Sunday alcohol sales high on Oxford agenda
Mayor speaks out on Square, garage, tennis, transit

By Buddy Bynum
The Oxford Enterprise Executive Editor

Oxford Mayor George “Pat” Patterson remains emphatic in his opposition to unrestricted sales of alcohol on Sundays, but the issue is nontheless coming to a public hearing on Sept. 2.

“I don’t think the majority of this town wants to have unrestricted bar service on Sundays,” said Patterson, whose first business was a liquor store he opened in 1978. “I think it’s nice to have one day of piece and quiet.”

In an interview with The Oxford Enterprise, Patterson said the last time the Sunday alcohol sales issue came before the Board of Aldermen it went down in defeat, six opposed and only one in favor. But that was before any real research had been done into the pros and cons of the issue. Since then, Patterson has appointed a special committee to explore barriers – legal, commercial, public safety — and options other than unrestricted sales. That committee has scheduled a public hearing for Sept. 2 at 5:30 p.m. in the Municipal Courtroom at City Hall.

Oxford Alcohol Committee Chairman Peyton Self said his group is “coming up with some creative ideas” that will be made known soon, and that comments from the public will be welcome at the public hearing.

“I see my job and the committee’s job as trying to figure out alternative ways of dealing with this,” Self said. “We hope to educate ourselves, then the board of aldermen and mayor, and the public on the reality of Sunday alcohol sales, whether it would be wild and crazy or sedate. People fear it would look like Saturday night” on the Square.

Within a few weeks after the public hearing, Self said he expects the committee will have specific recommendations to present to the mayor and aldermen. New city ordinances could be proposed that could cover bars and restaurants not only on the Square, but also anywhere within the city limits.

Meanwhile, a section of the city’s Web site that encouraged residents to post comments on the issue — comments Self told Patterson were running about 10-to-1 in favor of Sunday sales — was apparently pulled without explanation on Thursday.

The site had been up for about a week. Jason Plunk, owner of Taylor’s Pub and a strong advocate for Sunday alcohol sales, said his Facebook page – citizens for 7 day sales – would continue to collect comments and present them to the mayor and aldermen.

Plunk has also questioned the process itself. “How can the people the mayor put in charge of this task force be fair when he’s so clearly against it?” Plunk said.
He said opening up another 52 business days a year means not only more sales for bar and restaurant owners and more tax revenue for the city, but also more money in a tight economy for waitresses, bartenders, cooks, cabs and other vendors.

“It opens up another day for people to come have lunch then go to a movie,” Plunk said. “There’s no way to know what additional revenue this town would see unless we do this. But, no one’s going to make any more by not doing it.”

On other subjects:
The Square
Patterson said he opposes converting the Square into “pedestrian-only” space, but would favor making it a more “pedestrian-friendly” area by building a nearby parking garage; the city is in discussions about doing that on property behind the University Club.

“I don’t think making the Square pedestrian-only is a viable idea, partly because of our traffic flow issues,” he said, noting that North Lamar and South Lamar – which run through the middle of the Square – are downtown Oxford’s only major north-south arteries. “But you can take some aspects and make it more pedestrian-friendly in conjunction with building a parking garage or maybe two. I think that could be done, but it’s a long-term project.”

He said plans have progressed to the point that a $5 million, 300-space garage is being considered.

“We are in discussions about building a parking garage on property located behind the University Club,” Patterson said. Financing, partnerships, access and other issues are being examined.

He said of four options explored, a garage behind the University Club is the best with more space, flat land to build on and perhaps synergies with other agencies.
Tennis complex

Patterson has officially notified Lafayette County supervisors that the city is willing to issue up to $3 million in bonds for construction of new tennis courts, if the county is willing to pay 50 percent of the cost and expenses.

In an Aug. 6 letter to supervisors president Lloyd Oliphant, Patterson proposed that any private sponsorship money raised for the project could be split 50/50, after 20 percent is withheld by the Oxford Park Commission for upkeep and maintenance.

Patterson said he does not support including bonds for new tennis courts in an upcoming $30 million school bond issue for Oxford schools. Oliphant had raised that possibility last week.

OUT system
The Oxford University Transit system is now moving about 1,000 riders a day, mostly students, and Patterson said this city-university partnership is working well.

