Three Generations of Rowlands - Featuring Tom Sr., Tom Jr., Turner, and Hayden Rowland
TOM ROWLAND PODCAST
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Podcast Synopsis - Tom Rowland Sr, Tom Rowland Jr, Turner Rowland III and Hayden Rowland on the Tom Rowland Podcast In Bozeman, MT
This week is a very special week for the Tom Rowland Podcast. I had the opportunity for a 3 generation trip to Montana to fish and visit with my family. Tom Rowland, Sr joins Turner Rowland, Hayden Rowland and Me, Tom Rowland for a great discussion on family, fishing, wisdom, parenting and funny stories. I had never heard a few of the stories and the world is about to learn how I could grow up with a live grenade in my living room for 42 years. Recently my Dad found it as they were moving out of their house and the story of trying to get rid of it was hilarious.
Join the Rowland family on this podcast to get to know us all a little better, laugh, learn and tell a few stories.
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TRANSCRIPT:
TRANSCRIPT of 3 Generations of Rowland's podcast on Tom Rowland Podcast episode published October 14, 2020
Introduction:
I saw a lot of places that violate your your rule on the way out here and all through montana
um are you talking about the rule that my father gave to me is that if it has a gravel parking lot and serves beer and plays music and allows dancing you keep on going
yeah that's it that's a good place to find out who's the toughest guy in Bozeman
yeah that's a typical montana bar yeah yeah so i found a lot of places that uh that violate those things now if you have a paved parking lot somehow that's better yeah um and if they have live music versus jukebox is that better or worse well i i have taken my father's advice and i i don't know i'm tom Rowland senior and this is the tom Rowland podcast
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and now we're getting back to the show
All right here we are everybody this is one of the most special podcasts that i can remember doing ever and that is because we have three generations of Rowland’s right now we're looking out over Bozeman there is a new fire a wildfire right above the m if you're familiar with Bozeman there's a a big very large m made out of white rocks on the Bridgers and uh just above that a fire started yesterday so actually in the hotel room where we're in right now we're looking out over that fire and all the attempts to put it out it's pretty cool but right now we've got grandad which is tom Rowland senior at hayden Rowland in the middle got turner Rowland right next to me and uh it's pretty cool we've had three generations of Rowland's doing a little fishing trip what do you guys uh you had any special special things happen this week we was just a great opportunity to fish with turner one day and hayden one day and both of them one day and weather's been great company's wonderful been a good time it has been a good time we we uh since since i've been here we've been able to do slew creek one day we did which was really cool a couple of camping trips around that and then um the yellowstone river the missouri river and uh we've been able to take granddad on the yellowstone last couple days um it's pretty hot for september i think what was your favorite my favorite well the day that we all got to go together was the favorite so yesterday probably um had my friend kevin sloan that's in in Bozeman here he took us or didn't take us we we have four people so he uh uh i floated with him and you guys floated together stopped on the side of the river and ate those um elk brats that he brought which literally was like the best thing i've ever eaten it was pretty good it was pretty good yeah i think it was polish sausage with like cheese in it and uh a lot of beef fat i think that makes a difference i think you gotta go like 80 20 out to beef yeah well there's a lot of fat in those things tasted that's why they tasted so good it was it was great but i like that i mean i like everything that we we've done out here because um you know the fishing's been great we've had lots of different kinds of fishing the uh the missouri river is quite a bit different than the yellowstone and Slough creek is quite a bit different than both of those and um i don't know it's a good little good little tour to uh experience all of that um different kinds of fishing and you know walking way into a place is is cool and then drift drift boats are cool and wade hayden and i did some waiting off the road one time and that was cool but i just love it i love the west it's great and you guys are out here so um let's fill everybody in because we've i've done a podcast with both of you before um tell us what you're currently doing now um because people are interested hayden what are you up to so right now i'm working in a wood shop in livingston um at total woodworks of montana and i'm currently not in school right now so that i can get my in-state tuition to go to montana state it makes it a lot cheaper um i think it's probably the best time to not be in school right now why do you think that because COVID yeah because of COVID a lot of online schools my friends are saying that it's not not the same education so i thought it'd be the best time to you know take a semester year off and and work and and spend time with friends and go outside and fish just hang out and so what's the what's the situation at a college these days i mean you've got um everybody wants to you gotta wanna have parties you wanna get together you wanna be college students are people paying attention to the the corona guidelines or or not i think it depends on where you are at least with like my friends i've noticed that we're a little bit more cautious like we clean our apartment pretty much every day spray it down with bleach and then but then like some of my other friends i've noticed that they don't pay attention at all really yeah and what how many people do you see getting it um i've only heard of a few of my friends getting it my roommate actually had a scare with it she she got it and we were under a government issue quarantine from the montana health department for two weeks so that was brutal can you fish in quarantine no okay good
and uh so the woodworking do you like the woodworking?
