By the mid-1950's the Nation was still feeling the victory of WWII won in the Pacific. Everyone "knew someone" who fought. Gun knowledge was great. Folks were settling down, forgetting the atrocities of war, raising families, and gathering prosperity from private work. Racial tensions were on the rise. McCarthy was chasing Communists in America, which peaked in '54. Russia became the new "Bad Guy" to beat the U.S. war drum against and in '62, the Cuban Missile Crisis confirmed the great new threat.
White tailed deer populations, previously decimated by harsh winters, market-hunting, clearing for cotton fields, and control of fire in forests across N. America, were growing in number as a result of the 1937 Pittman-Robertson Federal Aid in Wildlife Restoration Act and the Nation's focus in the 1940's on the War in Europe and the Pacific. The 20+year period through the 1950's enabled live trapped and transplanted deer across the East and Mid-Western U.S. to explode in numbers.
Regulated deer hunting became the anxiously awaited, sleep depriving, adrenaline pumping, school closing, season opening synonymous with Thanksgiving. War surplus, grit, technology, and the human-animal instinct advanced the sales of guns, ammo, and merchandise to hunt deer. Grandfathers, Fathers, and Son's cement relationships every November at the Lodge Pole. The Nation took stock in its natural and renewable resources.
As our politicians sent us to Korea and Vietnam, into wars neither heralded nor waged to win, the National view "back home", exploited by a complicit Media, was insurrection, and almost communist, which blackened the face of politics and the Nation by advancing racism in Welfare and generational handouts, continuing to this day. We have yet to learn, and seemingly do not want to learn, that no one can be made responsible or empowered with dignity by giving them money for nothing.