Students ride free of charge and other passengers pay $1. With the opening of a South Lot near the intersection of Highway 6 and Old Taylor Road, where students and other riders can park their cars and catch the bus, Patterson said he expects ridership to increase and buses to run on 10-minute intervals during peak class periods.

Teaching an old dog new tricks

Gershon looks to reinvent Ole Miss law school

By Jesse Wright
The Oxford Enterprise

At his last job, Richard Gershon built a law program from the ground up. Now, as Dean of the University of Mississippi School of Law, Gershon is in charge of one of the oldest state-supported law programs in the nation, but one that doesn’t even break the American Bar Association’s Top 100 list.

Instead of having to invent a law program, Gershon must reinvent, and that’s fine by him.

“The challenge and opportunities fit within what I want to do,” he said. And what he aims to do is, “be entrepreneurial.” Gershon believes the school already has most of what it needs to improve its ABA rank, the school just needs to marshal its resources better.

“The school is underrated – there’s no question about that,” he said. “The programs we offer here, the national centers we have here and the quality of our faculty are such that it’s amazing we’re not ranked in the top 100 law schools in the country.”

To help break the top 100 list, Gershon intends to make more money and resources available for professors to travel, to present and to do research, and write more. Just last week six faculty presented in Florida at the Southeastern Association of Law Schools, and Gershon said he hopes to promote more of that.

In addition to better visibility, Gershon said he wants to expand the school’s focus and look beyond incoming law students.

“The way I think we’ll grow is not through the JD (juris doctor, or law degree) program, but through the graduate programs,” he said. Appealing to working lawyers who need a few classes instead of a whole curriculum is a relatively new concept for law schools, but Gershon said it’s a good way to increase visibility and increase school revenue. He should know; he’s done it before.

“I had an opportunity to teach a class at the Stetson College of Law. I was skeptical at first, but it was great,” he said. The course was in elder law and he taught it over the Internet, using cyberspace instead of class space. Gershon’s course attracted working lawyers from across the country and that’s good for the school, he believes.

“Now all these lawyers from all over the country have an interest in the Stetson law school,” he said. “That’s something I think we can do here.”

In the spring the new law school building – named for Ole Miss Chancellor Emeritus Robert C. Khayat – will be ready for classes and the current building will be given over to undergraduate studies. Although Gershon understands that a few folks might be sad to see the move, he says the new law building comes with high tech resources, just the sort of tools needed to improve the program.

All that said, he is quick to add that newer and better resources are not the best or only solution to improving the law school.

“I like to think this school provides students with private school attention at public school cost,” he said. At Charleston, the law school he helped create, a semester of tuition cost $30,000 and by the end of the program, students were saddled with about $100,000 – a hefty debt in any economy, not to mention a recessionary economy.

The University of Mississippi program is considerably cheaper and students can enjoy smaller class size, but Gershon thinks there’s still more he can do to add value to a University of Mississippi law degree.

“The alumni need to be brought back in and we need to work hard to get their involvement with the school,” he said.

What he has in mind is a mentor program, where professionals come in and give real world experience to law students. Years ago law practices did this sort of thing all the time – new hires would usually be paired with wizened old pros so they could learn the in’s and out’s of a law firm – but Gershon said this doesn’t really happen anymore and the burden is falling now on law schools.

“It’s important for practicing lawyers and judges to have an opportunity to mentor young people in the profession,” he said. “This is important because law practices don’t have time to do that anymore.”

All told his plans will take time to implement – years, perhaps. Still, he says he’d rather do this than build it all from scratch.

“I definitely feel like that was fun,” he said of his experience at Charleston. “But I wouldn’t want to do another start up law school because I don’t think I’d have the same passion as I had for that one. But of course I do have passion for this law school.

Afflicted with chronic pain, Mansel builds new kind of medical practice
From physician to patient, and back again

By Robin Street
Special to The Oxford Enterprise

Dr. Keith Mansel knows too much about pain.

“I have learned a lot about chronic illness and pain,” he said. “They can turn your life upside down.”

For 18 years, Mansel, 57, taught and practiced medicine. Both patients and physicians regarded him as exemplary.

But constant pain from a condition called spinal stenosis forced Mansel to make the heartbreaking decision to retire.

“I had to quit practice in 2003 because of the inability to stand for more than a few minutes and what eventually became a series of operations and dealing with pain,” Mansel said.

