Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/116174
l L rt & Etc. I The creator of five Federal Duck Stamps and many treasured prints and originals, Maynard Reece has earned a special place in the annals of wildlife and sporting art. rrespective of gender, the typical American teenager is the most fashion-conscious creature on the face of the earth. This has been the case for a long time – certainly since I was a teen, which was, well, a long time ago. Your peers are judging you by what you wear, after all, and when you're a teenager the approval of your peers means everything. If you've raised a teenager – or should I say if you've survived a teenager – you're nodding your head in agreement. And rolling your eyes at the memory. In the time and place where I grew up – western Iowa in the late 1960s/early '70s – the choice for manly headwear was a Jones-style hunting cap. You know the kind I mean: tan canvas, with a stiff brim that you fold up in back so the top edge slants down, like the wing of a paper airplane. On rainy days you can turn the brim down so it covers your ears and lets the water run off, although I don't remember any of us ever doing that. S (On second thought, Nutz Walton sometimes wore his Jones cap that way. But then, Nutz Walton was known to wear a paisley shirt with plaid pants, too.) So why was it so cool to wear a Jones cap? Easy: Because Maynard Reece wore one, and Maynard Reece was The Man. Or at least he was if you were a teenaged Iowan who, like my buddies and me, was obsessed with waterfowl and upland bird hunting to the exclusion of just about everything else. Well, okay, maybe not girls. Or rock-and-roll. Or beer. But that was all. Other guys had their sports heroes; we had Maynard Reece. Forty-odd years ago, he was already a legend. (No one used the word "icon" then.) It wasn't that we aspired to be artists; it was that we aspired to live in the world Reece painted, a world of gaudy roosters bursting from the corn and bobwhite quail boiling out of the fencerows and all the ducks we lusted after – woodies, mallards, canvasbacks – spiraling down n celebration his 85th birthday, Maynard IReece, now 92,ofcreated this beautiful scene of a Midwestern duck marsh, which he titled 85 Mallards. P O R T I N G C 153 L A S S I By Tom Davis C S