Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/401545
S P O R T I N G C L A S S I C S 7 4 wanting to meet her for 30 years! Her first great dog, Tomoka, sired my first real bird dog, a gorgeous roamer named Zack. No doubt existed, of course, about the identity of the man under the white cowboy hat, the man with the knowing twinkle in his eyes and a smile as wide as the Cherokee Strip: Delmar Smith, the 88-year- young living legend who's the Elvis of the bird dog world. I noticed a couple other white hats in the room, too, and even without looking I'd have known they belonged to Delmar's son, Rick, and nephew, Ronnie – a couple pretty fair dog hands in their own right. Among a knot of guys clustered at the bar (dog guys at a bar – gee, there's something you don't see every day), I spied the bearish figure and ruddy countenance of my friend Nolan Huffman, who guided me to my first sage grouse in Montana and whose Brittany, Rusty, is one of the finest bird- finders I've ever gunned over. Everywhere I looked, I spotted other familiar faces: Tom Dokken, the inventor of the DeadFowl retrieving dummy; Chris Mathan, the human dynamo behind the Strideaway.com website; Steve Snell of Gun Dog Supply; Ted Gartner of Garmin; Jake Smith, my editor at Pointing Dog Journal and Just Labs; and my Sporting Classics colleague, Ron Spomer And those were just the people I knew. Or at least recognized. No wonder they'd dubbed it the Sporting Dog Summit. The logistics of getting all these folks in the same place at the same time had to have been mind-boggling, to say nothing of what it must have taken simply to persuade them to come. Only one man could have pulled it off, a man working the room at that moment, shaking hands and greeting everyone with his trademark sincerity and enthusiasm: Bob West, Purina's long-time ambassador to the sporting dog world. Getting all these people together, of course, was precisely the point. Despite everything they have in common, many of them rarely if ever cross paths. It's just the nature of the business. And while it's easy to understand why, say, the retriever guys, the pointing dog guys, and the hound guys don't mix and mingle much, the fact of the matter is that the urina nutritionist and world champion sled-dog sprint racer Dr. Arleigh Reynolds makes a point at the Sporting Dog Summit. P courtesy purina