Start once I'm back to work in just 19 days.

You could use some more room I’d say!

Wow, you've got potential there. At least you found room for that old moose mount! Guy needs a vaulted ceiling or to win the lottery an build a new house...lol

Even my wife would push back on that......

...and she is good with mounts, fans, beards, antlers, fur, and such.

Excessive mounts and such are just dust collectors ovah time..

For me

LOL.....all memories for me.Look at them and think back

100% Bruce, same here. There's a reason I paid the money to get something done up.

… I need to extend my front porch

Once you shoot a hundred or two Savell, ya just throw them away with the hide and innards.

Fred Goodwin who was a legend around here as a boy would go around bugging all the local people for their antlers.He had piles and piles of antlers from those and ones from deer he shot himself.His mother and father would say to him all the time why are you wasting your time doing that.Later on when he was old he sold his collection of antlers for thousands of dollars.

Quote

Outdoor legend Fred Goodwin from Silver Ridge Maine went to be with the Lord on Saturday Nov. 26th, he was 102 and was born in 1909. His birthday was Jan. 3rd and would have been 103 years old. Fred was well know for decades as a gun collector and dealer and repaired Winchesters for thousands of people over the decades, anyone who had a Winchester needing repair In the earlier days knew Fred and his work was as good as it got and he was known across the country as he advertised all over. He was one of the earliest major antler collectors and had collected over 1300 trophy deer racks between the 1920s and early 1980s Including many Boone-Crockett racks and record sets, it was a collection that probably could not be aquired and done to that level In todays times. Fred sold his antler collection In 1982 to Dick Idol. Dick was a founding member of North American Whitetail magazine and the first premier Issue that came off the press In 1983 showed the Flora Campbell buck taken In Maine and for more than 40 years the biggest deer taken by a woman on the cover and was part of Freds collection of trophy antlers. If you have the March 1983 Issue of NAW you will see it on the cover. Many old time trappers and hunters may remember Fred when he and Stan Hawbaker worked together on trapping/hunting lures together and had put out brochures. Fred guided hunters for decades In the wilds of Maine for everything from small game to bear, deer and moose and I know no other man who has taken as many cats as he did in one season back in the day in "the big woods". He has had numerous articles and stories written about him in all the major outdoor magazines over the years and many of you may have the book LEGENDARY WHITETAIL 2 that Larry Huffman and Gordon Whittington had done that highlighted some of the worlds biggest Whitetails Including the FRED GOODWIN "Silver Ridge" BUCK that Fred took back In 1949, with a 225"+ typical frame its one of the largest typical frames ever seen on a whitetail to date and the rack had a 36" spread! He worked with trappers, taxidermists, hunters and fisherman, gun nuts, antler collectors and many many others that have a connection with the outdoors. He was trully what we call a "rare breed", one of a kind....a legend and will be missed and admired by many for generations to come. See you when we bring over the next one Fred -BR

lol....he was a kid when he started.

Another quote about Fred Goodwin

Last of the horn men: stories of the past live on today because of men like Fred Goodwin.

Link/Page Citation
HE WAS BORN in the rugged wilderness of northern Maine within sight of Mt. Katahdin, Maine's highest peak. The year was 1909, the same year the Lincoln penny replaced the Indian-head penny.

By the time young Fred Goodwin was a teenager, he'd developed an insatiable fascination for whitetail deer and the antlers that adorned their heads. Deer were magical, and whenever local hunters discarded the antlers from bucks they had killed, Fred would seek permission to rescue them from the garbage pile and drag them home in the snow. Soon he had a growing collection of deer horns of all sizes and shapes.

For generations, whitetail hunting among the farmers and other residents in the community around Silver Ridge in Aroostook County where Fred grew up was a much anticipated annual event and a cherished tradition. But putting food on the table was always the primary objective. Fred recalls at age nine or ten dragging home in the snow the racks of two big bucks his father and uncle had killed. Fred hung the racks over the door in the kitchen until his mother made him put them in the barn. Fred started collecting discarded racks from deer killed by neighbors. Often people would give him the racks because bucks were judged more by weight in those days. The heavier the buck, the more meat he would provide. Little thought was given to the size of a buck's antlers--by everyone except young Fred.

