True Old-timers Test
Back 50/60 years ago or more there wasn't much out there in the way of learning to call turkeys. I remember going turkey hunting in the Fall with some uncles. We never got a turkey and as I look back, I believe it was more or less a way to get out of the house and away from the women.
So, years ago you had options on how you learned to call turkeys.
# 1 Back in the day you had somebody who knew how to call turkeys and would take the time to teach you on how to call turkeys properly.
# 2 You went in the woods listened to turkeys and tried to mimic their sounds. It didn't take long before you alienated yourself from every member in your household, dogs and cats included. I guess for some it was like listening to fingernails on a chalkboard!
# 3 In most cases if you were trying to use a diaphragm call you sounded like a blind bucktooth beaver with a lisp and soon gave up trying to master a mouth call.
# 4 You bought a 45 RMP instruction record and taught yourself.
Who remembers listening to a Smith's Turkey Calling 45 RPM Instruction Record?
I bet if some look hard enough you still have one packed away somewhere.
Do tell.
We were in the #2 category, and am thankful I grew up in that era. I can honestly say that anything calling wise, I learned with on the job training. And most of the people that would call around camp back then, and there wasn't many, didn't sound like what I heard from turkeys. Same holds true today.
Whew, guess I escaped the Old timers classification. I learned listening to cassette tapes and turkeys.
I'm that old, but no one in my immediate family turkey hunted. So I'm a self taught turkey hunter who didn't start hunting turks until 1990. By then there were commercial calls and instructional VHS tapes.
Sent from my moto z4 using Tapatalk
I'm going to have to say a little of all 4 of them. I cut my teeth first on a couple of homemade tube calls made from stuff cans and homemade gourd call with a cane striker. After these calls, i moved up to a homemade turtle shell with a piece of old roofing slate glued into the shell and corncob cedar striker... I still have the old stuff can's and turtle shell and i still have the homemade cane striker for the gourd.. had to carry the gourd call in a piece of PVC pipe to keep from breaking it... I listen mostly to Ben Lee records and tapes... One of my all time favorites was Ben telling about crossing the fence and the wire made a squealing sound and the gobbler / gobbled from the wire squealing, he could tell some stories....
Grey I think my first slate call was a Maxwell House coffee lid. I used an old roofing slate glued to the lid which I punched holes in for better sound
Quote from: Turkeybutt on May 19, 2022, 11:16:16 AM
Grey I think my first slate call was a Maxwell House coffee lid. I used an old roofing slate glued to the lid which I punched holes in for better sound
Agree back in the early days we had to make most of our calls.. we didn't have these retail stores carry calls and back in those early years most small Sporting Good Stores didn't carry anything related to calls etc... You could find a few homemade duck calls ...
I started out reading everything I could find on turkeys and how to hunt them. Could not call worth a darn. Got me a Lynch box and a couple mouth calls and I believe a Dick Kirby cassette tape. I met an older fella one day ay the archery range. We hit it off and he took me under his wing. But besides that I winged it myself. I would stop in diners and coffee shop trying to meet hunters with more experience and sometimes it payed off with tidbits of info. I worked a bird one morning unable to close the deal. Back in them days if you met a turkey hunter you would recognize him again if you came across him. That`s what happened that day on my way out. I told him the story and 15 minutes later he killed that bird. Congrats to him.
Took me 5 years to kill my first gobbler. Still trying and it never gets old. Good luck and God speed to all of you.
My father-in-law got me started & it took off from there, learned as I went along from the birds & a few hunters I came across along the way. Mike
HS Strut VHS tapes for me, and mimicking real hens. Called in a couple birds my first season, but it took me another season to finish the job. Learned the hard way that they can see even the slightest movements.
Roger Latham 33 1/3 Instructional Record. Truly a little Turkey hunting history from my teenage years.
Well, I don't quite fit into the 50/60 year category...only 46! Started spring 1976. But there wasn't much available back then. So I guess I'd be a modified #2 category. Bought a Lynch 101 box and a Lynch slate. Went into the woods, found some turkeys and listened and learned.