Hayden Rowland:
i love it love it i mean you've always been an artist so do you see that as an extension of your of your art like of your drawing and and you know you've been good at all all kinds of different art over the years do you see this as a as a extension of that like a form of art it's kind of like developing like new art skills most of the stuff that i did in high school was a lot of 2d work with sharpies and pencils and it's really cool to to work on a piece of paper but it's also pretty sweet to take a 20-foot board that you get from a sawmill and uh and take that and turn it into like a nice dresser or something wow so it's like my job is i'm the assistant which basically means that the head carpenter trains me to do the stuff that he doesn't want to do so that he can have free time um but i i like get the wood and then i like choose the sections that we're gonna use and and uh join them plain them rip them to width length anything that we need sand i do a lot of sanding do you do a lot of sweeping i do mostly sweeping i think that's where uh i mean i'm no carpenter that's for sure but um i think most carpenters start out with a broom in their hand right for sure yeah a lot of sweeping a lot of vacuuming yeah well that's good you're learning to pay your dues too you know which which is good for everything all right that's cool turner what are you up to um well i'm entering my senior year at uh montana state with um with what's going on it's a little different um but it
it's still good i mean the teachers are having a hard time with webex and everything but i uh i'm selling some software and i am going to fish and hunt as much as possible um during this last time um that i know for sure i'll be in Bozeman and uh kind of have as much free time as i do i'm just trying i'm trying to get it all in yeah well this is a good time for that but um the software sales that you're doing that started out as um as an internship right that you have kind of
progressed on past the internship are you still in the internet no i'm i'm still considered an intern but the whole sales team for this one software product is interns or our interns so really we're doing everything from you know looking at looking at leads to actually selling the software to to to customizing workflows based on that software um so it's really more it's more of a full-time job than an internship which is which is great because i i learned a lot about myself doing this internship i learned that when i'm given a sense of responsibility for my work my work is dramatically increases in quality um i don't i don't know if that's just a me thing or if that is something that can be applied to anything you know like if you you want somebody to do a job particularly well maybe you should give them a sense of responsibility for it and the ability to make their own decisions and decide you know what what work is is good work or maybe that's something that you have to kind of baby step two like i did through cs because that was just customer service right for software company and you're just answering you know how do you do this how do you do that what what does this error message mean um and then once i was given a sense of of freedom and responsibility i think i really did a lot better that's cool yeah yeah it's interesting like that so you're finding a good balance between working and going to school trying to it's been a it's been a little bit of a of a tougher adjustment than i thought definitely like working full-time more than going to school though you do yeah a lot of people don't yeah no i have a lot more free time when i am i'm just working full-time um because usually i mean i'll do some stuff where like past five if i have like a project i'm working on then i'll like work to like i don't know eight or so at night but other than that i mean i mean me and melin we i'd get off work and um she was doing instacart this summer and we just go hit the gallatin i mean almost every day after work and um i don't i don't think i'm gonna have the free time to do that right now but i do have wednesday mornings off so maybe i'll go and get an elk hunt in closer to town or something like that yeah and dad you have uh you've had a big change in your life recently tell us about what you've been doing well i have slowed down in my business quite a bit and the home that we raised my wife and i raised our children and lived there for 45 years we have sold and we've moved to another location which she just loves it's a bright airy smaller my problem has been disposing of a lot of stuff that i've accumulated over a 45-year period of time but i have made made that work and uh it made her happy yeah and a happy wife is a happy life what were some of the things that you um that you found as you were moving out of your house that's quite interesting because uh i love to shoot handguns and i've taken all the boys to to the range and we've had a good time with uh improving our marksmanship and i had a a a small target pistol that i just really enjoyed shooting and i said well i want to get another one of these which i did and i remember taking it to the range and we shot it one time and
somehow it disappeared and and my son thinks that i accused him of taking it and and i asked many times if he knew where it was and he said no i don't and he thought i was being accusatory it was a little bit accusatory and uh the only thing i could do is apologize for that but here we go we've got this house that's probably in excess of 6 000 feet and and we've cleaned it out and the new owner and my wife are walking through the house and the new owner looks up at a shelf that's higher than you can reach i don't know how anybody could get there without a ladder and she said what is that up there on that shelf and my wife said i don't know it's probably one of tom's handguns so sure enough it was the 22 pistol that tom thinks i accused him of taking but i didn't i or if i did i didn't mean to uh so that was one of the big things that i discovered and also i discovered a cowboy hat that i had uh 45 years ago that i had swapped a silver belly hat if anybody knows what that is it's a silver hat for this bull rider's black hat and uh it disappeared but i found it it was in the back of a closet i also found some stuff underneath the beds that i had hidden i don't know who i was hiding them from it seemed like it hit them more for myself than anybody else maybe and you found something else um recently that that isn't as easy to dispose of i mean i don't know of a lot of people that move out of their house and the the two things that they find is a handgun that they lost a long time ago and a hand grenade
oh well yeah my father-in-law uh was uh stationed in japan and right after the war and he was flying medvac with army air corps and after the war uh he and some of his buddies went to tokyo and before they went into tokyo the supply sergeant said you must have a wet a weapon before you go into town so they say well we don't have any weapons he said well come in the supply room we'll ex we'll issue you one so i went in the supply room and they issued him a uh m1 carbine and he took it to town and they came back after their visit to tokyo and got on their plane and were getting ready to leave or getting ready to leave to get on their plane and they went to supply sergeant and said we want to turn this uh carbine in and he said what carby said the one that we checked out this morning he said i don't know anything about what you're talking about so we got these weapons that we picked up at supply room what do we do with them supply sergeants said i don't care what you do with take home with so he brought this home along with
a fragment grenade a japanese fragment grenade and somehow it had been placed on a piece of furniture in our house on the top of it and this is the same room where we ate christmas dinner for 45 years