In the case of an unusually large rack, the horns were sometimes hung on the barn for people to see. On very rare occasions, an exceptionally large rack might be taken to the taxidermist to be mounted, but few north woods hunters had the money to do this. As Fred's meager collection of deer antlers grew, he eventually started trading for larger and more unusual freak racks. By the time he was nineteen or twenty, he was traveling considerable distances across Maine and into Canada on antler-buying expeditions.


Fred's aspirations went way beyond earning hourly wages. Like his father before him, Fred was cut from a different cloth. Fred's father was a Jack-of-all-trades; he farmed, trapped, hunted, loaned money and was a gifted gunsmith who traded guns. In short, he did whatever it took to get ahead, and Fred followed in his footsteps.

In addition to his gunsmith business, Fred's father operated what certainly must have been one of the 20th century's first rural pawn operations. He always seemed to have a supply of hard greenbacks when no one else did, and desperate neighbors often came to him for loans. Usually, he would take guns as collateral, and in those days the weapon of choice across New England was the Winchester lever-action carbine. The lever guns were available in a variety of calibers and cost about $5 new.

In the fall, locals would go out and buy a new lever gun for deer season. Once deer season was over, though, these hunters had no further use for the gun until the following season. Since cash was a much more important commodity than a deer rifle in the closet, they'd go to Fred's father and either sell their guns outright or use them as collateral for loans. Fred's father would gladly buy a slightly used Winchester or loan money on it for a fraction of its value. Then the following fall he'd resell the unredeemed gun to its original owner or to another prospective deer hunter. Young Fred quickly picked up on this money-making tactic. Along the way, he, too, became a gifted gunsmith under his father's tutelage, and he started repairing and collecting Winchesters on his own account. Today at age ninety-nine, Fred Goodwin is probably the world's foremost authority on Winchester lever-action rifles.

Young Fred Goodwin grew up with an incredible passion for whitetail antlers and Winchesters. Antlers always took precedence over Winchesters, even one of the old, pre-1900 saddle-ring carbines that today is fetching upward of $25,000. Soon Fred's small upstairs bedroom in the family's modest, two-story farmhouse was filled to the ceiling with deer racks, many that he had bought with his hard-earned money. His father pounded the old saying "You can't eat horns" into Fred's head. Once, in a fit of rage, after Fred came home with yet another big rack that he had purchased, Fred's father stormed upstairs to Fred's bedroom and threw his entire antler collection of several dozen racks out the window. Fred sneaked outside after everyone had gone to bed and retrieved his beloved keepsakes.


Fred purchased a Harley-Davidson motorcycle when he was in his late teens, and soon he was traveling all over the state of Maine and across the border into Quebec and New Brunswick seeking out and tracking down large and unusual sets of antlers wherever he could find them. No sleuth ever went about his business with more determination or passion. In fact, Sherlock Holmes himself probably could have taken a few pointers from Fred for his tireless detective work and his innovative methods for locating large or unusual antlers. Fred knew every taxidermist in the state, and he frequently ran ads in local papers. When he found a giant rack that he wanted to buy, he would trade guns, furs, bear traps or anything else to add yet another big rack to his collection.

Customarily, around the first of December each year Fred would place a small ad in the Bangor Daily News as well as several other northern Maine newspapers. He'd also place ads in papers up in Quebec and New Brunswick.

"I'd get an old Frenchman to help me write the ad in French for the papers up in Quebec," Fred remembers. "I never had any luck getting any good horns out of Quebec, but I did find some awful good ones in New Brunswick. I'd always get quite a few answers to those ads."

