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 white-tailed deer, especially the antlers that adorned their heads.

This 2003 photo shows a spunky Fred Goodwin at age 95 with well-known antler collector Phil Osborne and Fred’s best-known trophy whitetail, the “Silver Ridge Buck,” taken in 1949. Phil, who is one of Fred’s biggest admirers, said, “Fred infected me with the antler collecting bug a long time ago. Now I’m hopelessly addicted!” Phil hopes to preserve many of Fred’s artifacts and photos and possibly publish a book about Fred’s amazing life.

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 tradition. Hunting was an enjoyable and much cherished diversion from working “dark to dark” seven days a week, but putting food on the table was always the primary objective.

At nine or 10 years of age (approximately 1919), Fred recalled 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. Deer were judged more by weight in those days. The heavier the buck, the more meat it would provide. Little thought was given to the size of a buck’s antlers (to everyone except young Fred that is!).

The exception, of course, was during one of those rare occasions when a particularly large buck was killed. In the case of an exceptionally large rack, the horns were sometimes hung on the barn for people to see. On very rare occasions, an outlandishly large rack might be taken to the taxidermist to be mounted, but few north woods hunters had the money to do this.

MARCHING TO A DIFFERENT DRUMMER
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 17, he owned a Harley Davidson motorcycle, and he was traveling considerable distances across Maine and into Canada on antler-buying expeditions.

From the earliest times, it was apparent to everyone who knew him that young Fred had been blessed with some unusual gifts. For one thing, he was extremely smart, and he possessed a driving ambition that would eventually take him way beyond his meager circumstances. “I was always scheming,” Fred told me with a mischievous grin on his face when I visited him in 2003.

Hard times had hit this part of the country long before the Great Depression of the later 1920s, and if you were a boy growing up in northern Maine in the post-World War I era, you pretty much lived a life of toil on the farm from a very young age. Chances are you worked in the potato fields or the local factory. If you were really lucky and if you had the grit, you might get a job working in one of the remote lumber camps. No matter what you did, though, you were destined to spend most of your life laboring long hours week in and week out for very little reward.

A NATURAL HORSE TRADER
But young 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, he ran a general store, he trapped, he hunted, he loaned money and he 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.

The elder Goodwin always seemed to have a supply of hard greenbacks when no one else did, and desperate neighbors frequently came to him for loans. Often 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, with the venerable .30-30 probably being the most popular, and they cost about $5 new.

In the fall, local hunters would go out and buy a new lever gun for deer season. Once deer season was over, though, these hunter/farmers had no further use for the gun until the following season. And since cash was a much more important commodity than a deer rifle sitting 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, say $2. Then, the following fall, he’d resell the unredeemed gun to its original owner or to another prospective deer hunter for $5. Young Fred quickly picked up on this money-making business 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.

THE WINCHESTER MAN
In later life, not only did Fred amass a huge collection of Winchesters, but being the frugal New Englander that he was, he also collected spare parts from broken or discarded rifles of all makes. This led to a booming international mail-order business in which Fred eventually sold thousands of Winchester parts to people all over the world. And all of this occurred long before the advent of Internet. Today, at 100 years of age, 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 Winchester rifles. But his fascination for antlers seemed to always take precedent over the Winchesters, even if that Winchester happened to be an old pre-1900 saddle-ring carbine that today could fetch upwards 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.

The old saying “You can’t eat horns” was pounded into Fred’s head by his father over and over again. Once, in a fit of rage, after Fred came home with yet another whitetail rack that he’d purchased, Fred’s father stormed upstairs to Fred’s bedroom and threw his entire antler collection of several dozen racks out the w
indow. Fortunately, deep snow covered the ground and nothing was hurt. Fred sneaked outside after everyone had gone to bed and retrieved his beloved keepsakes.

LOOKING BEYOND MT. KATAHDIN
Fred purchased a Harley Davidson motorcycle when he was 17 and soon he was traveling all over 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. Later he bought a truck. 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 of value in order to add yet another big rack to his collection.

Around the first of December each year, Fred would customarily place a small ad in the Bangor Daily News, as well as several other northern Maine newspapers. He’d also place ads in papers in Quebec and New Brunswick. Since deer season closed around the end of November, Fred figured that the first week in December would be an opportune time to place an ad because he knew that any hunter who had scored on a nice buck might be willing to sell the horns from that buck for a good price.

