Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Our mission is to take a stand for Christ while hunting from tree stands and enjoying God’s great outdoors. On every adventure, if you look for it, God will teach you something about Himself. That’s what we want to share, a show about awesome hunting and an awesome creator who made it all possible.
Speaker 1 0:00
The following is brought to you by The Stand Outdoors and is sponsored by Steel Pixel Studios, White Tail Heaven Outfitters, Hot Frog Print Media, and Word FM. so Mike has been bugging me to tell the story of the Baker boys and he's finally corralled me into the studio today to talk about it, and it's, it's, it's not the longest story in the world, Mike, but it is my, my hunting story, and my family story, and kind of where I came from, and it really kind of started, Mike, with, with my dad's grandfather, they called him Pap, and he was, he was my dad's grandfather on my great grandfather on my dad's mother's side, and he was a Methodist circuit preacher, and he was the, he was the one that, that kind of knew about hunting. He was one of these, you know, they used to call him. I don't know if you ever heard the expression, he's a dead
Speaker 2 1:26
eye, dead eye shot. Yeah, oh yeah, he could, he could put
Speaker 1 1:30
a bullet in the side into the size of a dime at 100 yards without open sights. Just one of these kind of guys, you know, he would. there's a story. My dad said he was hunting up in the woods in West Virginia, in the middle of nowhere, and it was, it was buck and doe season. And here comes, here comes a herd, and every time they jumped over a log, pow, he'd shoot one, they'd drop. Here comes a doe, jump over the log, pow, he'd shoot one, they drop. Here comes a buck. He jump over that same long pal. He, he leveled like four deer in a matter of 15 minutes, dropped them all. They never.. I mean, this is.. this is.. they never moved. Like,
Speaker 2 2:12
yeah,
Speaker 1 2:12
you know, you and I have shot deer. They've run 100 yards, yeah. You know, and shot them good.
Speaker 2 2:16
Yeah,
Speaker 1 2:17
and he put them down. So, these are the kind of stories he.
Speaker 2 2:20
in the military?
Speaker 1 2:21
No, not in the military. Circuit preacher grew up Pennsylvania and West Virginia areas in different parts of those states, and
Speaker 2 2:30
that's where you grew up in West Virginia.
Speaker 1 2:32
I was born in Bethesda, Maryland, and grew up mostly in my life in Maryland. Okay, in the tri-state area, there we were talking earlier,
Speaker 2 2:40
yeah,
Speaker 1 2:40
Pennsylvania, Maryland, West Virginia. I grew up sort of in the thinnest part of Maryland. When you look at the map that borders West Virginia, Pennsylvania, there on 81 I grew up. That's where I started my radio career, there too.
Speaker 2 2:56
There's some good hunting down in Maryland, really going down there a couple times. Oh my shores, yeah. A
Speaker 1 3:03
lot of mineral down there, a lot of, they call mineral buck, or yeah, river bottom deer.
Speaker 2 3:11
You don't think you think of the fowl hunting rightly, but you don't think of deer hunting so much. But they got some beers, mammoth
Speaker 1 3:18
deer, mammoth, of course. They do a lot of farming out towards the shore and out towards the ocean, and there's a lot of farming, lot of deer, lot of flat lands too, but some wooded areas. Oh yeah, it's unbelievable. So kind of my my dad learned his hunting skills not from his father but from his great some as from his grandfather, and my dad had three other brothers, and they were the Baker boys. Oh, okay. They grew up in Washington, D.C. sort of the suburbs of Washington, D.C. And back in the day, back in the late 40s, early 50s, when you went to D.C. there were still fields and woods in suburban Washington, DC.
Speaker 2 4:01
It
Speaker 1 4:01
wasn't what it is now. It's all basically gone as far as woods and fields, and so there have been oftentimes my dad's grandfather would come wake him up in the morning on a Saturday morning and say, "Come on, Baker boy, let's go get some squirrels, and so Dad would grab the 410 or 20 gage and Pap would take him out to a little patch of woods there out in suburban DC and go shoot a batch of squirrels, and that's how Dad learned how to shoot and how to listen and how to stalk, you know. For squirrels, you kind of have to be cunning, you can't just go racing into the woods, and you know you're hoping they're cutting, and they're up there busy cutting nuts, and you can kind of sneak up into, you know, so all those sort of skill sets. You know, my dad often would say to me in the woods, Baker, keep your eyes peeled.
