpenter two and three students in the same class, which are two totally different curriculums. So, I had one kid that in the carpentry three course, by himself, with me with carpentry two students, and that kid made a four, and I didn’t teach him a thing. All I did was say, “This is what you’re going to get on the EOC. You need to study this in the book, and study these questions, the Vocat three test.” And he went through that stuff and he made, I mean, he made ninety-eight on EOG, or EOC. I couldn’t believe it. Then, my kids that I taught carpentry two, they made sixty and seventy. Different students, I don’t know. Crazy. Now, some of the things we did as kids around here that were interesting. We used to build tree houses a lot. And Mincey 19 we built a three story tree house down here once. My dad had to tear it down. We had, we just nailed little pine limbs here where the boards crossed, but it was three stories. We had three stories of it, my brother and I did. Crazy. We fell out of trees a time or two. Got knocked out once or twice. But, my little boy just wrote a paper on this, this is interesting too. When I was a kid, I was probably about twelve, my brother was about thirteen and a half, and we’d been watching some flying squirrels, sugar gliders, dive You ever seen a flying squirrels around here? Juan: Umm… I’ve heard of them, but I never… Jack: I haven’t seen one here since I was a kid. We used to see them a lot. I mean, they’re sugar gliders, and they’re neat little things. We had a family of them up in the woods behind our house. There was a family with a nest and there was little ones in that nest, not very big. So, we wanted to get us a pet. Went up a jack pine about fifty feet up the creek. My brother couldn’t climb trees. I could climb anything I could put my hands on. I mean, really I could climb anything, just, straight pole, rope, metal pole, doesn’t matter. So, I shimmied up the top of that pine tree. We waited for the adults, we thought the two big ones had left, so I stuck my hands in both sides, it had a hole in each side of the nest. I came in both sides of it, and I came out with sugar gliders on every finger. They all, they ate me up. And I went like that, and swung squirrels all over the…wide away from me. I had to go to the house and get my fingers tended. So, we didn’t get us a pet squirrel, but that one… It’s a wonder I didn’t fall out of the tree, but I had my legs wrapped around it pretty good, and I was going to catch a pet squirrel. My sister-in-law had a pet squirrel when she was in high school. I don’t know how they got it. Fell out of the nest or what. But they let it run around their house. They had real wood beams like this, and it just ran all over the place in their house. But she had it for a year or two. We had a pet groundhog too when I was a kid. We caught it and it was… And it was friendly to us, but it would chew the baseboard where we keep it on the back porch it chewed all the baseboard off and built a little nest in behind the deep freeze. And we finally, when it got around hibernation time we turned it loose. We’d go back out and it come back to us the next year, but it wouldn’t come right up and let us pet it anymore. It knew we wouldn’t hurt it, but it got, became wild. Juan: They can be ferocious little creatures. Jack: Yeah. Now, when I was in college I knew a boy over there that had a pet raccoon. He’d walk down the sidewalk at Western with a raccoon sitting on his shoulder. It was cool. It was real tight. The problem with the groundhogs as pets, I know, is the hibernation. They hibernate in the winter. To keep them in captivity it’s real hard to allow that to happen naturally. They suffer in the winter if they don’t go to their natural den and hibernate. It’s weird. Juan: I’ve got a friend with a pet coon. It’s something special there. Jack: Yeah, if it’s friendly. I’ll tell you what though, a raccoon can be miserable. A groundhog can too. Juan: I’ve seen many a dog get whipped by a raccoon, or by opossums, raccoons, groundhogs, especially groundhogs. Mincey 20 Jack: Oh, opossums, there’s a secret. I used to catch rabbits to train my beagles with. We had little box traps we’d made so we could catch them alive and turn them loose in front of the beagles, and let the beagles run them. I caught a big opossum one day, and it… it had snowed about a foot deep, so it was two days before I got up here and checked the trap. I dug that opossum out, and it plum eat me up. You know, opossum don’t always play opossum. They’re just a big rat that’s all they are. Most of the time you drop them out, they just curl up in a ball. This one didn’t. I ran a few a feet and I turned around and chased it. Finally, and it ran away from me. Pretty weird looking creature. Almost prehistoric looking when they open their mouth at you with their teeth. Juan: You ever have any large cats up here where you, ever seen any or had to deal with any up here? Jack: Well, I’ve had to kill a couple bobcats that got into my hens. I caught two kittens. I actually caught the mother. I got live traps there. I caught the mother because she killed like eight of my chickens over about a two week period. Every other day she was killing a chicken, so I set live traps. I got rid of her and it wasn’t two days later these two, about half grown bobcat kittens showed up, got in the live trap, and I relocated them. It’s against the law to move them, but I didn’t want to kill them because they were just kittens, but they were old enough to survive on their own. Then, a couple years later I killed another bobcat that was coming in for my chickens. I’ve never seen a big cat, but I have seen a mountain lion track twice in my life. Once was when I was a kid over at Standing Indian, and my dad was with me, and I mean, it was a cat track about as big your fist. And then, at Shining Rock where we used to deer