One Heck Of A Ride

15 L ooking back on my life, there is no doubt my grandfather planted the seed that led to my love of hunting. However, if I had to credit just one person who influenced my desire to seek adventures around the world, it would be Jimmy Standley, a plumbing contractor from Tucson, Arizona, who introduced Bud Dyer and me to Safari Club International and its awards programs. Bud and I first met Jimmy when we flew to Montana for an elk hunt and he invited us to attend an SCI Arizona Chapter event in Tucson. Before then, I believed someone had to be wealthy beyond belief to hunt on far-off continents. I also had no idea there were so many types of animals that could be hunted. Jimmy introduced us to C.J. McElroy, the founder of Safari Club International, who also had owned a floor-covering business in California before he sold it and moved the club’s world headquarters to Tucson. I attended chapter parties inMac’s trophy room in his home and always came away awestruck. Life-size mounts of polar bears, grizzly bears and black bears, plus a tiger from India, a long- maned lion and a leopard from Africa, and a North American mountain lion guarded the doors. Dozens of life-size mounts of wild sheep and goats were displayed across a rock fireplace that was forty feet wide and nearly twenty feet high. The giant-sized head, ears, trunk, and seven-foot, hundred-pound tusks of an African elephant, along with shoulder mounts of all of the world’s major species of wild oxen, were above dioramas with African antelopes and zebras on the opposite wall. The other two walls had rows of more than David and Dorothy Paulin My First 4 point Buck Mom Grandpa Dad My Introduction Chapter 1 To Be Placed a hundred deer, antelope, goats, and sheep. Scattered over the floor were rugs made from the skins of more lions, tigers and bears. The room was so large that, even with the largest collection of big game trophies I’d ever seen, a party with fifty or sixty people did not make the room seem Author with his first big game animal, a forked-horn Columbia black-tailed deer taken in 1958. Author’s father, David William Paulin patrolled California’s roadways as a motorcycle cop. His mother, Dorothy Franklin Paulin, was a registered nurse.