Now he is putting the lessons he has learned as a patient to use as a medical navigator, advisor and educator. He will not treat patients, but will help them find the right doctor or treatment, and know the right questions to ask.

“I have had this idea of a patient guide or advisor for several years,” Mansel said.

“In practice I was always frustrated by the often time-pressured visit that leaves both patient and physician unhappy. As a patient I realized that as soon as I left the doctor's office there was always something I forgot to ask or did not understand well.”

Mansel grew up in Oxford. He graduated from the Mayo Clinic School of Medicine, then taught at the University of Mississippi Medical Center. He returned to Oxford to practice pulmonary medicine in 1992.

In 2001, he herniated a disc. An MRI showed the disc was only part of his problem.

He had spinal stenosis, which causes excruciating pain in the legs, hips and buttocks when standing, sitting or walking.

“Stenosis is the medical term for narrowing,” Mansel said. “Spinal stenosis is a narrowing of the spinal canal predominantly by arthritic bone spurs that impinge on the spinal cord and the nerve roots that flow from it.”

His symptoms grew worse, despite multiple surgeries including two spinal fusions, in which the arthritic bone is removed, and the spine stabilized with rods and screws.

His wife remembers the sadness of his decision to retire. “There was a lot of grieving over the loss of something he had spent his whole life trying to prepare for,” Darri Mansel said.

Not only did Mansel grieve; so did his patients and colleagues.

Area physicians greatly respected Mansel, said Dr. John Webb, an Oxford gastroenterologist. “That was certainly a big loss to our medical community when he was not able to practice,” Webb said.

Mansel treated Kaye Bryant’s late husband, Buford, after doctors in Memphis twice failed to diagnose him.

“When (Buford) developed pneumonia, Keith met us at the emergency room and did some blood work and a chest X-ray and in one hour diagnosed him with multiple myeloma,” Bryant said. “I would rate him as the best diagnostician I know.”

After his retirement, that caring led Mansel to help found the Medical Ministries Clinic for people without health insurance. That work resulted in his being named Oxford’s citizen of the year in 2009.

An anonymous nomination for the award said, “Dr. Keith Mansel has the rarest of qualities I have ever witnessed. He is an absolutely brilliant physician, like none I have ever known. Along with his medical expertise, he has the kindest manner when dealing with each and every patient, from the wealthiest to the poorest.”

In 2008, Mansel’s growing pain forced him to give up working with the clinic, but, finally, a third spinal fusion last summer brought some relief.

“I gradually began to improve and along with physical and emotional therapy, change in meds, exercise and prayer, I have reached a place that I have not been in many years,” Keith Mansel said.

Today, Mansel spends most of his day in a recliner because sitting up straight and standing remain painful. But he has progressed to walking one mile.

His improvement motivated him to get involved with medicine again. He realized he could help people medically without actually being their physician, as he helped attorney Jack Dunbar on a medical problem.

“The one thing about Keith … was his personal interest in my problem and his ability to listen,” Dunbar said. “Some doctors don’t have time to listen. Keith did and was able to point me in the right direction.”

Mansel’s own courage and perseverance can also be a lesson to the people he counsels.

“I really am proud of him,” Darri Mansel said. “A lot of people would have given up.

He is not a quitter.”

For more information on Dr. Mansel’s services, visit his website at mdoxford.com.

Dr. Elizabeth Payne: Blazing an historic trail
Tracing lives of courageous women who helped build Mississippi

By Jo Dale Mistilis

The Oxford Enterprise

“Fortune’s children are those whose work and pleasure are the same,” said Winston Churchill. 

Dr. Elizabeth Payne is, indeed, a child of Fortune. Her work – a professor of history at Ole Miss, author and documentary filmmaker – is definitely her pleasure. And people’s histories, which she calls humanity, are her passion. 

She was founding director of the McDonnell-Barksdale Honors College at Ole Miss from l997 to 2003 and played an integral role in securing the resources necessary for making the Mississippi History Project a reality.    

“Martha Swain and I gave our project the name while we were doing research for our book, “Mississippi Women/Their Histories, Their Lives,” Payne says. “Through Martha, I met Jan Hawks with Women’s Studies, who was with us in the beginning and, sadly, died the next year. Marjorie Julian Spruill worked on the book, too.” 

