I've always believed that Sept. 2 is a great day for a birthday. It often falls on Labor Day weekend, and that marks the start of two of my favorite seasons in Arkansas--hunting season and football season.
Growing up, Labor Day weekend at our house meant dove hunts, attending football games (and playing in them when I was in high school) and catching part of Jerry Lewis' telethon on television. My mother would ask what I wanted for my birthday dinner. Being a lover of wild game and wanting to enjoy the fruits of our first hunt, my request usually consisted of dove breasts, rice, biscuits and gravy. She always made a large chocolate sheet cake covered with pecans for dessert.
Though temperatures were still hot, the start of the dove and football seasons signaled that fall was coming. For decades, these events on a Labor Day weekend have been a part of the rhythm of my life.
If dove season opened on the Saturday morning of Labor Day weekend, we would be in the field on Saturday morning, Saturday afternoon, Sunday afternoon (Sunday morning was reserved for the First Baptist Church of Arkadelphia), Monday morning and Monday afternoon. My father loved to hunt, and he was a tremendous shot. He had been raised in Saline County in a poor family during the Great Depression, and being able to shoot well often meant the difference between a supper with meat on the table and one with only biscuits and gravy.
The Labor Day morning hunt with my father's dear friend from college, O.J. "Buddy" Harris, and his two sons, Cliff and Tommy, was a family tradition. Tommy and Cliff Harris would go on to be pretty good football players as Ouachita Tiger, Arkansas Razorback and Dallas Cowboy fans can attest.
My father loved telling the story of cleaning more than 100 doves one Labor Day and giving them to a local grocery store owner. The grocer enjoyed eating doves, and he also enjoyed drinking whiskey. A week later, my father asked him: "How were those doves?" The grocer answered: "Never give me another dove, Red. I was so sick for two days that I couldn't even get out of bed. Either I got some bad doves or some bad whiskey. I want to think it was the doves."
Writing for Gun Dogs Online, Michael DiLullo explained the importance of dove hunting in our region of the country: "Dove hunting in the South represents the beginning of fall and another hunting season, the start of the harvest, a chance to be afield again and to renew old acquaintances. The return of the migratory mourning doves each fall draws hunters of all ages to the crop fields. The dove fields of the South are special places, where the stories and the learning process are as important as the hunting itself. For many Southern youngsters, the dove field will be their formal introduction into hunting and the shooting sports. It is also the beginning of their kinship with the outdoors, the reverence of nature that lives in all true outdoorsmen. These lessons will be the foundations of lifelong ethics, values and traditions."
Jonathan Miles of Field & Stream wrote: "More than the reappearance of school buses on the roads, it's the dove opener that signals summer's passing in the Deep South, which is perhaps why dove shoots--big, communal events with dozens of hunters scattered throughout a field--have so long been paired with celebrations, barbecues, grand revels. In Northern climes, the hunting of mourning doves--which some consider songbirds--is a controversy-scarred topic. In the South, however, dove hunting is a venerable tradition, older than bourbon and as beloved as college football. Dove hunting offers challenging pass-shooting, it's true, but here it's about much more than that: Kids, wives, dogs, camaraderie, post-hunt cocktails, grilled dove breasts and pork barbecue, old customs and the changing of the seasons."
And speaking of college football, what I believe to be the best quote about the sport in this region came from Marino Casem, who once coached at Alcorn State in Mississippi and Southern University in Louisiana. He said: "In the East, college football is a cultural exercise. In the West, it is a tourist attraction. In the Midwest, it is cannibalism. But in the South, football is religion, and Saturday is the holy day."
Saturday is the holy day because it's college football that matters here far more than professional football. As writer Andrew Hall of Bleacher Report explained in a story on the importance of football in the South: "In the North, the continued development of metropolitan areas yielded a slew of professional sports franchises. By the mid 1960s, dozens of pro football teams had popped up in major cities across the Northeast and the Midwest. In the rural Southeast, however, there was a distinct absence of such organizations until the Atlanta Falcons and Miami Dolphins took up posts in 1966. ... Two generations of Americans in the South grew up embracing the game of football, and out of displeasure with the North and geographic proximity, the overwhelming majority flocked to collegiate allegiances rather than to the professional brands offered by the NFL and the AFL."
A daytime speaking engagement in Lake Village (how could I decline after being told that Rhoda Adams' tamales are being served for lunch?) will keep me out of the dove fields on my birthday. But you can bet that I'll be at a college football game tonight.
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Senior Editor Rex Nelson's column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. He's also the author of the Southern Fried blog at rexnelsonsouthernfried.com.
Editorial on 09/02/2017