Definitely a combination of 1,2 & 4. It was the mid 70's when I was old enough to start hunting both deer and turkeys with my dad and my uncle. Unfortunately, they worked alot and we only got out a couple times for turkeys in both spring and fall seasons.
After a couple years with limited success, I bought a Roger Latham box call, a Ben Lee single reed diaphragm call and a Ben Lee 45 record to learn how to call. Plus, I was fortunate to live in an area with an abundance of turkeys and places to hunt, so I spent alot of time in the woods listening, watching and learning. Of course calling is only a small part of what it takes to be successful, but back then we fall turkey hunted alot, which I think helped speed up the learning curve for spring gobbler sucess.
This is an interesting question because I can't for the life of me remember how I initially learned to run a box call. I know that was the first call I used for sure. I know I had a tape of duck call sounds that I used to get better at that. I guess someone showed me how to run the box. One thing's for sure, it wasn't from the internet :camohat:
Quote from: Turkeybutt on May 19, 2022, 09:52:32 AM
True Old-timers Test
# 1 Back in the day you had somebody who knew how to call turkeys and would take the time to teach you on how to call turkeys properly.
I learned on my own by listening to my pet ''wild' turkeys
# 3 In most cases if you were trying to use a diaphragm call you sounded like a blind bucktooth beaver with a lisp and soon gave up trying to master a mouth call.
I used my natural voice to imitate my pet turkeys and that was my call my first 17 years of hunting
# 4 You bought a 45 RMP instruction record and taught yourself.
I did have a 45 RPM but I thought mine was from Ben Lee
Started in 1978 or 1979.
Back then, I only knew 2 or 3 guys who hunted turkeys. We didn't have any turkeys around our area. Had to go to the mountains. We'd drive close 100 miles out around Penn State Univ area to hunt.
My very first calls were Smith 2 and 3 reed diaphragms........which, after some practice, I still wasn't very good. Listened to a Ben Lee cassette that my brother's buddy had.
Couple years later, turkeys had moved into our area. I made a tube call from a 35mm film canister, a piece of rubber surgical glove and some black electrician's tape. Killed my first bird with that call.
Yoder back then you couldn't buy turkey calls anywhere so we did what we had to do and made it work.
If you were like me you were always experimenting, trying to find something ya thought sounded good and would call a turkey in. Case in point you made a tube call out of a film canister and it worked! Congratulations on killing your first turkey way back when with that homemade tube call. Hope you still have it.
Or cut river cane. My Dad always made ours when we got to camp the night before. After the weekend hunt we tossed them and he made new ones the following weekend.
Self-taught in college.
Grew up actively bird hunting, and shooting a bird on the ground was antithetical to everything I knew about bird hunting. Bought a cassette tape and a VCR video about turkey hunting and calling.
First call was a Quaker Boy Grand Ol' Master... Guy at the sporting goods store said that was the best one.
Soon got an H.S. Strut DD mouth call, and found out why they called these things "tongue ticklers." Initially, I could not understand how anyone could overcome the discomfort of using these calls... But being a duck hunter and understanding air displacement I rapidly became extremely proficient at making very realistic sounds out of this call... Realistic if I were calling in seals that is.
I soon graduated to the H.S. Strut Raspy Old Hen... Bought a multi-pack of H.S. Strut calls that came with a call tote (that I still use some 32 years later), but that Raspy Old Hen was my favorite.
Almost old timer,
Pretty much self taught, I started in the 80's listened to a cassette tape on calling. It could have been Lohman, don't remember. I patterned my gun on a pie plate at 25 paces with copper plated lead. First mouth call was a Quaker Boy and I was horrible at it, still am. We kept is simple back then. :)
Sometimes ya sit back, look something over a little bit, maybe scratch your head, adjust this, adapt that then it hits you.
Keep it simple!
Many scoldings , lessons etc from the porch of a man named Mr . Ken Morgon , along with my grandpa who was a turkey killin machine . Other then that , trial / Error . Most hunters back then wouldn't tell you anything.