Speaker 2 4:57
Yeah,
Speaker 1 4:57
I think he learned that from Pat, Pap Wigner.
Speaker 2 5:00
Right,
Speaker 1 5:00
and he would go in the woods, and Baker, you got to keep your eyes peeled, you know, keep your ears open, keep your eyes peeled, you know, that was the key for him. And so, Dad, you know, started learning from Pap, and then his brother John was only a year younger than him. So, Dad and John were, they were the two hunters that started out, then the Youngers came along, couple years separated the next two, but Dad basically taught his brothers, the Baker boys, how to hunt, and Pap would take them
Speaker 2 5:30
all.
Speaker 1 5:30
So, back in the probably in the early 50s, my grandfather, my dad's dad, worked in an area called the Bridge Market in Washington, D.C. a big area marketplace where people would come and buy fresh produce and goods.
Speaker 2 5:45
Okay,
Speaker 1 5:46
my dad worked there, and one day a guy from Star Tannery, Virginia, came there. He was living in DC for that year. His name was Omar Orr, and Dorf, six foot nine mammoth guy. He would, wow, he would, he would trudge mountains like he was going over an ant hill, you know. He was the kind of guy he was. He was a hunter extraordinaire, came from Star Tannery, Virginia, which is not far from Trout Run, West Virginia, where my dad eventually ended up. And so he came into the bridge market one day and said, Baker, boy, do you guys want to go kill some deer? And, of course, my dad and his brothers, they were all game, they were just young kids, teenagers, and they looked at his dad, and dad said, yep, you can go, and so in 1955 my dad went to Trout Run, West Virginia was Hardy County, West Virginia, the Trout Run between two mountains and Omar, he put them on these stands on the mountain. You all right, Dave, you're going to stand here and look over here and watch over here, and he's where these deer are going to come up. This is the time they're going to come up, and you know, just kind of taught them how and where and what to do.
Speaker 2 6:59
Well,
Speaker 1 7:00
Mike, it didn't take long, as you probably can think, that they started, they started having success. Omar put them in all these stands. Well, they started just taking over, so next thing you know, they didn't need Omar anymore, and so you know, Dad and them started hunting everywhere, they started hunting all the seasons down there, rabbits, grouse, squirrels, whatever was open, they'd go there and hunt, and they found a guy by the name of Charles Snyder, he was, he was a, he was as West Virginia as they come, I'll just say that, and he cut wood, he was, he cut pop wood for paper companies in the mountains of West Virginia. Big guy, his arms were as thick as my thighs.
Speaker 2 7:49
Yeah,
Speaker 1 7:51
and so they held a piece of property down there. He had about 100 acres down there, Charles Snyder. So my dad brought a couple trailers down there, and they would stay there and hunt, and so I came along when I was born, and of course, Dad's brothers, they all got married, had kids, I had all kinds of cousins, and
Speaker 2 8:08
yeah,
Speaker 1 8:09
they would all come, we'd all come down there.
Speaker 2 8:12
How many would you get together? How many?
Speaker 1 8:14
Oh, we'd probably have 11 or 15 of us, so we would, we would, we would slaughter the,
Speaker 2 8:19
and where would you stay during that
Speaker 1 8:21
in the little trailer there, little all of you stay in trailers, camping trailers, yeah, there's construction trailers, we'd all be spread out everywhere, tents,
Speaker 2 8:31
it's great,
Speaker 1 8:33
and all the kids would come, you know, we'd all have our shotguns, and we'd be killing, I mean, we'd lay them out on this big flat bed there. My dad has pictures, just hundreds of squirrels, hundreds of rabbits, hundreds of birds and grouse. Just back in the day, it was just littered with that. The mountains of West Virginia at that time hadn't really gotten hit with a lot of disease, and so you know, the chestnut trees, a lot of the nut trees were, and of course that made everything that had food for every every kind of animal that you can think of, and so it was just abundant.
