Deputy sheriff Joe Kellum turned from the shotgun-side seat of the cruiser and said to me in the back seat, “Fred, you ever been snipe hunting?” This would be the summer of 1961. I was 17 years old and sure, I was naive. But not so naive that I couldn’t understand I was being set up for a practical joke.
No, I replied, quickly trying to size up things. What’s a snipe hunt, I wondered to myself? Where you throw up an object and shoot toward it with your shotgun? No, that’s skeet shooting. “So tell me, what’s this all about” I said, trying to play this out until Kellum and fellow deputy Lonnie Depew, who was driving, might get tired of the game before events took their course and I would, in some manner, be humiliated by the pair of lawmen.
I had myself to blame for getting in this fix. Paul Ray Jones, a tall, raw-boned country fellow, had been sheriff of Hopkins County in Northeast Texas for a few years. I got to know Paul Ray, as he was called, a year earlier when I began covering the sheriff’s office for the Daily News-Telegram on Saturdays during the school year and every day during the summer. He always treated me with much more respect than was due a high school-age cub reporter. He liked seeing his name in the paper, I guess, and I was his conduit to achieving that goal and thereby increasing his odds of reelection.
At any rate, I asked Paul Ray if I could ride with him or his deputies on patrol one weekend night. Sure, he said, and that very night Paul Ray and deputy Kellum took me with them. We stopped for a couple of hours on the eastbound shoulder of Interstate Highway 30, comparing licenses plates of passing cars with the plate numbers of known bootleggers. It would have been exciting if we had made a match, but it didn’t happen. The rest of the time, until about 1 o’clock the next morning, we roamed the back roads of Hopkins County. Hopkins is about 20 by 30 miles in size, with Sulphur Springs, the county seat, in the middle. In any event, nothing more exciting than a domestic argument aroused our attention that evening, but I had fun.
Let’s try this again, I decided. So a week later I was with Kellum and Depew. Hopkins County is criss-crossed by paved Farm-Market roads, known as county roads in other states. In White Oak Bottoms, where the creek by that name nears its confluence with the Sulphur River, Kellum turned off the FM highway onto a dirt road, drove a ways, stopped, and cut off the motor. Then he asked if I’d ever hunted snipe.
Kellum explained that one of us—that would be me—stands on the road to yell and scream, to awaken and scare the snipes, which he described as little furry animals. You’ve never seen one, he said, because they’re shy and only come out at night. Then he and Lonnie would catch them somehow as they scurried down the road, to get away from me.
Okay, I said, consigning myself to my fate, let’s do it. I got out. One of them fished among the shotguns in the trunk and came up with a burlap bag. If I caught a snipe myself, I was told, put it in the bag. Bye Fred, they said, and drove off into the night.
So I stood there in total darkness, occasionally yelling in case Kellum and Depew were in hearing range. I was 95 percent certain there was no such thing as a snipe (there is, it turned out). And for sure, I didn’t hear the pitter-patter of little snipe feet. All I heard was the chorus of crickets. After what seemed an hour, but was probably ten minutes, the deputies drove back, expressing disappointment at the outcome of our little hunt. We’ll have to do it again when there are more snipe out and about, one of them said. It was clear that the lawmen liked me for going along with their gag.
The next Monday, Paul Ray Jones said he’d heard I’d been snipe hunting with his boys. How many did you catch, the sheriff asked? None, but I had fun trying, I lied.
I had participated in a rite of passage among American boys almost 200 years old. There’s even a Wikipedia entry on the topic. Had I been more mature, and possessed some nerve, I could have woven a nice little feature story about my adventure. I can imagine the headline Joe Woosley would have written atop it: SNIPE HUNTING, WITH THE LAW.
But I didn’t, and so Joe didn’t. Why is it, I wonder today, that such experiences as this are wasted on kids too young to know what to do with them?