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.

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