so i told my wife i said we need to properly dispose of this and i took it to the fire department and then it was early in the morning and the door was locked i knocked on the door of the fire department nobody came and i went back to my car and i was on my truck and i was getting ready to leave and this fireman came out and he said can i help you and i said yes i have a grenade here i'd like to dispose of her properly and he said what a what i said a grenade so where is it i said it's in the cup holder in my truck would you like for me to get it they said oh no no no stay right there don't don't go anywhere close to it i said okay so what we're going to do he said we're going to call the police i said oh my gosh
so i said okay so i sit down and wait for the policeman to come policeman doesn't come and i said hey if you guys got any coffee in the in the station here let me see hey joe we got coffee oh we're all out he said no i'm sorry i said well can i drive up to the convenience store and get a cup of coffee oh no no don't don't move i don't want you moving that that grenade in that car uh you just stay right there so the policeman comes and he said what's your problem i said i don't have a problem
he said give me your name address and phone number and where you'd work where you live all this stuff so what you got what do you got i said i got a grenade that my grandfather my father-in-law brought back from the army so what kind is it i said it's japanese he said oh my god he said we got to call the bomb squad i said oh man for yes sir okay so i sit back down again and i'm trying to be on my best behavior because i might be in big trouble and i don't want to be in trouble so finally the bomb squad shows up and a guy walks over there and he said where you got and i said it's a unexploded grenade where is it i said send a cup holder in my truck so he walks over there and he reaches in and picks it up and said oh i can take care of this so that's the end of that story but it was kind of exciting for a while i guess so um so i looked on the uh all you got to do is google chattanooga hand grenade and there is there are it's full of stories full of stories and here's a picture of it in your cup holder and it says many people like to put drinks and snacks in their cup holder but one chattanooga man came to firefighters for help with a world war ii hand grenade in his cup holder you read that right a more than 75 year old hand grenade chattanooga fire department officials say they recovered the grenade on thursday morning cfd says a man arrived at the hixon fire hall and informed the crew that he had a world war ii japanese hand grenade in his truck and needed to help to get rid of it firefighters took precaution called the bomb squad i mean your story's dead accurate um but the funny thing is is you can go to the facebook thing quite a few comments about who what kind of redneck you would have to be to have a unexploded hand grenade and what a waste it was to i mean it depends like half of the comments are from people that think you're a redneck if you have a hand grenade the other half of the comments are the people that were thinking about man what a waste think about all the good fishing you could have done with that hand grenade think about all the other things you could have done with this hand grenade hand grenade not hand grenade that's a funny that's a word that people say right grenade hand grenade i think like it's not a hang yeah no costume no with an h that's not spelled that way no but hand grenade you don't say hand grenade say hand grenade well it the the grenade still had the pen and it and i knew it was still could be exploded with the proper know uh but the people hit a bump in your cup holder yeah is what you're trying to say no i don't think that i don't think that it could have been detonated just with it so who found the grenade my lovely wife i was afraid she might use it on me so i decided to take it to the fire department let them she put it under your pillow yeah um that's funny um so this worked out this trip worked out really great um because we were we were supposed to go elk hunting today today's the opener of elk hunting season we were gonna go archery elk hunting turner has been training for a whole year has everything all sighted in ready to go but today happens to be like 95 degrees in Bozeman so i don't know if it was going to be really good so we scheduled another elk with kevin and that's going gonna be really good so it worked out perfect that we could we could have it was a perfect time for uh granddad to come out here and and visit so what do you think about the uh the the lifestyle and the the life that these boys are living well i certainly appreciate the opportunity that they have and i'm glad that they have the opportunity
it's a a great experience you can't get in much trouble on the river i don't know about that it's fine you can shoot you can shoot a bald eagle you can do a lot of stuff well you can go to a spring creek you're not supposed to fish into well you can get that kind of stuff you're not gonna get accosted in a bar uh i don't know i saw a lot of places that violate your your rule on the way out here and all through montana um are you talking about the rule that my father gave to me is that if it has a gravel parking lot and serves beer and plays music and allows dancing you keep on going yeah that's it that's a good place to find out who's the toughest guy in Bozeman yeah that's a typical montana bar yeah yeah so i found a lot of places that uh that violate those things now if you have a paved parking lot somehow that's better yeah um and if they have live music versus jukebox is that better or worse well i i have taken my father's advice and i i don't know yeah well i somehow i think that you do but that's another story i think it's the windows um well if there are windows that helps yeah i do know that i i thought that the the the piece of advice that i've heated to is if it has a gravel parking lot serves beer on tap and has live music that's a place that you definitely want to be out of there before midnight not a lot of good things happen there after midnight it's like roadhouse a lot of good things happen after midnight anyways that's right patrick swayze that was a great movie pain don't hurt
you know that movie yeah i mean i i haven't watched all of it i've what you how do you even start it and not finish it is that the family i think yeah where are you family driving kicking roadhouse yeah yeah i don't know about the family yeah yeah man peter gets obsessed with roadhouse and he's driving around with his legs and every time he he kicks the steering wheel to turn and every time he does roadhouse i don't know i haven't seen that family guy but it sounds pretty awesome but roadhouse they take him down like a really windy street and he's kicking it all the time oh okay well roadhouse is a is a classic movie where they have to bring in patrick swayze he's an awesome super famous bartender or not bartender bouncer and they bring in a bouncer to clean up the bar now they don't close it down and you know like pave the parking lot get a little higher class of of entertainment in there they decide that now we're going to let the same people come in but we're going to have this bouncer here that's going to whoop him if it gets out if it gets out of hand but his deal was you got to always be polite so he'd walk up and he'd say excuse me sir you're gonna have to leave and then they would turn around and kick him and then it went down and patrick swayze was supposed to be like george st pierre he knew how to kill people in a million different ways but when you go back and look at it it doesn't quite hold up like after you see somebody that really knows how to kick somebody and then you watch patrick says he try to do it and it he should have stunt double yeah yeah well you see that a lot and martial in hollywood or movies or whatever you know the it's funny how if you talk to somebody that knows a lot about something then watches a movie about it then you know it'll tell you what's wrong with it well either way it was it was a great movie it really was you should watch it um so what are we going to do this afternoon well i think we're going to the museum of the rockies right it's probably going to be a great thing to do on a day that is 95 degrees in september yeah have you ever has anybody ever been to the museum i've been you have yeah yeah it's really cool i mean they have like one exhibit that is there all the time it's a dinosaur exhibit