Speaker 2 9:12
Yeah,
Speaker 1 9:13
so that's kind of where we started, you know, the Baker boys, and so eventually, you know, we would go to places in Pennsylvania, we moved to Pennsylvania, not right on the border, actually in Maryland, but we would hunt in the fields of Pennsylvania there, and we'd, we'd have 11 guys coming down through these fields, just pow, pow, pow, I mean,
Speaker 2 9:30
just doing a drive,
Speaker 1 9:31
just throwing a drive,
Speaker 2 9:32
right,
Speaker 1 9:32
and people started to know us as the fabulous Baker Boys, the Baker Boy gang is here, you know, and the community used to think, oh, here they come, but the farmers didn't, didn't, didn't care, really. They said, yeah, you can go ahead and cut our fields, and
Speaker 2 9:47
yeah,
Speaker 1 9:48
before they started doing no-till and using poison, we used to have abundant cock birds, you know, pheasants,
Speaker 2 9:56
pheasants, yeah, that was so much fun, so much fun was, and
Speaker 1 9:59
then that air. You, where we were near Clear Spring, Maryland, the farmers and the fields were full of pheasants, but when they started doing the no-till, it used to affect
Speaker 2 10:12
the egg hatch, egg hatch, and then I remember reading about,
Speaker 1 10:14
they went away, but so the Baker boys, we know, we sort of settled into West Virginia, deer hunting was our big thing, and you know, Dad would, would still bring his pap down there, and they would hunt, like I said, he'd kill those deer one after another,
Speaker 2 10:30
and
Speaker 1 10:31
my grandfather, he did a little hunting, my dad's dad, but he wasn't, wasn't a hunter per se, he would come, but that wasn't his thing, but the boys were, and so my dad and his brother started an ice cream business in Gaithersburg, Maryland, called Baker Boys Ice Cream, and in 1972 they had 72 ice cream trucks
Speaker 2 10:49
going
Speaker 1 10:49
all across the region, the tri-state region,
Speaker 2 10:52
there
Speaker 1 10:54
selling ice cream bars, they had ice cream trucks and they had the name Baker Boys Ice Cream, we I still have some of the novelty ice cream, like nutty buddies and ice cream sandwiches.
Speaker 2 11:03
Were you working on some of that stuff?
Speaker 1 11:05
I worked on an ice cream truck when I was a kid. When we moved to Clear Spring, Dad had a couple of trucks, and we'd do that,
Speaker 2 11:12
but,
Speaker 1 11:12
but as all family businesses go, there was too many chiefs and not enough
Speaker 2 11:16
Indians, so it
Speaker 1 11:17
only lasted too long until they just kind of broke apart and all did their own thing and and dad started when we moved to Clear Spring, he started getting a relationship with some of the Mennonite families there, so he would go down to the city where he used to be and sell baked goods and and fresh eggs and ham and turkey
Speaker 2 11:37
that he would get from the Amish,
Speaker 1 11:38
he would get from the Amish,
Speaker 2 11:39
okay,
Speaker 1 11:40
and so that was his business, that was, that was what my dad did for work. He was a huckster.
Speaker 2 11:46
I remember going to Bradford County, and we'd stop, you know, from Bucks County to Bradford. Yeah, we would stop. We're going to my, my father-in-law's place up there, and there was always there was this little Amish side stand on the side of the road, and they would have these donuts that I'm telling you, they weighed like two pounds a piece that we called them sinkers, you could use them as an anchor, but they were so good, they
Speaker 1 12:16
still to this day, there's some Mennonite groups down in West Virginia and Virginia called Straights Donuts, and they still do those very same donuts.
Speaker 2 12:24
They're delicious, and they're so..
Speaker 1 12:26
they're unbelievable.
Speaker 2 12:26
They weigh it. It's great.
Speaker 1 12:28
So, as the cousins got older, Mike, the Baker Boy Clan, grew obviously exponentially from the four original - we call them the originals now. And we started deer hunting, and we would go up through the national forest, illegally, of course, in these motorbikes, we'd go up in the morning, we'd meet at the gate, there was a gate there outside of Charles's place at 330 in the morning, we'd get our Honda 90s and we'd get our backpacks on, and when we'd all charge up the mountain 100 miles an hour in the cold of the morning, and you could hear us, you could hear him, and if you just..
