# Tom Huggler has a novel idea



## Hamilton Reef (Jan 20, 2000)

Honored outdoor writer has a novel idea

http://www.mlive.com/sports/fljournal/index.ssf?/base/sports-1/1116517813242040.xml

SUNFIELD, THE FLINT JOURNAL FIRST EDITION, Thursday, May 19, 2005 
By David V. Graham, [email protected]  810.766.6306

SUNFIELD - For years now, former Flint-area resident Tom Huggler has been one of the best-known outdoor writers in the United States. 

With any luck at all, Huggler, a modest, soft-spoken man with a ready smile, may soon be known for another kind of writing - as a novelist. 

He has been working on a novel about a real-life Michigan pioneer woman who lived a long life of hardship and sorrow in the Sunfield area, where Huggler now lives with his wife and 3-year-old daughter.

A former president of the Outdoor Writers Association of America and a full-time outdoor writer since 1982, Huggler has written thousands of articles for more than 100 magazines, 20 outdoor books and has been a columnist for Outdoor Life and Great Lakes Angler, North American Fisherman and Hunter, and Chevy Outdoors. 

He is still a columnist for Shooting Sportsman, Michigan Out-of-Doors, Woods and Waters News and The Pointing Dog Journal. 

Field & Stream magazine recently approached him to see if he would be interested in writing a hunting dog column. 

Huggler, 59, grew up on a small farm near Genesee in the 1950s, where he hunted, fished and trapped. He wrote his first outdoor article - a story about trapping - for a national trapping magazine as a 12-year-old boy. 

Five years later, he sold a story about crow hunting to Outdoor Life. He was a high school senior at the time, and the story and its several photos sold for $350. 

After college, he taught English in the Genesee School District and was an assistant high school principal for 13 years. 

He left teaching to become a full-time freelance outdoor writer in 1982 and has been at it ever since. For years, he lived in Otisville, Genesee and Flushing before moving to the Lansing area in the late 1980s. 

He specializes in writing about bird hunting, hunting dogs, Great Lakes fishing and camping. 

His books on hunting for grouse, quail and woodcock were particularly well received by other outdoor writers and won two national awards from OWAA. 

Bird hunting remains his favorite outdoor topic, he says, because he loves watching bird dogs work. He owns three English setters and a German short-hair pointer. 

"I will always be a 7-year-old boy following my dad's English setter, putting up pheasants back in the 1950s," he said. "I will always remember that (experience); when I think about it, I have as clear an image of that as if it happened yesterday." 

Huggler says he particularly likes hunting for woodcock. 

"Everyone has a spirit animal (that they identify with), and mine is the woodcock," he said. "I like them because they are a wanderlust bird. Of all upland gamebirds, they are the only ones that migrate, and I tend to do a lot of migrating myself. 

"They are a bird that is put together all wrong, and they remind me of how I was as a teenager, all gangly, awkward and with little purpose. 

"Yet they are a passionate bird - the male is the first sign of spring. The males show up first on the northern breeding grounds to practice their spiral dance, ever hopeful and optimistic." 

Huggler has won at least 30 awards from OWAA, the Michigan Outdoor Writers Association and the Association of Great Lakes Outdoor Writers. He recently has been nominated for a Lifetime Excellence in Craft award from OWAA. 

Five of his eight bird-hunting, shooting and walleye fishing videos have won national awards. 

This work has been accomplished in large part because he has been willing and able to hunt and fish all over the world, often for weeks at a time. 

He has hunted and fished throughout the United States, Canada (all provinces except Newfoundland) as well as Mexico, Spain, Russia, the Ukraine and Argentina. 

"At one time I figured I was spending about one-quarter of the year on the road," he said. 

Somehow, he finds time to do public relations work for four Showspan outdoor shows each year in Novi, Detroit, Grand Rapids and Lansing. 

Huggler said he decided to cut back on outdoor writing in 1997, when Outdoor Life canceled his regular camping column. 

"I began to think this (cancellation) happened for a reason," he said, referring to a trend in declining payments for freelance outdoor stories. He said the heyday of outdoor writing was in the 1970s and 1980s, when magazines paid well for stories. 

Lately, Huggler has been devoting much of his time to writing a novel about Rachel Barnum, a Michigan pioneer who moved to the Sunfield area from New York in 1839. She married and had four children before her husband died. 

Huggler heard about the woman from a descendant, a local hardware store owner. He told Huggler that family legend has it that she single-handedly traveled to Missouri during the Civil War to recover the body of her oldest son. 

Huggler looked up military records and found that the son, indeed, died from disease, and then found an old family journal that said the mother had recovered her son's body. 

With considerable research, Huggler fills the book with what the woman's journey must have been like. 

For instance, he believes the son probably died from smallpox because he found records that showed his military camp had a severe outbreak the month before he died. 

The book is only about one-quarter finished now, but Huggler said he hopes to finish it this summer. 

"My next goal is to write a novel and be recognized for that," he said.


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