and i mean these dinosaurs are taking all across montana and up into alberta like that's really where like the t-rex and the big predators from what i understand are and were concentrated in or at least they're for whatever reason their fossils were and so if you go to a place like the missouri breaks that's where a lot of these big t-rexes are taken from and i went turkey hunting there this past spring and it is it's really the place that outlaws went to escape um escape all the all the parties hunting for them because there are these canyons and they're just like endless canyons and you can glass for a long way and you can kind of look at these ridges that come up and when i was turkey hunting there you know you could see oka all all coming up and down these ridges but when you get in the ridges it it's like this endless canyon that is way steeper than it looks it has all these thorns and all this nasty stuff and they irrigate these fossils out of these cliff faces and i don't know i mean someone's doing some heavy lifting over there because those those dinosaur bones can't be light and they take them out these sides of cliffs and have to hike way up like pretty much a mountain i mean to give you an idea of how steep it is like the world record sheep or big horn or at least the continental record comes from the missouri breaks so you know sheep like that really steep rocky stuff and that's all there is in the breaks it's it's really cool and you you know when you get there they have maps where you go and if you go up to glacier like around two medicine you've ever been there there's like all these museums that you just you ever seen that uh black mirror episode where the girl like the opening is that girl and she drives into the desert and she comes across that little museum with that guy and he ends up having all those like really messed up memories i didn't see that one didn't see that one where the where the dad is in the electric chair and then this one you haven't seen that oh dude you got to watch this black mirror episode it's crazy he is like this i can't remember how it how it goes down but he's somehow connected to all these like really messed up projects and so he ends up getting i can't even remember it's been so long since i've seen it but those museums and two medicine are kind of like that they're just like in the middle of nowhere like like you know gravel parking lot and it shows you where these dinosaurs get taken out of and it's right where you're fishing like it's really yeah i mean it's super cool you go up there and so maybe we'll see some of those bones today i'm sure you will yeah i mean like the museum here right i mean this museum here is pretty big yeah yeah i mean it's pretty famous i mean i've heard a lot of people say that if you come to Bozeman you got to go to that museum so that's what we're going to do today that'll be that'll be pretty cool because uh last couple of days i think we wore grand dad out we were supposed to do a four-hour float turned into an eight-hour float and then we did a then we did a four-hour float that turned into a five and a half hour float um how are you hanging in there dad i'm doing well thank you i recovered doing pretty good for older gentleman how much of an older gentleman are you you mean in age the number you you can you can you can um 82 okay it could be any any criteria you wanted 82. they did too so in your life is it fair to say that you've seen outhouses to teslas yes sir we have in fact uh on i can remember uh halloween night many many years ago uh when we would trick or treat and we'd steal somebody's outhouse and put it in the middle of a road and that that was ever was there ever anyone in it no no we didn't ever get anybody in it but we did certainly see a lot of tires squeal and hear them when you put that outhouse in the middle of a road on a dark night
and so you just kind of hang out in the bushes and wait for somebody to blast through it oh yeah yeah did you ever see that happen no we just saw a lot of rubber burned from stopping real quick uh-huh those bad blame kids yeah yeah that's my outhouse yeah what do you think the biggest the biggest changes you've seen in your lifetime that have changed the way that that we live what do you think those have been well i grew up in tennessee in a in a fairly rural part of the state and i would say the tva authority and the expansion of electrical grid across the south did more for anything especially for manufacturing
the ability to generate the power and provide power for the equipment to manufacture things also
opportunity for people to be excess have access to the rest of the world through tv now i can remember first tv we ever had was a seven by seven inch uh black and white and that was quite a quite an event to be able to
have dinner i guess maybe one of the advents would be the tv tray table yeah where you sit right in front of that little tv uh at dinner time and have a tv dinner yeah and have a tv dinner tv dinners used to be actually not bad like a tv dinner today is kind of gross but right that was like pretty fancy used to come in a metal used to be all metal you put it in the oven and it would have like turkey and dressing you know i can't even remember that do you remember like what you did before tv would you i mean like gather around the radio and there used to be radio programs which is now the modern podcast i i envision people sitting around listening to this as a family maybe not well i i i would say my dad was a baseball fan and and whenever there was a game on he would turn it on the radio and we'd sit down and listen to it together and that that was quite entertaining sometimes it was kind of boring when you didn't know who the players were but he knew most of the players and
but he was drafted when he was 35 years of age because at that time i was the only child and the united states was prepping for a possible land invasion of japan so they were
taking anyone between the age of 18 and 35 even if you were married or or had children if you had one child they were subject to the draft it was quite an experience to see a 35 year old go through basic training with 18 year olds
and that uh when he came back from the service he didn't have a job so he had to
find out something to do and and do it and he got into the army surplus business and would find manufacturing plants that needed things like picks and shovels because at that time there were no metal tools available because all the metal was being used in the war effort so uh he'd go to a military base that was closing and auctioning off all these things he'd purchase some drive buy a truck drive it to chattanooga and sell it to the manager of the dupont construction plant so he like when you say all these things like like shovels picks taxes axes hard hats uh pipe fittings and so that stuff was super hard to come by very hard so your these guys great grandfather my grandfather was he was an entrepreneur he was uh he was he's a hustler yes yes he was he was willing to do whatever he needed to do honestly to feed his family and support himself i never heard that that he did that um you know you like to tell stories but you haven't told that story very often because i don't i don't remember that of him selling army surplus or military surplus right first first vehicle we had after the war was a 44 model jeep and we drove that
four or five years it didn't even have a top on it like a willy's jeep yep exactly that's what i learned how to drive on when i was 12 years old thing had a clutch on it to break your leg exactly i've driven one of those one time i mean you don't feather the clutch on that thing buddy and i thought i'll never learn how to do this uh oh shoot okay fire is the fire is update the fire is is burning see those ships burning more than other bridge looks like i don't know they've been dumping a bunch of that red stuff whatever that is the people listening at home we can't see of of the uh we can't see the fire this fire i don't know if it hasn't no that's just uh we're not that was just the they must have just dropped the retardant or whatever you called the red the red powder it looked like a fire was was really blowing up but i think it was that red powder so anyway sorry dad it's interrupted so when i was trying to learn how to drive with that clutch like that i i never thought i'd learn because i'd get the clutch about halfway out and then all of a sudden bam it would kick back out and that jeep would jump like a [ __ ] horse and my dad said let it out slow son let it out slow and i tried again and it would be jumping and i came home that first night i was laying in my bed upstairs and i said i won't ever learn how to drive i think it's gotten a lot easier oh yeah i'd say yeah it's a lot easier than driving that old thing well you know that austin healey man you drive like manuals today and then you drive his austin healey and it's significantly harder the austin healy's a lot easier driving those jeeps oh yeah and then then when i got an army we'd