Speaker 2 13:04
they're like little mini bikes,
Speaker 1 13:06
yeah, little Honda 90s, if you know what they are, they have a seat in the back, and all, and I remember going up in the back, Dad would be.. Dad would have his compound bow strapped in the back, and it was.. and it was.. it was early season, September, and there was a frost going, you know, and we were going up through there, 100 miles an hour, and he would say, "Baker, lean forward, Baker, lean forward, as we go up, and the bike would start. Oh my goodness, lean forward, Baker. And there, forget this one morning, it was extra cold, September morning, and the compound post snapped, and that thing came back and hit me right in the face.
Speaker 2 13:37
Oh my goodness,
Speaker 1 13:38
almost knocked me off the bike. The front came up. Dad's going lean forward, of course. Behind this was all my cousins and my uncles, and they had their bikes there going up through the mountain. I mean, I'm sure if you could just walk out that quiet morning, you'd hear all this
Speaker 2 13:54
right
Speaker 1 13:55
racket. That was the baker,
Speaker 2 13:57
and you got away with.. we
Speaker 1 13:58
got away with.. I can't believe it. We only got caught one time of one of the driver groups there, the Harper Valley gang turned us in.
Speaker 2 14:06
Okay, somebody got you, yeah, some jealous,
Speaker 1 14:10
but you know what, there's not enough, there's not enough people, not enough wardens in that area to police all that. So when things died down, we went right back at it again. But my first experience was 11 years old. My dad took me up at 11 years old, got me a 3030 30.
Speaker 2 14:27
They're great,
Speaker 1 14:27
Winchester
Speaker 2 14:29
Lever Action, Lever Action. Oh, good, they're so good.
Speaker 1 14:32
And so he did what what Omar did with him, and what his pap did with him. He put him on a stand and said, "Baker, sit here, and when you see the deer come up, you shoot them. See one with horns, you shoot them. The back in that day, Mike, we shot anything with horns. We weren't supposed to. Again, we were illegally shooting deer. We probably shouldn't be.
Speaker 2 14:53
Well, if they had horns back then, well, we
Speaker 1 14:55
always use if they were bigger than a cigarette,
Speaker 2 14:57
right? That's what the rule was, right?
Speaker 1 14:59
Well. You
Speaker 2 15:00
and you, and you could have been a half smoking cigarette, that's
Speaker 1 15:03
right, a half smoke, and one might not, might have, might not reach it, but I remember, I remember that that morning, Dad left me in the middle of nowhere, we were separated, probably by a half mile, he would drop me off top of a mountain, middle of the morning, I was the first dance, so I was there 430 wasn't gonna get light till six,
Speaker 2 15:20
oh man,
Speaker 1 15:21
so I'm sitting there freezing for hours, waiting for it to get light, and sure enough, here comes a drove of deer, comes a bunch of does up, here comes a buck, five point, he comes up, he's running at me 100 miles an hour, I just lift up my gun, pow pow, I think three of the four, two of the four shots went in the ground, because I was just, you know, I had buck fever,
Speaker 2 15:43
right? Right,
Speaker 1 15:44
and he turned and went down the mountain. I thought, well, I don't think I don't think I hit him, you know,
Speaker 2 15:49
right.
Speaker 1 15:49
So hours later, my one uncle came up, and he said, "You see anything? He said, "Well, I shot at a five point, I don't know if I hit him
Speaker 2 15:54
right.
Speaker 1 15:55
So let's go down over here, you know, let's look for him. So we spent an hour, we couldn't find anything, and we were about ready to give up. My uncle looked down and found a spot, I mean a pin drop of blood.
Speaker 2 16:06
Wow,
Speaker 1 16:07
and once we found that, I hit him high upper shoulder, didn't bleed much.
Speaker 2 16:11
Okay,
Speaker 1 16:12
but I got my first deer.
Speaker 2 16:14
That's so we
Speaker 1 16:14
celebrated. It was exciting, of course. Dad was
Speaker 2 16:16
excited.
Speaker 1 16:17
Dad was very excited, because his son, you know, I've been holding squirrels since I was a little kid, you know. When you, when you, when you're cleaning squirrels, you hold their back. Dad would used to, you know, cut them in the back, so we pull up the skin
Speaker 2 16:31
like a shirt,
Speaker 1 16:31
right? And so I would hold that one side and dad would got to hold them up there, Baker, and he got the squirrel, you know. And so I've been, I've been involved in hunting and cleaning out dead animals to eat all my life, and so for him to see his son finally got his first buck, because Dad loved two things he loved in life: he loved a buck hunt, and he loved a turkey hunt. Those were his two number ones, and he was avid. He was in when I growing up, Dad with my dad in between jobs, he was in camouflage pretty much all year long, in some form or another.