My God how things have changed !!!
But, Kenneth would tell you a lot and when you started to listen, your kill ratio would go up. I miss him dearly.
This is my 59 Turkey season. My mentor taught me how to make diaphrams out of aluminum and dental dam. Then we would meet once or more a week and he taught me how to use what I made. They were crude but W Va gobblers would come to us. I listened to as many records and cassette tapes I could ... I still have them.
Dental dam!
Wow I remember using that as well.
Just got a few sheets from my dentist two or three months ago!
It was that or I was going to go buy some condoms.
Quote from: guesswho on May 20, 2022, 10:11:13 AM
Or cut river cane. My Dad always made ours when we got to camp the night before. After the weekend hunt we tossed them and he made new ones the following weekend.
Now that is very neat.
Started in 77-78. Leroy Braungart 33 records for instruction.
Years ago myself and a friend had a slate or two, store bought. One hunt we were crossing a ditch and ran across some slate so we would pick pieces up and try them, after doing this for 10-15 walking down the ditch we had some responses. We were thinking.......... What? We had been looking for turkey on this fall hunt all day in this large timber. Turned out to be a heck of a hunt, we got our birds, both toms.
Kept those pieces around for a few years an a few birds until they were no good.
I recall some instructions on a Ben Lee tape concerning busting up a flock in the fall and then calling them back together in order to then shoot one. One mid-morning during the fall season some 40+ years ago, my buddy and I were driving down a gravel road and had a flock run across in front of us. We slammed on the brakes and bailed out of the truck, chasing them about 100 yards into the woods only to have them stop and look at us. Neither of us had thought to grab a shotgun as we were just following the tape's instructions of busting up the flock. We returned to the truck, got our shotguns, and waited for the flock to try to reassemble which they did all around us. Needless-to-say, our inexperience left us empty-handed.
Yeah, I have a collection of those old turkey hunting recordings and videos from "way back when" stored away in some dusty location in the man cave.
I started "trying" to learn to spring gobbler hunt in my early teens back around 1965, as I recall. The fact is that the tools and knowledge that were available back then are not in the same universe as what is available now. I can vaguely remember going to a couple of "spring gobbler hunting seminars" back then that were presented by some of the so-called "experts" of that time. (I qualify that statement by stating that, out here in the west, the term "expert" was pretty loosely defined ;D )
Simply put, those "experts", and the calling and tactics they promoted as being the "end all" in turkey hunting, would get laughed out of the room in this day and age. There are few hunting strategies, calls, and calling tactics that they promoted back then that I personally see in use today by consistently successful turkey hunters. That is not to say that those "old timers" don't deserve the reverence that we bestow upon them. They most certainly do, as they were the pioneers of our passion, but the knowledge of spring gobbler hunting and the tools available for such was, in reality, pretty rudimentary compared to that in today's turkey hunting world.
No disrespect intended to those fellows, but I look at them like I do when comparing professional athletes from that time with those of today. When push comes to shove, there is actually no comparison to be made, and I say this knowing full well that to many here on OG, I fit firmly into that "old-timey dude" category. ;D :D
Listened to a podcast this year with and old fella, I forget who the guest was, maybe Fox Haas. He said the reason all the old timers said yelp 3 times and sit for an hour was because all the calls were so crappy back then if you were able to get out 3 good yelps you didn't dare mess it up by trying again for a long while.
Real Turkeys Cassettes from Mr. Williams, were a staple around here when they came out. Before that it was "Real Turkeys" in the woods, both Spring and Fall. Big Cypress Swamp and Fisheating Creek were where myself and several of my Kin and close friends learned to call up and kill Turkeys. Back then, around those old Men, if the turkey you killed was not called down the barrel of your 410 shotgun, to within 30 steps of the tree you were sittin against, without having to crawl, sneak, creep, or any other horsesh#t tactic, they did not want to here about it. Those of us alive feel the same about that to this very day. ;)