you'd have to double clutch some of those deuce and halves that they had and that's a that's pretty interesting too but we've seen a lot of what's a double clutch well you take it out of gear if you're going from first to second you're in first move it up to neutral and you have to push the clutch in again before you put it into second and then you just have to keep going through the whole gearbox on that some of those old trucks had six six uh gear six gear box and that was a challenge of course if that's all you knew how to do it was not a problem some of the kids now might have a problem with it because they got all automatic transmissions now weak legs skipping leg day
skinny jeans all kinds of stuff not you i don't think you skipped leg day in a long time no no this leg day is just every day out here you walk up these mountains this is leg day there's a lot of last time i went hunting with turner it was uphill all the way even after we had gone all the way uphill and we were going back to the truck it was still uphill somehow i don't know how that happened but every time we get to the top the highest peak i could see turner would say well they're probably up there and i'd turn around and behind me there'd be another peak we'd climb up that one and he'd go thought they'd be here they're probably up there and then i didn't even know there was another peak and we kept going and then we get to the top he's like well this is probably as high as we're going to go we'll probably make it back to the truck but we should go over that peak right there before we go back to the truck so again we go up to go down and then i don't know up was not as bad as going down once we finally went down it's it's it's legit out here you you you do a lot of walking you do a lot of driving um on a rowing it's a physical it's a physical life it's good good for you fresh air exercise yes stuffed french toast and that was pretty good this morning breakfast went to the jam on main street and they have a stuffed french toast which um if you eat that you better plan on getting some exercise afterwards but that's that's definitely a favorite for here so um dad i have a lot of people that have asked me many times like how to get into the outdoor world how to how to follow your passion how to do something similar to what what i've done and a lot of times the question arises what did your dad think about it when you started doing this and doing this meaning um guiding for the most part um so i've never really asked you about that well that's that's interesting uh when you went to the university you came back after your first semester and said i don't know what i want to do this summer i'm thinking about
doing some things and i said well let's let's take a look at it and see so i found a the contractor that supplied the labor for the national parks and i said well you may want to think about a summer job where you don't need a car you really don't know anybody you're going to be away from home and you can do just about whatever you want to do and you're not going to have anybody judging you i said what about working at one of the national parks you said well i think maybe i'd like that and so you did and you became a certified bed maker and toilet scrubber it's good for me it was and and uh you loved the west you had a chance to fish about every day after you'd get through working i can remember you calling and saying dad i caught a fish today on the first fly that i tied myself and you were so excited about that i said well that's great so then the next year you came home at christmas and you said i think i want to go to alaska and work and that put a fear in me because the only thing that you can really do in alaska with without a car or without an airplane is work on a
lobster boat or a crab boat or something and the survival rate of those folks is very low and i say well i think you ought to consider it but let's see what else we can find i looked in the orvis newspaper and found an ad for the western rivers fly fishing guide school and i sent that to you and i said why don't you think about this this might be an alternative to alaska i didn't want to say
to you or to any of the children you can't do that because i wanted you to be able to make your own decisions and and thrive that way so you went to the school and the and they promised that if you completed the school they would harm me give you a job and so the fella that owned the outfit and had the depth of school said yeah i'll give him a job i wanted to work for me so then the next year you went back and you said dad i think i'd like to do this say well son i only have one piece of advice for you whatever you decide to do pursue it with a passion and be the best that you can be and that's kind of
here we are now yeah um and i'm very proud of you and you've done an outstanding job and and provided your sons with the same type of opportunity well it's interesting because you said you you know you get to these places in parenting where you you don't really want to say no and you don't really want to tell them that they can't do it but there's a real fine balance there how do you how do you deal with um with that balance of telling some young person that it's not such a good idea versus letting them go ahead and do it and making the mistakes that you know that they're gonna make well we all have to there's a famous general or admiral excuse me that was ahead of the
nuclear submarine program for the united states named hyman rickover and one of his famous quotes was we must learn by the mistakes of others because we will not live long enough to make them all ourselves so
as a parent a child has a child is going to make mistakes and you have to be able to work with them to try to help them learn from those mistakes
you can't and this is hard to say but you can't be a buddy to your children you got to be a parent and uh because there is a big difference between being a buddy and being a parent and sometimes you have to put the hammer down and say no we're not going to do this and that's hard because
me being a parent i want only the best for my children that they can achieve and and education i think gives the children the opportunity to accept information and filter it and be able to make a decision based on the facts and i think that's probably one of the things that's the most important for education not necessarily what you learned in the classroom but these other opportunities that prepare you for the future uh some of the stuff that you study in school you'll never ever think about again but at some point you might um what do you think about um the the way that education has changed how do you see education changing since let's say since you got out of high school and we're thinking about going to college versus turner and hayden right here well pardon me two days after i graduated from high school i was at fort jackson south carolina and that took a lot of uh crazy ideas that i might have had out of my mind because i didn't have time uh that was something that happened throughout your entire generation though right like i mean that part that that time of the of the world there was no there was none of this follow your passion you should do something you want to do right well that's right it was more structured than than it is now i had i had a an appointment to west point and decided that i could not stand to be away from this young lady for four years that i was dating and i turned it down but i still had an eight-year military obligation and thank goodness that's not the lady that i married but uh i went ahead and spent my eight years in the service in the reserve primarily and uh