Speaker 2 17:06
He's man after my own heart,
Speaker 1 17:08
right? I mean, camouflage was his number one, you know.
Speaker 2 17:10
That's
Speaker 1 17:11
my mom has to use, used to yell at him, David, you can't wear that. But anyway, the Baker boy clan.
Speaker 2 17:19
So, how many brothers did you have?
Speaker 1 17:21
I didn't have any brothers. That two sisters,
Speaker 2 17:22
two sisters. So you were the old, so you were
Speaker 1 17:24
the only son of the oldest Baker boy. Now the other Baker boys, they had several sons, so they had more. I had more male cousins than I did female cousins.
Speaker 2 17:34
Okay,
Speaker 1 17:35
on my, my dad's brother's side. So the, they're still there to this day, my cousins are there, living there. My actual sister, who wasn't a hunter, lives there now with my brother-in-law, Jim. He's a hunter. We've hunted 30 years together. He got introduced to the Baker boys. He thought we were all nuts, but he joined in, and you know, being at the gate at 330 was just nuts to him. Why are we at 330 in the morning at the gate, we still laughed about today. Finally, Jim and I broke up and said, we're not doing the gate anymore, we're the first stands, we're not going to get there till 430 or five, because we could get up the mountain. We were young, we'd get up the mountain 30 minutes, we were on top, so we would only go, we would only go about halfway up on the motorbikes, and we'd have to walk the rest of the way, and so, yeah, it was, it was an experience. We met some great people, and those, those, those hunts in West Virginia, there was a man there, his name was Old Man Ripper, and Old Man Ripper used to work for the Pennsylvania Game Commission.
Speaker 2 18:36
Okay,
Speaker 1 18:37
and so Old Man Ripper, he had eyebrows as thick as fur, like fur on his eyebrows, never forget him. And he talked like this, and he'd come up, and he'd flash the light at me, because I was the first in, "Hey, Baker boy, have you seen anything? And he made.. I wish I could get his notes. He made copious notes of all the kills, the kind of deer they were, their teeth, their age, all that, because he was with the Pennsylvania Department of Game
Speaker 2 19:03
Commission. Right,
Speaker 1 19:04
so I would have loved.. I didn't know him well enough to be able to get some of those. I would have loved to get the records, because during the whole time we were, you know, since 1955 till he passed away, he was taking copious notes of what the Baker boys were doing, even though he was taking notes of what him and his sons were doing,
Speaker 2 19:22
yeah,
Speaker 1 19:22
but we would meet him up in the trail, and we were always trying to get ahead of mr. Ripper to get up to our stands, so yeah, these are all stories, and there's many, many more I could tell, but you know, just trudging up that mountain in the morning with my dad, his three brothers, and all my cousins, and my one uncle at the league, because he was the heaviest of the brothers in weight,
Speaker 2 19:42
right.
Speaker 1 19:42
So he was the one who was the pace setter, and at every stop we would stop at a tree or a stump, and they were all marked, and they were all named, and he would tell a joke, and we'd all laugh, and we'd take a break, and we'd drink some water, and we'd go to the next one, and that was part of my upbringing and. Hunting, being with the Baker boys, and doing it their way, and you know, none of the names of the mountains or the people that live there were pronounced right. It took us years to figure out who they were talking about, because once we finally met these people, their names weren't pronounced the way that my okay father would say they were, so we still laugh about that today, but anyway, that's the, that's kind of the Baker boy story, that's how I came up in hunting, and and had the privilege to lead my uncle to Christ, and some of my cousins, and of course their relationships, so that's been a real thing, and I've had to really kind of stand in that with some of my cousins and uncles to show them the love, even though they haven't treated us well, because there's always that in family fighting, and there's they're fighting against my dad, or they're not getting along, and the Baker boys had a very contentious even through all of hunting, hunting is the thing that always brought them together, but even outside of that, there was always contention and fighting and talking, and so,
Speaker 2 21:06
well, you know, you told, I don't, you, maybe you're going to get to this, but I, you told me that story about your dad, and how he passed, yeah, and that was pretty, that's how I want to go, well, share that with,
Speaker 1 21:18
you know, Dad, Dad was a person who had some in his 60s, had a lot of issues health wise. He had a stroke, had several strokes, came back from that. I remember the first stroke he came, we went to the hospital, he said, Dave Baker, I'll never shoot a.. we caught each other Baker, Baker, I'll never shoot a gun. I said, I don't know, I think you know, I think you'll be okay. So when he came back, and he was able to shoot more deer. Got in the woods, then he got cataracts, so he started calling him Cataract Jack. He got his cataracts removed, and he was able to shoot deer again, and he had his cataracts. He beggar, I don't think I'm gonna be a hunt again. We got the cataracts fixed. He had heart valve replacement, that gave him many more years of hunting. He wasn't, he was getting the point where he couldn't even walk, he would be so tired out, so that gave him more years.