"I'd always try to write back to each one of them. First I would try to find out what the deer head looked like. I'd ask the owner to send me a snapshot if one was available. If it was an especially big deer, it might have been mounted and they'd often have a snapshot of the horns. If they didn't have a snapshot," says Fred, "I asked them to draw me a picture. Then, if the set of horns was big enough or freak enough, I'd keep the letter and the person's address in the glove box in my truck until I could go and look at it. I was on the road all the time back in those days trading with gun traders, trappers, fur buyers, antique shops and all types of people like that. Sometimes I'd be gone for a week at a time."

Not only did Fred collect the heads, he also preserved the stories behind many of these great deer. Had he not done this, many of the stories from record deer taken in Maine in the 1940s, '50s and '60s would have been lost forever. Fred corresponded with all of the top antler collectors of the day, and this small fraternity of "horn men" stayed in close contact and shared information about world-class whitetails all across North America.

Fred also developed a passion for hunting big whitetails. During the 1930s, '40s, '50s and '60s, he killed numerous big-antlered trophy bucks Fred and his brother started a whitetail guide service that he operated for the next thirty-five years. Fred trapped, hunted, collected antlers and traded Winchesters. He also retrieved parts from broken guns and started selling them. This small, home-based business eventually turned into an international mail-order business in which he sold old Winchester parts.

By the early 1970s Fred had accumulated an extensive collection of Winchester lever guns (he also had about 100 Model 70s) amounting to some 2,000 rifles. Many of the Winchester lever guns were rare pre-1900 rifles. By now in his early '60s, he decided to sell that entire collection in 1972 for a large sum. By the early 1980s Fred had also accumulated some 1,300 deer heads. More than 100 of those heads qualified for the B&C record book, and the top twenty included many of the largest heads ever taken in Maine.

Because of advancing age (he was in his early seventies and never expected to live to be ninety-nine), he decided to sell his entire deer head collection to antler collector Dick Idol in 1982 for $25,000. (Today the top 100 heads alone in that collection would be valued at well over ten times that amount.) Despite pretty much breaking even on the sale of the deer head collection that had taken him nearly sixty years to accumulate, he never had any regrets.

Fred Goodwin is one of those rare human beings whose outdoor life has been extraordinary. Deep down inside I think that every serious deer hunter and outdoorsman in North America harbors dreams about living the kind of adventurous life he lived, and a simple story like this one cannot even come close to capturing the full magnitude of this man's legendary exploits.

On January 3, 2009, Fred Goodwin will be 100 years old. During his lifetime he was a gifted artist (in fact, he worked a while in the circus as a tattoo artist), incredible photographer, passionate antler and gun collector, seasoned trapper, bounty hunter, respected whitetail guide and tireless hunter of big bucks.

He is probably the most knowledgeable living authority on Winchester lever guns alive today. Unquestionably, Fred Goodwin is the greatest antler collector who ever lived. Truly, he is the last of the great horn men.

Does that mean you'll be off trapperman then?

Won't be on as much just like every year for 5 days a week while working

Why wouldn't you do it when you had the whole winter off?

It's good thing you're short enough not to have to remember to duck after a hard night at the Honky-tonk.

Keith

No extra money when I'm not working.

Bruce- Thanks for sharing those details of Fred Goodwin. After my Father passed away, I was going through some of his Winchester books and came across a letter from Fred G. to my Father. It was a lengthy letter and quite personal which lead me to assume he and Fred had some history. I remember years before my Fathers passing, him talking about a man he was buying obsolete and hard to find Winchester gun parts from. He probably mentioned Freds name but at the time it meant nothing to me. I do remember him saying the mans inventory of parts was massive. My Father collected, bought, sold or traded anything Winchester and Savage for over 55 years. The last 20 years he focused on Model 88's although for his own hunting needs he favored the Model 100. When he passed in 2005 he passed down 2 complete sets, each caliber in both carbine and rifle, one set to my son and one set to my daughter. They still have them. My son loves the 358's and has harvested a couple of moose with them.