which occupied a lot of my free time so i didn't have i didn't have a whole lot of choices to do things i had to i had to make a living because my wife and i had children very early
first child was born at age 21 so i didn't have much uh opportunity to fiddle i had to hit the ground running and so now as as you fast forward to today you hear a lot more about following your passion and and doing something that you love versus like just getting after it um what do you think about that right now
well to be honest with you and this is not a good answer i haven't given that much thought at all
i guess it's according to what your passion is but as a parent the only thing that you can really ask for is that your children do pursue something that they really would like to do because they're gonna have to do it for a long time none of us or i don't know many folks that have the resources when they're born to support them till they pass so you got to keep going after it yeah what about you guys you getting any kind of clarity on something that you want to do for your life nope
well honesty is a very important trait well a lot of that comes um i i think that comes from experience and i have a lot of people uh that listen to this that are interested in doing something they want to do but they really just don't know what it is and their question is like well how do i find out what it is and that to me is that's based on experience you need to experience the good and the bad like like you're doing hayden you need to go to work you need to try something and say you know i like that and i'm learning something but i definitely don't want to do that for the rest of my life or maybe you do like me like i started guiding and i liked it right away but it wasn't until i saw some older people some of the guys that i was guiding with that had some of the things that i wanted in my life like a family and a house and a and a life like every one of my friends and most of the people that i knew were still asking me you know seven or eight years in when are you gonna get a real job and i was like i don't know i think i have one like i think this is a real job and you know it wasn't about how much money you're making or whatever but i saw other people that were doing what i thought you could do and it opened my opened my eyes like you can be a fishing guide you know maybe you're gonna have to also be a carpenter maybe you have to also be something else but you can be a fishing guide for your whole life and then it was like but you can't be a fishing guide all year long in jackson wyoming because unless you want to be an ice fishing guide
so i realized okay well you're going to have to move and then that lifestyle is difficult as well the vagabond chasing the season lifestyle so anyway we figured out a way to make it work but um i i think that that if if people don't know young people don't know what they want to do it should be an opportunity not a not a problem like you have this opportunity to go find some other things that you may like or may not like and you're young and unattached and you don't have any bills and so after this little season's over you could try a different job you could try a different location you could try a different something and basically i think that if you don't know what you want to do you probably haven't tried enough things well i might say that one of your cousins
had a job picking lettuce in england and i asked him how he liked that he said well granddad it was extremely hard work and i did determine that i didn't don't think that i could support a family on the wages from picking lettuce but he said you know i said well you know the good thing about that is you eliminated something you don't have to worry about considering that again for a career
but you have to i never had the opportunity to interview for another job because
and it worked out okay but i'm just very fortunate not many people my age that have been in one
profession in one area all of their working career that's unusual but it's worked out for me and so when you're you're close to winding it down you're 82 and still going to work yes what's the plan here oh well they may they may take me out of their ten toes up with my hands folded in front of me saying oh don't he look natural is that what you want or or not you know i don't really know what i want uh but for 60 years i've gotten up every morning shaved put on a tie and gone to work and it's kind of something that i do and i enjoy doing it i see a lot of people that i and i do business with the folks that i really enjoy being around so i i don't know of any reason to hang it up
so 10 toes up right no 10 toes um all right well anybody got anything else interesting to talk about
well i think finding what you want to do is that process elimination you know i think i think a lot of people can get discouraged when they when they try something out and it doesn't work for them like there's a when when you try something out sometimes there's and you expect it to be perfect right but a lot of times you gotta you gotta try out slightly different things like you know with me and elk guiding i i loved elk guiding but it wasn't something that i wanted to do for the rest of my life but maybe outfitting would be or maybe something in that area like i i think a lot of people get really discouraged like if they if they want to do sales if they're really into sales and they start in the the tech sales and they don't like it well that doesn't mean you just don't like sales means you might just not like text sales right same with with guiding if you if you're always wanting to be the person on the bow then maybe there's a place for that in your life i don't think you need to directly eliminate it right when you figure out that it's not something that you want to do for a career yeah because there could be an offshoot of it like i don't know exactly maybe maybe you love fishing and you try guiding and you don't really like guiding that doesn't mean that you might not want to you know have a kind of reinvent the industry with an online version of a fly shop or some other way like there's a lot of ways that to be to make a living doing something that you want and it might not be as simple as as a to be like i'm gonna be a fishing guide and then even then there's a ton of different kinds of fishing guides like you know maybe you don't like uh rowing down the river for whatever reason well you might be a wade wade guy you know yeah might like something else um but i don't know again that goes back to you know trying it and not being afraid to to give something a try but um you know some of the some of the advice that we've been talking about lately um that i think is is so incredible and it was um really brought to my attention when i did this uh podcast with sailing sophisticated lady and you know i was asking um i was asking him about like how did you make this jump into from having a regular job then living on a sailboat and then traveling the world and making a living living on a sailboat and he was like well that's simple best advice i could give you is don't have any bills because if you want a freedom if you want freedom in your life if you want freedom uh to do something that you want to do that all stops with a car payment that all stops with a mortgage like you can only be away for you know three months before all of a sudden somebody comes and takes your house you know or your car or whatever and um so that's something that hey now i've been talking about when we're fishing is like if you want freedom pure freedom in your life just make sure you don't have any of those monthly bills that's that is the way and that's why i think a lot of people have a hard time like i'm in this career i want to change into doing something that i really like to do i don't like doing this whatever it is that they're doing but it's really hard to change because you know at the end of the month somebody's got their hand out for a bill how do you set that up and how do you how do you know when it's time to have a mortgage like i think it would be very hard for someone who wants to have an investment an early age like myself wants to buy a house maybe rent it out for some monthly income how do you set that up to where you don't have any bills for a certain amount of time in your life and how do you know when it's okay to have that and set it up in a way where maybe you're not as restricted i'd pass that over to granddad well turner that's