In 2002 Payne left the Honors College and joined the University’s history department.

A year later the fascinating collection of stories, paying tribute to the endurance and accomplishments of many Mississippi women whose lives are examples of great courage, was published. 

The Mississippi book was a model for authors who later published “Tennessee Women/Their Lives and Times.”

Payne grew up in Nettleton and graduated from the former Mississippi State College for Women. Strongly influenced by her family’s Methodist faith, she went to Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University, thinking she wanted to be a minister like her great-grandfather, a Methodist preacher and circuit rider.

“It was a wonderful experience,” she says. “‘The History of Liturgy’ opened my eyes and for eighteen years I went to the Methodist church and the Episcopal church.
Now I am Episcopal.” 

She later earned a Ph.D. at the University of Illinois at Chicago. 

At Ole Miss Payne worked with her co-authors at the University Museum to produce a documentary about women’s lives in the l930s, covering all socio-economic segments and races. The documentary has been sent out to all high school teachers of American History and American Studies. 

“At the start, the response was slow,” she remembers, “but we started convincing women to come with their friends and help us with a breakthrough. I had read Anthony Walton’s book, “A Mississippi History,” which took place near New Albany.

A young African American boy from Chicago, attending Brown University, he made friends with a white girl from Mississippi who sparked interest in the book.” 

In Union County Mrs. Macy Visor Ferrell, age 9l, gave Payne valuable information to begin the documentary, and for two months they strung out telephone conversations because she didn’t want Payne to come to her house. 

“Before I attended the first service at Zion Missionary Baptist Church to see her,” Payne says, “I was questioned by the church board. After they understood my project, one of the deacons said, ‘Well, we think this is a good idea and we’ll help you.’ He got up during the service and said, ‘She’s doing God’s work.’ So Miss Macy invited me to her house, talked freely and was cordial; we’re still friends.” 

“She told me that I’d have to come on Wednesday or Friday because she does ironing three days a week for the community,” Payne adds. 

Betty Rutherford Wilson, at age 115, was documented as the oldest living person with an intact mind. “When we interviewed her,” Payne said, “we asked her who owned her family as slaves.” Her granddaughter’s answer “turned out to be my husband’s great grandfather, so I was taken aback and offered to stop the interview. Miss Betty reminded me that neither my husband nor I had owned their family, and she wanted to continue the interview.” 

Her grandson, gracious and accepting, said, ‘I’d like to meet your husband. When can we have a homecoming?’ Unfortunately, our homecoming was at Miss Betty’s funeral several weeks later.” 

Currently, Payne is working on a book she sees as a tribute to Anne Firor Scott, who was a founder of the Women’s History project. 

In her spare time Payne enjoys cooking, having lunch with women friends, doing things at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church and gardening. She is looking forward to a book signing at Square Books in the near future, and plans to teach for several more years.

‘Divine Chaos’ — perfect name for show

Liz Rathbone’s bold brushstrokes ‘bring canvas alive’

By Kristie Warino
Special to The Oxford Enterprise

Clinton, La., native Liz Rathbone discovered her artistic ability in high school while painting signs as a cheerleader for football games.  

“Art is important. No matter if it is art or literature, it matters most when people can relate and they don’t feel so alone,” Rathbone said. “Art is important because it connects people in that way.” 

Rathbone, 23, describes herself as “spontaneous, messy and chaotic. All the artwork is in the moment with no mistakes,” she said. She creates her artwork from her Oxford home, and on Tuesday will have her first gallery show, “Divine Chaos,” which will be held at the Powerhouse Arts and Cultural Center from 7 p.m.-9 p.m.
“This past year she went back to the basics and challenged herself to paint abstractly,” her colleague Sloan Tate said. “She knew if she could create successful abstract paintings that it would help her perfect her figurative work.

“Divine Chaos shows her journey through this process, and her post figurative works definitely show an abstract influence,” Tate said. “Divine Chaos exhibits her unique use of bold and colorful bravura brush strokes, which brings the canvas alive. Her work is indeed chaotic, but Liz has a talent for transforming her chaos into something divine.” 

For Rathbone, it’s another step in an artistic journey that also includes interests in sculpting and photography.

She arrived in Oxford in 2005 and enrolled in art school at the University of Mississippi, where she is pursuing a bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts. She took a drawing class in London during the summer of 2006 and fell in love with the work of Oskar Kokoschka. Kokoschka greatly influenced Rathbone’s artwork when she started developing expressionistic paintings. These works strive to show the emotional aspects instead of just the physical representation of a figure. 

With no background or family history of art, Rathbone said she just fell into it. 
“Liz has always been successful with her bold colorful brushstrokes and paint drippings, but after her studies she paints with a more in-depth texture,” Tate said. 

“Whenever I don’t create art it makes me frustrated and anxious,” Rathbone said. “I am always thinking of what I can do next, but at the same time it releases a ton of energy. If I don’t, it will build up and I get irritable.” 

She experiments with different techniques, like leaving her artwork out in the rain to see the different affects nature will have on them. She sees her show as a broad theme that captures what is unexpected and evokes emotion.

Divine Chaos will feature Rathbone’s paintings along with her video art as a backdrop. There will be live music by David Woolsworth, a local Oxford Musician and refreshments sponsored by Frank And Marlee’s.

In her video art, Rathbone experimented with different layering techniques and color clips to create everyday life and depict memories. 

This is Rathbone’s first art show other than the appearance of a few pieces at the Arts for Africa show held by the Hope for Africa organization earlier this year. 

Rathbone’s future plans including going to New York to seek inspiration in the center of the art world and to continue creating and showing her art. 

MorganWhite Group: College friends build successful business
Filling business insurance needs with employee benefit plans

By Mark H. Stowers
The Oxford Enterprise

Providing medical health insurance for businesses was the last thing on David White’s mind back in the mid 1980s. But that was before his good friend/college roommate/fraternity brother/politician Johnny Morgan got ahold of him.

The business partners had separate heavy equipment businesses (think dump trucks, caterpillars and the like) that were dwindling due to tax law and ownership changes.  

“I came unwillingly along,” White said with a laugh. “One day I was trying to decide what I wanted to do and Johnny gave me a call and said, ‘Let’s get into the insurance business.’” 

Becoming an insurance agent didn’t rank very high – or at all – on White’s “things I wanted to do list” but Morgan had seen an opportunity he wasn’t about to let his good buddy miss – selling employee benefit plans to businesses. 

“I said ‘no’ and Johnny was sick as a dog that day – he had terrible, terrible flu – and I said, ‘I’m about to do this other thing and sign papers on Monday’ and as sick as he was he got me into an airplane and we flew to Montgomery (Alabama).” 

White was quickly brought up to speed on this new business opportunity. 

“I guess they did a good sales pitch on me because when we got back we formed Morgan White Insurance,” White said. “That was in 1986 and that was the beginning of it.” 

With headquarters in Jackson, the company – MorganWhiteGroup – has grown to include its Oxford office and a Miami location that deals with international insurance products; overall, about 140 people are employed by the firm launched by the college buddies. 

“We started in Workers’ Comp when it was so hard to get in the early ’80s,” Morgan explained. “We evolved into health insurance. And we represent every A rated health insurance in the state as well as all the supplemental products like dental, vision and cancer.” 

Morgan enjoys calling on clients and explains that White is good at devising products to fit customer needs in a demanding market. 

“He’s very ingenious in coming up with products where there is a gap in the market,” Morgan said. “And I like doing the marketing for it and selling it.” 

The duo’s clients include some state of Mississippi agencies, including the Department of Transportation that has 6,000 employees, and the state’s Department of Mental Health. 

“We do state agencies, private businesses as well as the public sector,” Morgan explained.  

And they now reach into the international market by providing health care plans in South America, where socialized medicine reigns. 

“It’s nationalized healthcare like Obama care,” Morgan said. “Consequently, what’s happened is all the clinics there – and they are little more than a veterinary clinic because they have so many poor people – the doctors want people who have private health care insurance or they won’t see you.” 

White had international experience during his heavy equipment selling days that opened his eyes to working opportunities in international insurance. 

The company has moved online, www.morganwhite.com, and offers electronic enrollment for its clients, which opens the business to more clients worldwide. 

When he is away from the desk, Morgan, a Lafayette County supervisor, is an avid snow boarder and scuba diver, and enjoys his spacious pontoon boat he launches at Sardis. When not busy at work, White enjoys their condo in Florida and spending as much time as possible with his grandkids. 

With a growing business, White explained his concept of what makes it successful. 

“We don’t try to tell people that ‘this is what you should do,’” White said. “We try to listen to what they need. And then see if we can build a program around their needs and their budget to make that happen. And I believe we have been very successful over the last 22 years doing that.”

New programs greet incoming students
Dining operations have also been enhanced

By Mark H. Stowers
The Oxford Enterprise

From convocation ceremonies to welcome incoming freshmen into the academic and Ole Miss family to recognizing scholar programs to green initiatives, students and staff alike will be busy with new challenges as the new school year begins. 

The Center for Manufacturing Excellence (CME) will have its first class of students this fall. Director James Vaughn will lead this first ever for Mississippi and unique to the U.S. program. Several cross-disciplinary academic programs will help educate students on lean manufacturing systems, and the center will also be a resource for manufacturing-related research. Check out www.olemiss.edu/cme to learn more about the program and all it has to offer. 

A new Boar’s Head Deli in Crosby Hall, open from 10 a.m.-midnight, will join the new Subway in the Student Union as and it will be open from 10:00 a.m. to midnight. The entire food court in the Union has been remodeled.  

The university’s second residential college will be open for students. Made possible by a gift from the Luckyday Foundation, the goal of the college is to create a nurturing, learning, living environment. Freshman and sophomore students will find their own library, dining hall, computer center and fitness center in each residence hall. 

Helping students, staff and faculty understand the importance of green living, several new initiatives will be instituted this fall. The Office of Sustainability has added many programs encouraging biking and walking on campus, recycling promotions across campus and during football game weekends, disseminating public information about energy consumption and many more. Abandoned and donated bicycles will find a new home in the “Bike Give Back” program that refurbishes the two-wheelers and gives them to students or sells them at a low cost.

You can find more information on these programs at www.olemiss.edu/green. 

In the Meek School of Journalism and New Media, a new program is being established to train journalists in Integrated Marketing and Communication. Dean Will Norton said the “course has not been approved by the board of trustees yet, but we are offering the courses within the journalism major.” 

Professor Jim Lumpp will be teaching the intro class, which will include all of the areas of commercial communication – marketing, advertising, publicity, promotions and public relations. More than 50 students have signed up for the course. 

“It’s a big growth area and requires knowledge in new media,” Norton said. “We have courses in multiple platform journalism now. Every print kid has to know how to do video and every student in broadcasting has to know how to do print.”  

The close to 3,000 incoming freshmen – the largest class in the school’s history – will be welcomed will a “virtual red carpet,” according to Dewey Knight, associate director of financial aid, who says several events are scheduled for the historic class. 

“The Freshman Year Experience course helps them make the transition successfully from high school and home to the university,” Knight said. “One is the Class of 2014 Fall Kickoff on Sunday (Aug. 22) where all the freshmen will come to Grove for a picnic and pep rally type event.” Coach Houston Nutt, cheerleaders and the band will be on hand for the festive occasion.

Then, there will be a Freshman Convocation on Thursday at 7 p.m. at Tad Smith Coliseum.  

“There will be academic regalia,” Knight said. “This it to mark the official entry in their collegiate career. It’s a bookend to commencement.” 

This is the first freshman convocation since 2005, but with a record class, the university is focusing efforts on raising its impressive 81 percent retention rate. Students will receive a unique copper coin, which has Class of 2014 on one side and the Ole Miss logo on the other. 

“The event welcomes students to the University academic community and the Ole Miss family,” Knight said.   

Elsewhere on the the campus, the School of Pharmacy has improved its curriculum to conform to the latest standards in pharmacy education and to maintain the school’s leadership in the field. The new standards include more clinical experience and better problem-solving skills for graduates.

Always aiming for the perfect group – For the love of shooting
Local expert shares his experiences in the shooting sports

By Joe Meek
The Oxford Enterprise Managing Editor

Local shooting enthusiast Bill Byrd shared some of his memories of a life immersed in the art and science of firearms and the shooting sports with the Enterprise. 

When discussing the role of shooting in his life, as he puts it, “I was just born this way; I can’t help it.” Some of Byrd’s earliest memories are of reading about and studying hunting and shooting.

“My comic books were things like ‘Frank Buck’ and ‘Jungle Jim’ and things on that order when everyone else went with ‘Superman’ or the ‘Green Lantern,’” he says.

Before long, he discovered hunting magazines and was given a subscription to “Sports Afield” by a relative.  That was all it took to create a hunting/shooting addict.

He would snap up every magazine and catalogue he could find about guns and hunting and read them cover-to-cover. When he was just barely old enough to write, he began sending requests for catalogues to all the rifle and shotgun manufacturers he could locate. He hung on to all those precious publications and today has boxes filled with some 400 to 500 catalogues going back to the 1950s. He marvels at the fact that even these catalogues have become collectors’ items and are frequently sold for big bucks at modern gun shows.

Byrd was fortunate in that his parents recognized his interest in guns and hunting and allowed him to begin shooting early in life. He fondly remembers his very first gun, an old Iver Johnson, single shot .410 shotgun. Once he had proved that he could handle firearms safely, he parents allowed him to have a .22 caliber rifle, and by the age of 10, he was doing odd jobs so he could save money to buy his own guns.

His interests soon expanded into a desire to learn more. He found that he wanted to know more about guns and ballistics than any of his friends or even adult acquaintances. His natural attraction to firearms and shooting led to an interest in the competitive shooting sports. Byrd tells the Enterprise that were it not for the fact that most high-level shooting competitions require a shooter to specialize in a single rifle or shotgun, he might have chosen to pursue a career in the competitive field. He, however, was more eclectic in his interests and wanted to learn about all types of firearms, meaning that shooting would be for him a hobby and a sport, not a working career.

This is not to say that Byrd didn’t like to compete. He spent years competing in serious match shooting events around the country and learning all he could about ballistics, bullets, calibers and ammunition.  Among other things, he learned how to reload his own cartridges and shotgun shells.

“Today, you can buy extremely good factory ammo, but it is horribly  expensive.

Twenty years ago, the only way to have bullets with much better accuracy was to load your own using premium bullets,” he says.

He finds reloading ammunition a particularly intriguing hobby, saying, “I enjoy reloading ammo; I enjoy trying different recipes for each cartridge. Some of the old cartridges – .401 Winchester, .351 Winchester – are a lot of fun to experiment with and play with to see what kinds of performance you can achieve.”

Byrd is also interested in sharing his experiences and recommendations with other shooters. When asked about getting youngsters involved in shooting, he advises parents to do their research.

“There’s a wealth of knowledge out there about all of this, but younger shooters need to start with a .22 rifle under good supervision. Really they just need to learn how to shoot. Get them a 20-gauge shotgun, a good .22 rifle, probably bolt action, put a good scope on it, and when they have a little experience, get them a good high quality .22 pistol. If they find they love shooting as I did, they’ll work their way up from there.”

His years of practice have also given Byrd a wealth of experience which would help even seasoned marksmen. He has literally years of experiences with target shooting at incredibly accurate levels. He remembers competitions where shooters tried to fire a sequence of shots so accurately that they would all pass through the same hole in the target – and this was at ranges from 100-1,000 yards. 

Shots like this would obviously require extreme precision. Byrd tells us that to have any hope of such accuracy, a shooter must use a bench rest and spend countless hours firing countless rounds of ammunition so as to learn about the exact characteristics of his gun.

“Using a bench rest to shoot is what you do to determine the accuracy of your gun. You don’t get meaningful practice for field conditions from a bench rest, but this does let you know how accurate your gun is,” he says.

“Shooting offhand and from improvised rests like over a tree limb or a portable bipod lets you know how accurate you are, but you have to know how accurate your gun is and you have to have the right load, which means you have to shoot off of something like a sandbag, get it sighted in precisely, and find what load, whether it be a factory load or hand load, shoots best. You might have to buy a box of five or six different brands and types of bullets for your new rifle and shoot each one of them over sand bags to find the one that’s most accurate.”

Striving for perfection, that group of shots that all pass through the same hole in the target, may be an impossible quest, but for Bill Byrd, just the excitement and sense of accomplishment in getting closer to that ideal have provided a lifetime of enjoyment.

As we approach the coming hunting season, Byrd’s advice and recommendations should be heeded by all shooters. As he puts it, “Trying to use a gun that’s not properly sighted-in means you’re headed for disaster.”

So, by all means, take the time to learn about firearms and how to shoot them safely and accurately, and maybe one day you’ll be able to shoot that elusive perfect group.