WALLACE CLAYPOOL WILD ACRES PANORAMIC PHOTOGRAPH LIMITED EDITION

Image depicted due to me enlarging it for this post is fuzzy. The actual image is of better quality. The caption at lower right states: WILD ACRES   WEINER ARKANSAS  1955 W. H. CLAYPOOL

Those interviewed for the history and this photograph, all now deceased: GEORGE PURVIS, PHILLIP CLAYPOOL, NORFLEET TURNER, LYNN AND JERRY PARSONS, AND MAYNARD REECE, WHO VISITED AND DUCK HUNTER TWO DAYS AT WILD ACRES AND ALSO DID AN OIL PAINTING OF WILD ACRES.

Golf was his game in the 1920s. That was until he became interested in ducks. This occurred on his very first duck hunt at Reelfoot Lake in 1925 at the age of 40. The next year, Wallace Claypool was a frequent guess at the famous Hatchie Coon Hunting and Fishing Club, which is still in existence. In 1927 and 1928, he leased the first reservoir ever built in the Grand Prairie, which was built by Art and Verne Tindall, located six miles southeast of Stuttgart. In 1929, he purchased one-half interest in a new club, Stuttgart Hunting Club, which is still striving and is located in the Bayou Meto area; the other half belonged to Roger Crowe and Roy McCollum, both of Stuttgart. Due to the Great Depression, he sold his interest to the other two in 1933. He returned closer to Memphis to hunt ducks the next year, purchasing land adjacent to the famous Wapanocca Outing Club near Turrell, now a NWR.

Claypool was invited to Weiner, Arkansas, Poinsett County, to hunt with Ed Priestly in 1940, who was a member of the Mallard Pond Hunting Club, which was loaded with mallards, and he had a great time. He asked Priestly to find some land that was for sale so he could farm, build a reservoir, and duck hunt. Priestly consulted with Ernest Hogue, then secretary of Drainage District No. 3 in Poinsett County. Flanked by the L’Anguille River, Claypool acquired 5,000 acres in 1941 by forfeiture from the state due to unpaid taxes, by Quitclaim Deeds from two Drainage Districts, and from two different individuals. He immediately built a 1,350-acre reservoir, 800 of which were under water controlled by levees.

After 1943, the duck population increased steadily, and for the next two years, he hunted very little as ammunition was rationed due to WWII. During the latter part of the war, Navy pilots from Millington, north of Memphis, would fly low over Wild Acres, breaking the sound barrier in the wintertime just to see the thousands and thousands of ducks get up.

From 1945 onward until the drought years began in 1959, which lasted through the first half of the 1960s, Wild Acres’ duck population ranged from 250,000 to half a million. It was a spectacle like no other, bewildering wildlife biologists who traveled to Wild Acres to observe.

When ducks returned from feeding in nearby rice fields to Wild Acres and icy-cold weather conditions existed, three lead poisonings occurred: 1947, 1951 and 1953, each event killing thousands of ducks, mostly mallards at Wild Acres. The 1953 poisoning killed an estimated 16,000 ducks, with mallards making up 70% of the kill.

In 1954, Tom Mull, educational director for the AFGC, introduced George Purvis, his assistant, to Claypool, who asked if Purvis could shoot still photographs and movies of the ducks. After he agreed, George showed Claypool 400 feet of film and still photographs, which he had produced. Claypool was overwhelmed and thus began an eight-year adventure of filming ducks in their natural habitat.

By 1955, newspapers were proclaiming that Weiner was the “New Duck Capital of the World.” Spectacularly, that was reinforced after Arkansas experienced the miracle of two back-to-back grand passages, which occurred during the 1955-56 and 1956-57 duck seasons, with ducks arriving en masse during the early part of November, especially congregating on Wild Acres and staying for the season. Thus, it is here that NBC’s Dave Garroway’s “Wide Wide World of Sports” aired the greatest spectacle ever telecast on a Sunday, December 23, 1956, to a live audience after a Grand Passage had occurred the first week of November. TV advertisements blared all week: “If you have never seen several hundred thousand ducks at one time, tune in Wide Wide World on December 23. You have a treat coming. If everything goes right, millions of you will see thousands and thousands of ducks flash onto your screen.”

