Windham: Thoughts on a legend — a tribute to Dick Turpin | Columnists

He was a very unique outdoorsman — that’s an understatement, but I can’t find the words to describe him any better. He was a game warden, now called conservation officer for most of his professional career. His last 10 years, he was the chief conservation officer for the State of Nebraska in Lincoln.

He loved everything about the outdoors and did it all when it came to hunting with his bow. Turpin loved to hunt turkeys with his bow, a recurve bow, and blunt tipped arrows. As he told me one time, “You try for a head shot. With a blunt you either have an instant kill or a miss and the turkey isn’t hurt one bit.”

I first met Turpin about 30 years ago. It was early in my writing career and I had a number of outdoorsmen tell me I had to meet this guy. The Nebraska Bowhunters Association was planning a jamboree at the Bessey-Davis National Forest near Halsey in the near future, so I decided I’d go up and try to meet him.

I got there about dusk and realized that I did not have a real good fix on where Turpin would be camped. I thought about it for a moment and based on what I had heard about the man, I drove to the highest point I could find and turned off my vehicle. I stood outside and listened. It didn’t take long to hear a camp that had a lot of laughter coming from it. I drove to that camp, walked in and introduced myself. Turpin was in the center of camp and we were friends from that point on. Turpin was truly one of those individuals that never met a person who wasn’t a friend.

Over the years I learned that Turpin had a wealth of outdoor knowledge that he was very willing to pass on. Many people remember him from the TV shorts he did with the Nebraska Game and Parks Commission. The segment was called “Turpin Time” and people loved it. It was a combination of the down home wit of Will Rogers, sound wildlife biology and classic Turpin humor.

If you were around Turpin for any length of time, you knew that he grew up poor — dirt poor. His hunting and fishing was not for sport, it was subsistence hunting, pure and simple. He also learned to make what he needed because there was no extra money at home. In my way of thinking, he was one of the biggest and best scrounges I ever met — and I was amazed by what he could do or make and appreciated that attribute about him. I envied him.

Over the years, I heard countless stories from him about how he made something from junk or scraps he had picked up somewhere. I’ve heard a number of stories from other conservation officers who told me you never casually threw your arm up on the side of the bed of Turpin’s pickup and looked inside. Quite often it was the carcass of some dead critter Turpin has scraped up off the road because he needed the hide, hair or antlers for a project he was working on. I used my collective knowledge of this man to create an introduction for him at various gatherings.

Both Turpin and I were attending a function and he was to a speaker at the event. When I discovered that, I asked the organizers if I could introduce him. I got the green light and began my introduction with a brief history of his growing up poor and having to make due with what he had at hand. The last line of my introduction was, “Dick Turpin is a man who has done for so long, with so little, that he is now qualified to do anything with nothing.”

A few years after that, we both happened to be attending a wildlife conference and Turpin was 10 minutes into his presentation when he spotted me in the audience and stopped his talk. He called me out of the audience to give that introduction for the crowd. As I said, he loved it.

About two weeks before he died I had him on my radio show and that is how I introduced him to the listening audience that morning.

“Good morning everyone and welcome to another edition of the Outdoor Connection. My guest this morning is Dick Turpin, a man who has done for so long with so little that he his now qualified to do anything with nothing,” I began the show. We lost about a minute of air time just laughing.

As I stated before, Dick Turpin was a unique outdoorsman and had a unique take on life. For at least the last 10 years when we met and I’d ask him how he was doing, his response would be, “You know Kid I’m doing OK but I can die at anytime now and you can’t say it was unexpected, because I’m old!” Turpin called everyone “Kid” or hung a “y” on the end of their name — in my case it was Ricky.

Jeff Rawlinson, assistant administrator for the NGPC Communications Team, is a friend and another longtime acquaintance of Dick Turpin, remembers the same thing. “Dick told me the same thing at his 80th birthday party we had for him at La Paloma’s in Lincoln. I don’t think any of us thought that we would ever lose him, but we were wrong. He did die, we didn’t expect it and now there is a great loss.”

I know the feeling, Jeff!

Greg Wagner, NGPC public information officer in Omaha, remembers the time when he and Turpin were trout fishing on Long Pine Creek at the Long Pine State Recreation Area. Turpin completely lost his footing and fell into the cold, spring-fed waters of the creek. In all of his thrashing around, he lost both of his hip waders, which were not cinched to his pants.

Turpin kept yelling: “Keep an eye out for my waders tumbling downstream, Kid. They’ll be the only ones with all kinds of patches on‘em. But don’t stop fishin’, Greggy, I’m good to go in my socks.”

Turpin continued to fish, soaking wet, and just socks on his feet, casting nightcrawlers on his fly rod. “And, guess what? He caught a limit of skillet-sized rainbow trout in no time,” Wagner told me. “He out-fished me with my fancy stuff.” And to finish out the story, Wagner did eventually find Turpin’s waders downstream.

Gone, but it will be a long time before he is forgotten. Dick Turpin. vaya con dios, amigo — te veré en el campamento del otro lado!