“I’d get an old Frenchman to help me write the ad in French for the papers up in Quebec,” Fred remembered. “I never had any luck getting any good horns out of Quebec, but I did find some awful good ones in New Brunswick.”

One of Fred’s typical ads might read like this:

Wanted:
Unusual and Large Deer Horns
Write to:
Fred Goodwin, Monarda, Maine
I pay all transportation or come buy in person.

“I’d always get quite a few answers to those ads,” Fred said. “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, 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, but he also collected the stories behind many of the greatest deer ever taken in Maine, and he filed them away in his computer-like memory. Years later, he would share these stories with a brand-new generation of young antler collectors like Phil Osborne. 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.

A FRATERNITY OF HORN MEN
During the last half of the 20th century, Fred became good friends with other prominent antler collectors of the day, including Dr. Charles T. Arnold, who at the time lived in Nashua, New Hampshire. Fred corresponded on a regular basis with antler collecting legends like Widmer Smith of Minnesota and Phil Schlagle of Michigan. This small, close-knit fraternity of “horn men” stayed in close contact by mail and shared information about world-class whitetails 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, including the famed “Silver Ridge Buck” (see the January 1995 issue for that amazing story). In 1936, he and his younger brother Kike started a whitetail guide service that he operated for the next 35 years. Kike, 2 1/2 years Fred’s junior, was his best friend. They were extremely close. Together they trapped muskrats, beavers, weasels, fishers, martins, porcupines and bobcats. They hunted whitetails and bears with a passion. Tragically, Kike died in the late 1940s from colon cancer. It was one the toughest losses Fred ever experienced.

Fred was a gifted artist, and at a young age he developed a passion for photography. From the early 1930s until the late ’60s, he took thousands of high quality black-and-white photos of his hunting, antler collecting, trapping and guiding exploits. After having been seriously injured in two separate motorcycle accidents before World War II, the armed forces would not take him.

So Fred joined the Civilian Conservation Corps and set his sights on going to Alaska to work on the new Alaskan Highway that was being built during the war years. His photographic record of the years spent working on the Alaskan Highway (and hunting wolves for bounties) is probably one of the most complete and incredible photo records of that historic event ever made by anyone.

TWO UNBELIEVABLE COLLECTIONS
By the early 1970s, Fred had accumulated an extensive collection of Winchester lever guns (he also had about 100 early Model 70s), amounting to some 1,200 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. Needless to say, it fetched a hefty price. By the early 1980s, Fred had also accumulated some 1,300 deer racks in his collection. Over 100 of those heads qualified for the B&C record book, and the top 20 included many of the largest heads ever taken in Maine.

Because of advancing age (he was now in his early 70s and never expected to live to be 100), he decided to sell his entire deer head collection to antler collector Dick Idol in 1982. (Today the top 100 heads alone in that collection would be valued at well over 10 times the price that Dick paid for the entire collection, but in the early ’80s the antler craze had not yet gotten into high gear.) Despite pretty much breaking even on the sale of one of the most incredible antler collections ever amassed, a collection that had taken him nearly 60 years to accumulate, Fred never had any regrets.

WHO WOULD HAVE THOUGHT?
Fred Goodwin is one of those rare human beings whose outdoor lives have been extraordinary. Deep down inside, every serious deer hunter and outdoorsman in North America harbors dreams about living the kind of adventurous life he lived. A simple story like this one can’t come close to capturing the full magnitude of this man’s legendary life and exploits. On Jan. 3, 2009, Fred Goodwin was 100 years old!

Here is a recap of some of his lifetime achievements:
• Expert gunsmith, gun trader and gun collector, and one the world’s foremost authorities on Winchester lever guns.
• Professional hunting guide for 40 years.
• Professional trapper (and bounty hunter) for 40 years.
• One of history’s foremost antler collectors for 60 years.
• Gifted artist (former tattoo artist with the circus).
• Gifted photographer who took thousands of incredible black-and-white photos for nearly half a century.
• Exceptional trophy whitetail hunter for 70 years.

Unquestionably, Fred Goodwin is the greatest antler collector who ever lived. He is the last of the great old-time horn men, and those who come behind him have some tough shoes to fill! Happy birthday, Fred!

Next month, in Part 2 of this series, we’ll tell the story about Fred’s hunt for the Silver Ridge Buck and share some reflections about Fred from people who have known him and loved him over the years.