hunt we had something come in and get in our food supply when we weren’t there one day. And we found tracks in the snow of a cat that was as big as your fist. When I was a kid we heard one out at our place at [Beavers Hollow] We had like thirty-five head of cattle out there at the time. My dad was out there and when it squalled the cattle ran to the barn in a stampede. And we went out, all I had was a shotgun and dad had a pistol. We sat there, the hill next to the barn. It came down, it had squalled a few times, but it must’ve scented us because it never came out in the open where we could see us. But a lot of people were seeing a big cat out there at that time. So, I’m sure it was there. My dad saw a cougar in Georgia, cross the road in front of them deer hunting, coming in before daylight. One day him and his buddy, jumped right in front of the truck. He said it was as long as the road was wide. A little dirt road. But I had… I saw a pretty good size cat track in Tennessee Creek last year, but it could’ve been an extremely large bobcat, but I still think it could’ve been a small mountain lion because it was bigger than bobcat track I’d ever seen. I had a client with me from some island somewhere off the Georgia’s coast, and he said it looked like a small cougar track to him too because they had a cougar or two in the island he lived at. And they saw the tracks frequently, but it was a cat track. Pretty good size. And we got a really big bobcat down at that place at [Beaver]. We caught several out there. We had one kill a deer. We got the state biologist out there. It was in early February or late January. Because we thought we had a cougar, you know, it come and kill the grass and leaves and stuff. It was still blood running out of it when my dad found it. It had just been killed. Got the state biologist, wild biologist, to come out there and he said, “Well, you got a big bobcat or a group killed it.” It was when they were trying to reintroduce turkey. He said, “If you got some traps,” he said, “It’s legal right now, it’s trapping season. Set you some traps around this property.” We caught four bobcats in four nights. The first one was like twenty-eight pounds, tomcat. It was huge. The others were smaller. Mincey 21 I got one of them upstairs mounted, but we got that huge one mounted. The taxidermist, he even said it was the second biggest he’d ever mounted. So, it was a pretty big size cat. Juan: I was out hunting once, and had a something, we don’t know what it was, never could see it, but little hill ridge, just straight drop above us. Something squalled at us there. The awfulest sounding thing I’d ever heard. Moved off there and we were just, we just had muzzle loaders so if it had decided it wanted to come play there wouldn’t been much, too much we would’ve been able to do about it. Jack: I tell you, I’ll never forget, down in Georgia one time, just got there. I leave Blue Ridge School and I run down there to go hunting. So I got there and had like thirty minutes until dark, daylight left. So I just, I didn’t even grab my rifle, I just took a pistol. I had a forty-four magnum I’d killed a few deer with. So, I walk down in the woods, and I didn’t have a stand, I just sat down on the ground. And it just getting dark, and there’s a big…they got a terrible hog problem down there. We got it on Big Ridge. But a hog squealed right there, about a hundred feet from me, and here I’m on the ground, tag a hog. And then a coyote hollered and I said, “It’s time to go to the truck.” Juan: Oh yeah. Jack: Too curious if I was planning on being after dark in there. My nephew’s killed four boars on our place in Big Ridge this year. One of them was three hundred pounds and three hundred and twenty. That’s a big, big wild hogs. They were tearing our place all to pieces out there. But he hunts all night out there. They got this light that puts out a green light? Juan: Mm hmm. Jack: And it’s got a solar cell so it charges the battery and comes on every night, and they get used to that green light. So, you can use your regular scope. That’s the way we were trying to eradicate as many as we can out of there because we got yards they’re plowing up, rooting, and then the pastures out there. They probably rooted up a half acre of pasture land out there. It’s…you can’t mow it with a bush hog now it’s so tore up. It’s terrible what they’re doing. And they’re not native. They were brought in by somebody to turn loose, but they reproduce prolifically. Juan: Well, is there anything specific you’d like to add, or think that you’d like a

Jack Mincey is interviewed by Juan Moore on May 31, 2016, as part of Mountain People, Mountain Lives: A Student Led Oral History Project. Mincey discusses growing up around Cullowhee and the changes over the years. He talks about teaching at Waynesville Junior and Blue Ridge High School. Fly-fishing and guiding are considered with regards to Mincey’s occupation as a fly-fishing teacher. Fishing, hunting, and camping are discussed as well as Mincey’s many travels.

• Creator
  • Mincey, Jack
• Contributor
  • Moore, Juan
• Format
  • Sound recordings
  • Interviews
• Type
  • Sound
• Date
  • Date interview: 2016-05-31;
  • Date: 1960s; 1970s; 1980s; 1990s; 2000s (Decade); 2010s;
  • Date digitized: 2017-06-10
• Extent
  • Duration: 01:04:50 (sound recording)
  • Duration: 23 pages (transcript)
• Subject - Topic
  • Autobiography
  • Fly fishing
  • Hunting
  • Mincey, Jack -- Interviews
  • Mountain life -- North Carolina, Western
  • Teachers -- North Carolina, Western
  • Woodwork -- Appalachian Region, Southern
• Location
  • Jackson County (N.C.)
• Source institution
  • Western Carolina University
• Source Collection
  • WCU Oral History Collection - Mountain People, Mountain Lives
• Identifier
  • HL_MPML_Moore_Mincey_2016-05-31_audio
• Repository
  • Western Carolina University Hunter Library