you know i never had that opportunity uh i figured if i needed extra money i'd just make more calls and work a little harder and for a period of time i was saddled with a large amount of debt for primarily for education of children
success 18 years of
private school uh elementary education uh 18 years of private secondary education uh college education for for three for a period of anywhere from four to four and a half to five years uh three weddings uh purchased a house and all these other things and at some point i felt like i was up to my nose in in debt and i said gosh i'm just gonna have to work a little harder and i had some very good breaks and i did and and it's a extremely rewarding experience to wake up in the morning and say i don't owe anyone anything other than to try to act like a responsible kind gentleman and uh so but how that happens i don't know some of the financial planners could help you more than that but most of them say you need to accumulate an amount of money for a down payment on a house of at least 20 percent uh and then you don't go buy that new truck or that new bass boat or the new drift boat you may have to the first purchase purchases that you make on that kind of basis be for cash and they might be a lower
standard of what you'd really like to have and then when you get to where you don't owe anybody any money pay cash for things but that means that you have got to spend less than you make because you certainly become a slave to the bank sure i think um that's all incredibly good advice i would say if i were to add anything to it is that before you i think when you decide that it's time to get a mortgage you decide that it's time to um to acquire some bills or whatever is a is a place in your life where you you're very comfortable with where you are you're very very comfortable you don't have any of these regrets like man i sure would like to go backpack across england or i sure would like to you know walk the appalachian trail i sure would like to do all these things and you've got this you've got this yearning to do some things that's not the mortgage on a house because you've just kissed that goodbye and you still want it that's a bad bad place to be in my opinion right in my opinion the place to be is you know what i wanted to walk the appalachian trail i walked the appalachian trail now i'm really in love with this girl right here and i am ready to get married and i am ready to start my family and i am ready i welcome this mortgage i want this mortgage i want to be ingrained in this community that i'm in i want to do my best in this job that i have i am welcoming these bills and i'm happy with where i am and that's a big big major difference between saddled with this mortgage what i really want to do is go hike the appalachian trail and i'm going to do that one day you don't want to be there you don't want to be in that place where you have something that you really want to do if you have something you really want to do now's the time man now is the time get on it plan it do it and have no regrets have no regrets live your life to the absolute fullest do the things that you want to do and of course you're going to find some other things but there's of course i have places that come up on my radar and i'm like man i'd like to fish there but not right now i don't want to be i you know like when you guys were were young you got wrestling matches you got football games you got lacrosse games you got all the i don't want to miss that i am welcoming not doing that i am happy with that i am happy to say i'm going to put world travel on a on pause and maybe i'll get there one day but there's nothing i would rather be doing than this right here than watching this lacrosse game than watching this wrestling match then then watching this track meet something like that like if somebody gave me a free ticket to the seychelles i wouldn't even take it like that is being happy in your life i think being so happy with where you are that you welcome everything that comes with it and i think that's a major major difference than living a life of regret
we talk about the concept of both a lot mm-hmm you know it's one of my big things i say it's not an either or it's a both yeah i mean you know in various decisions in my life where i you know can branch off to one area or the next whether it was sticking with guiding or going on to the sales things you know you always bring up the concept of why not both is there room for both as far as getting the bills yeah there's room to travel and have built like on especially on the concept of investments well there's there's room to you know today you you you have some opportunities that that i mean i'm not that much old i mean older than you and i mean 30 years and dad's 30 years older than me and the opportunities that i had to do some things didn't exist when he when he was my age and now there's some opportunities that you guys have that didn't exist i mean particularly with the internet you have the opportunity to work anywhere you want to live you can live in a lot of different places but here's what boils down to you want to go and do something like the appalachian trail is a great example a lot of people want to do that in their life maybe it's the continental divide trail maybe it's that you want to float every river in montana maybe it's i don't know what it is but maybe it requires an extended time away 60 days i don't even know that many people that are pretty well established that can stop working for 60 days and pay their house payment their their car payment their electric bill their water bill their insurance their you know now you have you you've also acquired a dog now you have to put the dog in the kennel now you have to do all this stuff and you add up all of this stuff and it's not that you can't afford to pay whatever it is whatever it costs to go hike the appalachian trail it's that you don't have the resources to stop working and keep going with everything that you've got going and go away so in some situations it's i like to say nothing's impossible but there are some things where you put the pencil to the paper and it just doesn't make sense and if you want the freedom to do those things and you have it in the back of your head like i don't even know what i want to do but i want to do something and i'm going to figure it out one day that's not the time to get a mortgage i think that's a lot of i think a lot of people are in that situation or they are they're just like i don't know what it what it is i don't know if it's travel of course they are i don't know if it's if it's some great adventure but i want to do something right and here's the mistake here's where people get way off track in my opinion is some people is that they think okay well maybe if i bought that house i'd feel better about yourself like you're or whatever like you have this yearning to go do something and you feel like something would fill that void and that something that would fill that void is probably travel or some sort for some people or getting a job or always trying that one thing that they wanted to do whether that's being a fishing guide or a hunting guide or or opening their own business or doing something and instead of doing that they say well maybe i'll just buy this new car right or maybe i'll buy this new whatever boat maybe a boat's what i need and they buy that of course you can always sell it but you lose some money but they get in some situation to where now there's no getting out of it every month you're paying something and like a house like a mortgage you're not just paying the mortgage you're paying the electric bill the water bill the insurance the other things that come with it the sewer the trash the other things that come with it plus now you have a leak in the roof and you got to do all this other stuff they're all pipe bust now you have to fix that and if you're going away for two months well somebody needs to check on the house too so now you're paying the neighbor kid you know 30 bucks a week it all adds up and so i guess the point of it is is that if you have that yearning and you're asking me when do you know it's time to get a mortgage i would say it's time to get a mortgage when when when you are absolutely certain that your days of roaming you're comfortable with what you've done
