6/18/2023 0 Comments Fred bear lights out packageHe had an old camera with a gooseneck lens, his signature safari-style hat and red flannel coat, and a determination to not only prove his products, but prove the sport of archery as a whole.īecause of his determination, Fred Bear was able to convince Michigan to open their first-ever archery season in 1937. He began to film his hunts to show that hunters could be successful in the woods with a bow and arrow. He’s been famously quoted as quipping, “I not only had to make a product, but I had to make a market for it, too.” Bear had to get the word out about bow hunting. In order to help Bear Archery get off the ground, Mr. In the early days of Bear Archery, he sold products to archers at shoots and sports shows, advertised in at local markets and sold to hardware stores. They may be considered crude compared to today's archery equipment, but really these old bows are works of artistry and ingenuity. These bows were all hand built from a single piece of wood, usually Osage Orange, and used handmade Irish linen as the bowstring. He hired Nels Grumley, a bowyer now hailed as one of the greatest of all time, to help him design and build bows, all still under the Bear Products name. He patented the archery glove in 1937, and demand for his archery products steadily grew. He began designing and developing leather shooting gloves, arm guards, and finger tabs to sell at competitions and local shoots. Bear’s began developing innovative products using scraps of leather and the sewing machines in his office to help him in tournaments and in the field. Bear had developed an obsession, one that consumed his mind and began to consume his business. Bear's mind was beginning to focus on crafting and selling archery gear. Mr. Though he worked hard to keep his new advertising business profitable, Mr. Their main clients were automobile manufacturers. Together they pooled $1,200 together to buy sewing machines and the equipment necessary to begin Bear Products, a silk screen and print advertising business in Detroit, Michigan. Bear worked burned to the ground, effectively rendering his coworker Charles Piper and him unemployed. In 1929, the Great Depression had begun and the building in which Mr. Bear to take his bow to the woods, though, and he killed his first deer with his bow in 1935. Bear focusing primarily on target archery in the beginning. Bear later became friends by a chance encounter and the two were among the first handful of archers in the United States, Mr. Art Young, the producer and hunter in the film, and Mr. Of course, at the time, 1927, what we now know as traditional archery was just simply archery. Bear had grown up trapping and hunting, but his first experience with archery began at age 25 after he saw the first bow hunting film ever produced, Alaskan Adventures, at the local picture show. Fred Bear, the man dubbed as “The Gentleman Woodsman” and “the Papa Bear of the Great Outdoors,” almost single-handedly brought about the renaissance of modern bowhunting.
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