Speaker 2 22:05
Great.
Speaker 1 22:06
Finally, then he got prostate cancer, that setting back, he had tubes coming out for his kidneys were failing. But even at that point, when he was 78 years old, I talked to him on a Wednesday. I said, Baker, what are you doing? He goes, I'm going out, I'm going to the stand. I'd bought a piece of property down there. We've been hunting national forest land for years, and also some private, and I bought a 55 acre plot down there, and I bought one of those little hunting huts, so black hunting huts. They're like, I don't know, four by four by six.
Speaker 2 22:38
Yeah, you've seen right cinema line.
Speaker 1 22:40
Yeah, you make a platform, four by four treated lumber platform. You set him up on there,
Speaker 2 22:45
yeah.
Speaker 1 22:46
And I bought it specifically for him, because I knew he would only have to climb so far, and he could sit in there, and so he'd go down there. Of course, he had the salt blocks going, not supposed to have salt blocks on. He had feeding them corn, not supposed to feed him. West Virginia, title, totally legal. My dad's a rebel, anyway. He was down there, he was going 78 didn't feel well, but it was, it was early season in November, early season bow hunting. He had his crossbow, his 10 point crossbow, and he went down there, and I talked to him on that Wednesday morning, and he went down and, of course, every night, you know, it got dark. I'd come home from work, and I thought, "But I better check in with Dad and see if he saw anything. Well, I hadn't heard from him, it was dark, and so my, my, I called my mom. She picked up the phone, said "Dad's dead, Dad's dead, and hung up.
Speaker 3 23:36
Wow,
Speaker 1 23:38
so I immediately just walked back to my back bedroom, and got my stuff packed, and got in the truck, and left, and had a good cry on the way. Finally, I got on the cell phone, called Mom, and she said, "Yeah, John, his brother, his brother went down. Dad usually on the walkie talkie, a dark sound, "Mom, hey, I'm getting down, I'm coming back. She never got on, so that mom got worried. So John went back, back into the 55 we call it. He put his hand on dad, he was still warm, so he had just passed.
Speaker 3 24:06
Wow,
Speaker 1 24:07
he just crossed his legs, leaned over, and just fell asleep. And if you knew my dad, he
Speaker 2 24:12
was, that was in the blind,
Speaker 1 24:14
in the blind,
Speaker 2 24:14
right?
Speaker 1 24:15
So, if you know my dad, the way he talked, I can just imagine as he's lifted up in spirit, looking back down to the blind, I could hear him saying, Baker, I don't know, I think I just died. It's blowing my mind. That's how he would, he would talk like he would talk. Baker, I saw this buck, he's blowing my mind, he's unbelievable. We should see him. Dad was a storyteller, and he was very adamant, he was very expressive in the way he told stories, so I could just see him floating up above that stent. Baker, I could see if he could, he could have called me at that moment. Baker, I think it just died. I think I'm going like that's how he would be talking.
Speaker 2 24:52
Yeah,
Speaker 1 24:53
and so I to this day I have a little plaque on there. He died on the 14th of November 2014 And it was right after it was right at prime time bow hunting in West Virginia, coming in, so that that stand is still there today. I go in there and talk to him. I sat in that stand this past season and hunted during, in the rain, because it was raining. I hunted in there, so I just talked to him, Baker. Here I am, 66 years old, and, and repeating, you know, I'm sure he'd be proud that we were still doing
Speaker 2 25:25
it, and he was 7878 when he died,
Speaker 1 25:27
when he died,
Speaker 2 25:28
that's the same age my dad was when he died, 78
Speaker 1 25:31
yes, yeah,
Speaker 2 25:32
now that I'm 70, it seems so young,
Speaker 1 25:34
I know, but I think, you know, our generation, we, we have taken care of ourselves a little better, we watched things a little better,
Speaker 2 25:42
yeah.
