Ghosts of Issue Past

LISTEN: (7 min, 42 sec)

 

WE’VE BEEN TRIPPING THROUGH our memories lately as we count down the issues left before next May and the 40th anniversary of Texas Fish & Game. And with the holidays almost upon us, we’ve become even more nostalgic.  

Forty years is enough of a lifetime that many of our memories include people who have passed on. The masthead, or staff list, of Fish & Game has contained way north of a hundred names over the magazine’s long history. Some of those names were prominent members of our team who are no longer on the list because they are no longer among the living.

These Ghosts of Issues Past make up a Hall of Fame of outdoor and publishing professionals. Some of them were there on day one, some joined along the way. They all made important contributions that helped make TF&G what it is today.

Dan Alvey

We mentioned Alvey in our most recent column, recalling our days under the leadership of Bill Bray, the bombastic founding owner of Fish & Game. Alvey was the president and marketing brains behind the publishing company that spawned this magazine.

He had a gift for envisioning successful enterprises and an infectious (if somewhat exasperating) personality that, more often than not, won over even his most skeptical doubters.

Alvey was instrumental in launching Fish & Game, and guided its efforts to build our statewide audience. One of his more interesting achievements was using the Texas Open Records Act to obtain the list of all registered boat owners in the state. We used that list in our first successful direct mail promotion.

Alvey left the publishing company just a couple of years after Fish & Game’s launch, and spent the next three decades building his own successful media empire.

He died in December 2018 after an accident on a charter fishing boat he operated with his son in Alaska. 

Russell Tinsley

Russ Tinsley was an outdoor icon long before TF&G got its first taste of ink on paper. He was the outdoors editor for the Austin American Statesman and a regular contributor to just about every national fishing and hunting magazine in America.

We were a bit shocked and a little star-struck when founding editor Marvin Spivey casually announced that Tinsley was coming on board, not just as a writer, but as a regular columnist and as Fish & Game’s “Editor-at-Large.” From the very first issue—on which Russell graced the cover—he not only wrote for TF&G, he helped mold the editorial philosophy that continues to this very issue.

Russell kept writing for TF&G even after he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. He passed away in 2004.

Bob Hood

Like Tinsley, Bob Hood was already a household name in Texas, and beyond, before joining our ranks during our first year of publication.

He was the longstanding outdoors editor of the Fort Worth Star Telegram, a peer and contemporary of Tinsley and other legendary writers at a time when the state’s major newspapers still dominated the information universe, and the outdoors were covered with entire broadsheet sections. 

Bob wrote countless feature articles and hundreds of columns as TF&G’s Hunting Editor. He passed away in early 2014 after a battle with cancer.

Larry Bozka

Bozka’s history with us dated back to before Fish & Game. He almost hired on as outdoors editor of The Highlander, the newspaper in Marble Falls where TF&G began as a quarterly insert. Right before Larry started the job, Marvin Spivey, then editor of Texas Fisherman in Houston, called him and pitched the idea of a job switch.

Marvin, sick of the Houston rat race, wanted a slower pace in God’s Country. Larry, young and ambitious, couldn’t resist Marvin’s proposition.

He went on to edit the state’s then-largest outdoor magazine, and Marvin took the outdoors job at The Highlander, which of course, led us all to Fish & Game.

A couple of years after we merged with Fisherman, and moved the magazine to Houston, Marvin returned to the Hill Country, and Bozka became our editor.

Larry stayed four years and, as he won a slew of editorial awards, he also inaugurated our book division. He died in early 2023, another of our cadre to fall to cancer.   

Don Zaidle

Zaidle began writing freelance stories for us in the late nineties, and quickly worked his way up the Fish & Game editorial ladder, eventually replacing Bozka as editor in 2001. He served in that position until his untimely death in 2013.

Don was a word smith who held his own with the best of them. He was also a one-of-a-kind personality who cultivated an air of mystery and intrigue. We worked with Don for 15 years, yet we never really knew his full background and were constantly surprised every time an occasion presented the opportunity for a new revelation.

Such was the case when one of many in a long line of problems arose with the website we were forever striving to perfect.

“Well, I used to do a lot of coding,” he said, out of the blue, and proceeded to take over the role as webmaster.

We don’t think Don had any advanced formal education, but he was highly intelligent and articulate. He radiated knowledge and could converse with authority on virtually any subject. At the same time, he affected a gruff, backwoods manner that contrasted starkly with his otherwise scholarly approach and interests.

He fought fires on his personal time, and always seemed eager to court danger. He kept pitching—and we kept rejecting—one story idea where he wanted to put on a bullet proof vest and let someone fire different caliber rounds into it.

That, ladies and gentlemen, was Don Zaidle.      

Cal Gonzales

Eduardo Calixto Gonzales was another contributor who came on board as a freelancer and quickly became a masthead regular. He started out as our Hotspot reporter for the Lower Laguna Madre, the bay he’d fished his entire life, growing up near Port Isabel. 

Cal’s primary career was teaching. His experience as an educator, his degree in English from UT, and a masters’ degree in creative writing, plus his lifelong passion for fishing, all combined to make him the ideal candidate to take the reins as Fish & Game’s Saltwater Editor in 2007.

Cal wrote more than 300 columns and features for our pages, the last appearing a month after his death in late 2020.

Cal was a gifted writer who required little structural editing. He did require a weapons grade spell checker, as his zest for getting the words into each sentence often left a wake of hilariously creative  misspellings. But the end product was always a tribute to his craft.  

On this long and winding journey, we’ve lived a lot of adventure, both in the fields and streams of Texas and in the office trenches of the modern media business. 

Our adventures have been richer for the people we’ve shared them with, those still around and ready for more adventures, and especially those whose adventures have ended, only to live on in some of our best memories. 

 

E-mail Roy at rneves@fishgame.com and Ardia at aneves@fishgame.com

 

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