not that you're never going to do it again but you're comfortable with what you don't you've done as far as that roaming that adventure that going and dropping everything and going you're comfortable with that you don't really need you might want to do that some more but you don't really need it like you need water and food i mean there's a poor period in your life where where if you're like you couldn't think about missing opening day of whatever right there's a period of your life where if you don't fish every single day for the whole summer it's a complete disaster right but then there's another period where it's kind of like i'm not as i mean you hear a lot of people in the south they say well i'm not as mad at them as i used to be right like they don't hunt as hard as they used to they don't fish as hard as they used to they're enjoying their time but it's not this driving passion to just catch everything you can kill everything you can whatever and and you're happy with it and you've done this and you've you've experienced all these things there may be other things that you want to experience but now it's time to move on to the next chapter of your life which is raising a family or getting married or starting a career or something to where you are satisfied with where you are in your life and where you are in your life is you want to become ingrained in this community and you know what if you don't feel like that then rent like if if you feel like i feel like i'm going to enjoy this job and i want to i'm going to really give it everything i have but i don't know that i want to live in this particular town for the rest of my life rent no don't don't buy because you need to keep a house for about six years before in my opinion six years before you make any kind of a profit on it and don't get any kind of tax problems by selling it so i mean you can buy a car and sell it if you buy a used car you can probably buy it today and sell it tomorrow for about the same cost if you buy a new car you're going to buy it today sell it tomorrow and you're going to lose about what i don't know what what do you lose dad thirty percent forty dollars yeah as soon as you drive it off the lot brand new car brand new drift boat brand new skiff brand new whatever you're going to lose some value on it so i don't know just be careful uh i don't know if we answered your question right or not but i think when you know you know uh but just things um shiny things usually don't fill the void of of that's the tip what you're looking for fix this is this is uh from one of my buddies that i've known for about 30 years uh he always drove the finest new cars that he could drive in fact when the hummer first came out he he got him a big hummer but he he lived on a golf course in the middle of middle middle of tennessee and he had a house and a subdivision a very nice house and he was out cutting his grass one day and his neighbor was out there with him and they started talking and he said you know i know about how much money you make and i know it's about the same amount of money that i make but it seems like you just do so much better than i'm doing he said what's your secret and he said don i'll tell you he said is one wife and used cars that's a pretty good piece of advice right there
i used cars and don't get a divorce right exactly
well this has been fun and i want to thank you boys for putting up with me uh it's not easy to babysit for an old fart but i've tried not to get in your way and i did make a few good casts i didn't get tangled up too bad in the in the weeds or the trees and i didn't get didn't put too many wind knots in the well you know you do have to get it close to the bank to get it in the tree well i was quite you also have to cast to get wind notes yeah hey you know as you as you get older and and you didn't just enjoy driving he's not as mad at him as he used to be it's just like what we were saying exactly enjoy just floating down the river talking to your grandkids exactly i think you got one bite and goes i'm done
i'm done well that's uh that's a good place to be i mean there you are there you go that that right there in my opinion that's what happiness is you're happy floating down the river or you're happy catching a fish you catch a fish and you say i'm done like whatever i'm i'm happy i'm i'm doing what i want to do i'm floating down this river and you can take that and you can you can apply that to anything in in life like that's where you want to be you want to be in that place to where you don't feel like you have to catch every fish in the river at some point in your life you don't feel like you have to fish every day because you've done it and you're happy with it and you're happy where you are and you're happy with with where you are in life and what you've done and doing more of it is awesome but doing less of it is is okay too right right dad what do you think is uh if you were to define happiness what would you say well i'd just say that uh i'm there right now
i have a great wife i have a three outstanding children and eight outstanding grandkids and and that's a
something that i feel very rewarded in and very proud of that and and very blessed that uh up till now we've had a good ride and we're just gonna do everything we can to keep it on the right track well i'd ask you this as a closer that's that's a really awesome place to be in your life and i think that everyone aspires to be there and i think that the the common belief is that you know when i'm 82 and i've got eight grandchildren and i've got three children i've got a great wife and i just sold my house i'm about to exit my business and things life's good life's good right now how does life how how does a young person at 23 24 how does a young person or somebody my age 52 how do we get to that point i mean obviously i can't have eight grandchildren right now and i'm not to that point but that doesn't mean i can't be happy right so how does somebody that hasn't accomplished all of those things and is on the journey towards accomplishing all of those things how does that person reach the same level of happiness and fulfillment that you have well i think first of all you've got to have a plan you need to project where you'd like to be short-term term longer term and work toward that plan and know that there's a period of time when a day maybe you only have to work a half a day but that day may be 36 hours long and you may have to just keep gutting it and you know you're sacrificing a few things in order for the rewarded for the long term short-term gratification is wonderful but it is short-term so you've got to continue to plan and work and and and not have an and understand that you can't have everything now and when you get to be 82 you still may not be able to have everything but it doesn't necessarily mean that you need everything so you kind of have to become at peace with yourself and where you want to be good advice boys you got anything to add oh hating your math a few words today
sounds great good advice good advice all right well this has been awesome to uh to have um three generations um on a new form of media i told granddad we were gonna do a podcast he didn't know what that was where he could find it um how make sure you send it to me when when uh when when it's done um no i'm just kidding he knows what podcasts are he listens to them all the time um but anyway this has been awesome man thanks for thanks for doing it i really appreciate it and uh let's go let's go check out those dinosaur bones great thanks so much again all right until next week see ya