Speaker 1 25:43
And, of course, medicine is a lot better than used to be back in those days. We're living longer, but so that's just that's just a little brief review of the Baker Boy story, and that's where I come from.
Speaker 2 25:55
That's great.
Speaker 1 25:56
Even though I was born in Bethesda, Maryland, I somehow ended up in this region, Pennsylvania. We have roots everywhere. Peter Baker actually came over from, came over on the boat and landed in Boonesboro, Maryland. That's where the bakers started,
Speaker 2 26:13
from where,
Speaker 1 26:14
from Peter Baker, from from England,
Speaker 2 26:16
from England,
Speaker 1 26:17
settled in Boonesboro, Maryland. So we haven't, the Baker clan hasn't really spread too far away,
Speaker 2 26:22
right.
Speaker 1 26:23
My family, at least the Baker side, my dad's side has not really moved too far away from Paul Paul, West Virginia, where Dad grew up a little bit, and where the Wigners were, my grandmother and Pat Wigner, and so yeah, we come from a long line of hunters, and so, yeah, the Baker Boy story is an interesting one. I'm sure, if, if I could get all my uncles together - two of them have passed already, my dad and the youngest has passed, there's two left. If I could get them together and tell you some stories, you, we could go for days.
Speaker 2 26:55
Well, maybe we'll have to get out to West Virginia
Speaker 1 26:58
and do that,
Speaker 2 26:58
get them together and do that. We'll set up some kind of microphone or something, but
Speaker 1 27:04
you know it's one of the things, you know, just to bring it into a spiritual sense. Mike, I think the importance of family, and you and I are family guys, where we see the importance of our grandkids and our kids, and we've, we've spilled our lives to make sure that our kids are safe and that they're successful, that they know Jesus,
Speaker 2 27:22
yeah, and not in that order,
Speaker 1 27:24
and not in that order. Now, do all of our kids, and do all of them follow the way we want them to know? Do they all do the things that we think they should do spiritually? No, because they're adults now, and you have to let them go. But you know, you and I have been called to be.. we've been.. we've been given the torch, whether we know it or not. You and I have been given the torch for our generation to lead our family.
Speaker 2 27:46
Yeah,
Speaker 1 27:47
and one of the things that that we want to do is make sure our grandkids and our kids take the next torch and are able to pass that to the next generation to say you're the, you're the torch bearer for our family,
Speaker 2 27:59
for the for the
Speaker 1 27:59
Hays family, for the Baker family, so that they know Jesus, and is it all going to be clean and all gonna be perfect? No, it's gonna be messy, it's gonna be a mess, it's gonna be hectic, and it could be trials and tribulations of some type,
Speaker 2 28:11
but you know what, there's no greater joy,
Speaker 1 28:13
no greater
Speaker 2 28:14
than to see your kids right following the Lord, that's no greater joy in the world, and I remember my I had three daughters, and when they were just like one or two, and even earlier, really, I began to pray for their spouses,
Speaker 1 28:32
right,
Speaker 2 28:32
because I knew they were out there somewhere.
Speaker 1 28:34
Yeah,
Speaker 2 28:34
and so I did, and of course I prayed that they would love the outdoors, you know, that I'm not talking about their spouses, they would love sports, you know,
Speaker 1 28:43
something
Speaker 2 28:44
little selfish prayer, but the main thing I was praying was that they would be godly men, and they, they would truly be good, godly men for my daughters,
Speaker 1 28:55
right,
Speaker 2 28:56
and you know, God has answered that prayer, three men of God, that then they all live close by, and now have 10 grandkids. We're doing the same thing, we're praying for their spouses, even now that they will be godly spouses. You know,
Speaker 1 29:10
Mike, I don't know if this is right or true or biblical, but I think we live off the prayers of our ancestors. I really
Speaker 2 29:16
do. Oh, that's that's..
