This 1983 article in NAW's third issue features the author posed with an outstanding 12-pointer from South Texas. At the time, South Texas was just coming into its own as a "fabled land teeming with trophy whitetails." The cover of that same July-August 1983 issue also featured NAW co-founder Steve Vaughn with an equally impressive South Texas trophy.

I don’t remember exactly who called me back in 1981. It may have been Danny Allen or perhaps Dr. Carroll Mann, both of whom were principles in the Wake County Wildlife Club in Raleigh, North Carolina. They had just come up with the idea of a “deer show” and wanted to know if I would join Dr. James Kroll, Fred Bear and a fellow named Dick Idol as a speaker at the first annual “Dixie Deer Classic,” one of the very first such events of its kind.

At the time, I was co-owner/editor of Game & Fish Publications, publishers of several state and regional hunting and fishing magazines, including one in the Carolinas. I was also owner/manager of Burnt Pine Plantation in Middle Georgia. But more than that, I was a deer nut, so I eagerly accepted the invitation, little realizing that doing so would be the first step in the birth of a new magazine that would lead the way in the coming whitetail revolution.

Danny Allen picked me up at the airport, and upon arrival at the show, I found the place electric with excitement and abuzz with talk of whitetails. As I walked around the show, it didn’t take long for my eyes to be opened to just how many like-minded deer nuts were actually out there. I was amazed that so many deer hunters shared my passion for big bucks. Over the next two days, I was immersed in whitetail mania the likes of which I had never experienced. And it didn’t end when the show hours wound down.

A GATHERING OF FANATICS
It was inevitable that by the end of the first day, the “nuttiest” of the deer nuts had found one another and begun to gather together. When the show doors closed, several whitetail addicts, including me, continued our discussions over dinner and libations. Included among that group were George Cooper, Dr. Carroll Mann, Carson Smith, Dr. James C. Kroll, Danny Allen and a new acquaintance I had already decided was the nuttiest of all the deer nuts there — Raleigh native Dick Idol.

Dick was obsessed with big whitetails. True, nearly everybody at our little gathering was a professed big-buck hunter, but our “big” was relative to where we hunted, meaning for us Southerners “nice 8- or 10-pointers.” But Dick’s definition of big was not based on the limits of local perspective — his “big” meant the biggest in the world! And he had just acquired something that changed all of our perspectives of big whitetails — the famous Fred Goodwin Collection of photos and racks of strange, unusual and giant whitetails, the first ever great collection of monster whitetail paraphernalia unlike anything ever before assembled.

Even though Dick had only a small part of the collection at the show, what he had was sufficient to open up a whole new world of giant whitetails for us all . . . and send my mind racing down a path that would eventually lead to the premier deer-only magazine on the continent for the next 25 years, North American Whitetail.

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