The theme of the show was a birthday and Christmas gift, a shotgun, for a boy who was turning 14 on December 23. The boy wasn’t just any boy. It was Lynn Parsons, son of the legendary Herb Parsons of Somerville, Tennessee, better known as the “The Wizard of Winchester” or “The Showman Shooter,” who was an exhibition shooter for Winchester-Western Arms Co.

When time arrived to telecast at 3:15 p.m., Parsons fired a mortar filled with three blocks of TNT, similar to the ones used by him in exhibition shooting. High in the air, the TNT exploded, and 300,000 ducks, in seconds, exploded into the air, while shotguns blasts can be heard in the distance being fired from the boats, which were also being used to stir up the ducks. For eight minutes, ducks literally obscured the sky and so were TV screens across the country.

Considered the father and superstar of our space program and nicknamed “Rocket Man,” Wernher von Braun hunted December 28, 1959 at Wild Acres. His shooting was described as being “uncanny,” knocking down his limit of four greenheads with his first four shots from his 12-gauge Browning automatic. Back at the clubhouse, not long after finishing an early lunch, word came by telephone that von Braun’s mother had died in a Munich, Germany hospital that early Monday morning after an operation the preceding day.

He allowed only six people to hunt regularly at Wild Acres: Frank Vestal, outdoors writer for the Memphis Commercial Appeal, Ernest Hogue, the mayor of Weiner, and four wealthy Memphians, Bayard Boyle Sr., Snowden Boyle Sr., S. Toof Brown, and Norfleet Turner.

On June 15, 1966, Claypool and Miss Sallie, his second wife, sold Wild Acres to the four, and the two continued to live at Wild Acres. Seven years later, Wallace Claypool died at the ripe old age of 87. When Miss Sallie died, Rip, her Golden retriever, was given to Norfleet Turner.

Wild Acres was one of the wonders of America during the 1950s, as no place else could ducks be seen and heard in such profusion. To go into the timber before daybreak, listen to the chatter of great rafts of ducks on the water, watch them as they soared gracefully in the sky with whistling wings, and see the morning sun bring out the brilliant colors of their heads, necks, and wings–that was living. The images and videos of those spectacular years memorialized the end of an epoch–the last mass gatherings of ducks in America.

CERTIFICATE OF Authenticity: During the 1955 waterfowling season after a Grand Passage had occurred the first week of November, Weiner was declared the “New Duck Capital of the World.” At the request of Sports Illustrated, Claypool took this panoramic image of an estimated 350,000 ducks, with George Purvis submitting a cropped version for its December 26, 1955 issue. It is the only panoramic image of Wild Acres that was ever taken.

Ten panoramic prints were made in early January 1956 with the caption having been added to document that Claypool was the creator. One of the ten was given to Frank Vestal, who had it framed by Oakley’s Picture Frame Company in Memphis in 1960. In 40 years of collecting, I have only seen one other of the ten and that was when his two sons and my friends, Lynn and Jerry, showed me around their father’s Herb Parson’s home in Somerville, Tennessee. The den was remarkable with shotguns, rifles, taxidermic specimens, especially waterfowl that covered the walls and hung from the ceiling, along with lots of awards, trophies, and trap shooting coats covered with winning patches.

Vestal’s framed photo ended up years before his death with Memphis sporting memorabilia collector Harry Warner. Upon Warner’s death, it went to another collector who then sold it to me in 1990. From it, fifty prints were made, and this is ONE OF FIFTY   

Size of Print: 12 x 24

PRICE $50 PLUS S&H, MAILED IN A 13 1/4 X 3 1/4 TUBE, WILL NEED TO BE UNFURLED AND FRAMED, IF DESIRED. 

 

CONTACT: WAYNE CAPOOTH AT wcapooth@gmail.com