Speaker 1 29:18
I really do. My grandmother prayed for me, my mom's mom prayed for me that I would be successful in radio, and look at me, I'm in radio,
Speaker 2 29:27
yeah,
Speaker 1 29:27
and successful 30 years of Word FM,
Speaker 2 29:29
that's that's
Speaker 1 29:30
my lifelong dream since I was nine years old, is to do that,
Speaker 2 29:33
that's incredible. She
Speaker 1 29:34
prayed that prayer, and I'm living, I'm living from those prayers, I'm living off my mom's prayer that I would be the torch bearer when she passed away. She was the last one to pass away, and she wanted to make sure that I was the one leading the family to Jesus. And not all of them are following, not all of my, my, my nephews and nieces are following, but they do know that Paps and Grahams love Jesus. They're in heaven,
Speaker 2 29:59
and you know. I was the first one actually saved, I believe you know, out of my family of eight kids. I was number six, but I was, and I went pretty quick to Bible college, right after I was 19, and I remember the first semester or year when I came back home, all I cared about was that my family would would know Christ and live for Christ, so that they could have that abundant life that Jesus promised. But I was a little too gun ho, and I remember I was like the Mexican bandoler, I had all my ammunition from from all the theology I was learning, you know, same thing, and I just went in, just let them have it. I know, and it wasn't good, but then the Holy Spirit taught me patience, and taught me, you know, what. How does it, what does it mean, as Peter says, to speak with gentleness and respect? You know, and and then it's so neat how I saw, saw one after the other, you know, come to know Jesus and actually understand the gospel of Christ and receive it, and, and it was just a beautiful thing, you know, some of them aren't totally living form, 100% but they, they know the truth, they've accepted the truth of Christ, and that, that's just a beautiful thing, and yeah, it's.. it was a mission field, and it
Speaker 1 31:24
still is. And I would encourage all of you there listening, if you're.. if you're a believer, and you're a Jesus follower, and you're wondering, you know, what's my call.. even your.. your basic at the core of it.. if you're dad or a mom, your core is to make sure your kids get to heaven. If you can study heaven, study heaven a little bit, you'll be amazed at what's going to be, and you want to make sure your kids and family are there. So, if there's.. if you don't have to be a preacher, you don't have to be a teacher, you don't have to have a ministry, you don't have to have really necessarily a calling, but everyone, every person, especially moms and dads, you know, you know your heart, and you know deep down you want your kids to know Jesus, that's your calling.
Speaker 2 32:04
Yeah,
Speaker 1 32:04
that's your mission to carry that torch
Speaker 2 32:06
for sure,
Speaker 1 32:07
and make sure that torch is passed to the next generation.
Speaker 2 32:10
Amen,
Speaker 1 32:10
amen, and amen,
Speaker 2 32:11
amen.
Speaker 1 32:19
We would love to hear from you. We'd love to hear your stories. So, please send us a note or question by going to our homepage at The Stand outdoors.com and hit the contact tab. Also, we'd love to pray for you too. Leave your prayer request by hitting the contact tab or do you know Jesus tab.
Speaker 2 32:38
Yeah, also check out our targeting the truth Bible studies. We have these Bible studies that include hunting videos. Let me think about it. When was the last time you went to a Bible study and got to watch a hunting video? Well, that's what targeting the truth Bible studies include. You watch a video, then I share the three to five minute spiritual message at the end, but then you go into the five discussion questions, you have leaders guide, you have everything you need. You're so good right there to have a men's group, you know? You can download it, and guess what, guys? It's all free. It's right there for you. Anybody in the stinking world that has a computer can can download this for free, and we, you know, we want to keep it that way, because we want to reach as many people and the outdoor community as we can,
Speaker 1 33:30
and it's all found at the Stand outdoors.com Check it out. Hey Mike, and I would thank you for joining us today on the podcast. You can find it anywhere, it's in on Apple, Spotify, many other platforms. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, leave a review, share it with a fellow hunter, and you can get all the details about our guests. Any links can be found on our show notes, and you can find us online anytime, day or night, 24 hours a day, free of charge. The Stand outdoors.com that's The Stand outdoors.com Till next time, for my case, I'm Dave Baker, and remember, stand firm in the faith and keep targeting the truth,
Unknown Speaker 34:06
you.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai