I came across this old home video from waaaaay back the other day and decided to put it on my YouTube channel. It's November 7, 1996, I took my son Ben with me that day, he was 14, and we got back early so I decided to do a photo shoot for magazine articles and a book I was writing called Farmland Fur Trapping. We lined them all up on the boardwalk in front of a trailer in the back yard that was my office. At first my son Cody who was 10 at the time grabbed the camera and started filming, then my wife took it as you can tell by how much she was videoing our 1 1/2-year-old son Dawson LOL. My son Sterling would have been 2 months old and he's in a little carrier thing. The video and audio quality is poor but I believe I had 55 coon, 8 mink and a smattering of fox, muskrats and a couple badger.

I really regret we did not bother to get more video of those days.

That's great, Bernie!!

A video to be proud of. Thanks for sharing. Is that your office that caught on fire and you had to rewrite the book?

Yes that trailer burned down on November 8, 2000. I had to rewrite the Numbers Game book and I lost all the photos that were going into the book. Life changing moment for my family and it actually precipitated the move to Minnesota in 2001.

A lot of you have seen this picture!

One more bump

Bernie, please STOP showing these photos of how quickly the years have passed us by!
You big time coon guys were always an amazement to me. I don't want ANY raccoons in my canine sets, and here are folks like you sir, squatting the tires off a small series truck with all the weight!
Good times, good times!

Congratulations on the path you've walked AND SHARED with us.

Blessings!
Mark

Awesome pic Bernie. You and mark kept me motivated in 90s for sure.
Jim

Can it be that 30+ years have since passed Jim?
And we're all still at it.

Are you still glad you moved to Minnesota?

Cool video

I didn't get involved in trapping until my early 20s right around the time of the video, I didn't have any traps but I had a friend who was glad to have me tag along. I read everything trapping I could get my hands on, Bernie your name was on lots of things I read and I dreamed of catching a pile of coon like that. What would be the ballpark worth of that pile of fur in 96?

Kiemke some of the 90s were not very good price years, and some were.

I found these old sheets from late1990s awhile back and for giggles thought I’d post em up. Wished I’d saved his sheets from 1980s but I either didn’t or they got tossed somewhere among all the moves in my lifetime.
I used to save every trapper and predator caller mag and had clipped articles I liked and pasted them on inserts to 3-ring binders. I was pretty organized back then and a student of these guys for sure. I still have a signed copy of Charlie Dobbins land trapping book from nationals when it was in Nebraska that year, and had to be 80s I’m guessing???
Mr. June was a big influence when his stuff started hitting the market. Sorry mark, bought a lot of your lures and baits back then from local shop in Crete. I’d sell for, trade for lure and bait. Had a great symbiotic relationship with this buyer. The bank I still work at, we would close on Veterans Day so a paid bank holiday off for me. I’d skin coon for Rodger at turkey creek on that day, after running traps in morning of course. He paid 50 cents a coon and me and one other guy would see how many we could shuck in a day. I usually didn’t take the cash at end of the day would just go fill up a basket of bait and lure off of his shelf and we would trade services for goods. Loved that day but man oh man I was a younger dude and in better shape for sure. Was no skinning machines in his shop just a heavy chain gambrel and younger backs and arms to pull hides.

Anyway, rambling here. Sorry. Bernie’s pic got me all fired up. Here or some of my meager sales to roger back then. I sold about every week for some reason, I think because I needed another tank of gas or two to keep going and this was how I cash flowed my trapline, ha ha.





I did find this other one but it was from 2002. Top few lines were all put up rats.

Absolutely. It was the right thing to do for my family at the time. At times I miss Iowa, especially the people and the culture of small town rural Iowa, but I was migrating into fishing at the time and that really took off when I got to the Brainerd area. I could never have continued to make a living trapping in Iowa.

That’s a priceless video to the family for sure! The boys will treasure that for many more years. Thanks for sharing.

Honestly cannot remember. Most days I just went to bed while my wife took the coon to the fur Buyer. I got up way before daylight. If you notice at the end of the video I was taking a bunch of mink out of the truck, they were going in the freezer. I would skin and stretch the mink and muskrat after things slowed down. Whatever coon were caught after thanksgiving, I would put up myself as well as things were slowing way down.

I don't have any records of my catches or pay stubs from fur buyers, but by 1996, the coon were not worth anything near what they were in 1979 to 1987 when I was really pushing hard.