Sports: Outdoors

Honoring legends

• Longtime Seminole County fishing legend Jack Wingate highlights the list of this year’s Georgia Hunting and Fishing Hall of Fame class.

Ron Brooks
Special to The Herald

FORT GAINES - The Georgia Outdoor Writers Association inducted four new members to the Georgia Hunting and Fishing Hall of Fame at its recent annual spring conference held at George T. Bagby State Park.

Honored this year were Arthur Woody, George Perry, Jack Wingate and Dean Wohlgemuth.Charlie Elliot was the inaugural recipient in 2007, and a plaque bearing the names of all inductees hangs in perpetuity in the Charlie Elliot Wildlife Center located in Mansfield.

Of local interest, however, was the honoring of Wingate, a legendary Seminole County guide, angler, outdoors writer and sporting entrepreneur.

The major problem faced in naming Wingate to the Hunting and Fishing Hall of Fame was figuring out which category in which to place him.

While he excelled at most anything related to outdoors, his name is most closely associated with Lake Seminole in Southwest Georgia and its long history of fantastic largemouth bass fishing. Wingate grew up on lands now flooded by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers reservoir and has fished its waters since the floodgates closed in 1957. Jack Wingate is known throughout the southeast as the "Sage of Seminole." Soon after the lake formed, he opened The Lunker Lodge on its shores.

In 1967, he was on hand for the birth of the era of competitive angling as an invitee to fish Ray Scott's first bass tournament that eventually spawned the Bass Anglers Sportsman Society. For more than 40 years, Wingate managed the Lunker Lodge, wrote his outdoor column "Seminole Ramblins" in local newspapers, did a live local radio program, guided and fished on Lake Seminole. He also found time to establish Jack Wingate's Fishing Camp for Boys, while acting as the region's best known historian and booster.

In 1994, Jack Wingate was elected to the National Fresh Water Fishing Hall of Fame as a legendary guide. In 2006, he was inducted into the Legends of the Outdoors Hall of Fame a well. Also in 2006, the Georgia General Assembly renamed Georgia State Route 97 from Bainbridge to Lake Seminole as Jack Wingate Highway.

As for the other three inductees, each of their stories are just as amazing.

GEORGE PERRY

Perry, a legendary angler who died in 1974 in a Birmingham, Ala., plane crash, was best known for catching a fish in 1932 that made him an instant celebrity among  outdoorsmen.

Perry was a 20-year-old farmer when - on June 2, 1932 -his name was indelibly etched in angling annals. Taking the day off from working the fields because of recent rains, Perry and fishing buddy Jack Page headed to Montgomery Lake in Telfair County for a day of fishing.

While paddling a homemade boat around the oxbow lake off the Ocmulgee River, Perry cast the only lure he owned, a "Fintail Shiner" made by the Creek Chub Company, toward a log in the water. The bait was inhaled by a legend that has mesmerized the fishing world for decades: Perry hooked a 22-pound, 4-ounce largemouth bass that has been the world record for more than 75 years.

The native of Laurens County and his family eventually ate the fish, but he did have it weighed and entered in Field & Stream magazine's annual big-fish contest. He won a $75 prize package of outdoor gear, including a new rod and reel. In 1934 he also won the magazine's contest with a 13-pound, 14-ounce bass. When Field & Stream passed its record-keeping duties on to the International Game Fish Association, Perry's record continued to be recognized.

Perry later ran a flying service in Brunswick until his death, though in 1982, Perry was elected to the National Fresh Water Fishing Hall of Fame as a legendary angler.

ARTHUR WOODY

Born the son of a farmer in Union County, tradition holds that Woody witnessed his father kill the last recorded whitetail deer in the North Georgia mountains in 1895. The experience stayed with the youngster, developing into a passion for restoring and protecting the mountain domain in which he would one day reintroduce deer.

By 1911, Woody was an axe man with the U.S. Forest Service and in 1918 became the first Forest Ranger in what would one day become the Chattahoochee National Forest. Though he spent just three days at North Georgia College, he developed a keen interest in and understanding of modern conservation practices. He was instrumental in getting the federal government to add cut-over timberlands to Georgia's national forest inventory, and he protected those lands with one of the best records in the nation for preventing forest fires. Known locally as "Kingfish," or simply "Ranger," Woody shunned Forest Service uniforms and often refused to wear shoes while on duty.

While managing the forest, he promoted the building of roads in the district and stocked the streams with rainbow trout.Beginning in 1927, he started purchasing whitetail deer at his own expense to restock the mountain domain. His efforts were so successful that Georgia opened a limited hunting season in the region in 1941.

A plaque placed by local inhabitants adorns a rock on the shoulder of Georgia Highway 60 in Suches commemorating Woody as a Pioneer Conservationist. Woody Gap on the Georgia section of the Appalachian Trail was also named for him. Premier Hall of Fame inductee Charlie Elliott considered Ranger Arthur Woody the best woodsman he ever encountered and the "Barefoot Ranger" is regarded as the foremost figure in the history of the Chattahoochee National Forest.

DEAN WOHLGEMUTH

In the more than four decades since Dean Wohlgemuth first arrived in Georgia no one has had a more active and forceful voice for outdoor sports in the state.

After joining the Air Force in 1955 and beginning his writing career in the service, the native of Kansas next did short stints as a reporter for newspapers in Wichita, Kan., Rock Hill, S.C., and Lynchburg, Va. While in Rock Hill in 1963, he wrote his first outdoor column.

In 1965 Wohlgemuth went to work for the state of Georgia, serving as the managing editor and later editor of Georgia Game & Fish magazine. During this same period his weekly outdoor column was syndicated to 85 newspapers.

He left state employment in 1972, moving to Jesup to spend five years working in public relations for Rayonier, Inc. He also continued writing outdoor columns, including two weekly columns for the Atlanta Journal Constitution, as well as a syndicated coulmn for 25 Southeast Georgia newspapers.

In 1980 Wohlgemuth became the Media Relations Officer for the U.S. Army‚s Fort Stewart, continuing in that capacity until his retirement in 1996. Almost continuously since moving to South Georgia 35 years ago, his outdoor column has appeared weekly in the Jesup Press-Sentinel and its predecessors.His freelance magazine byline has appeared often in national, regional and state publications.

Wohlgemuth was a charter member of GOWA and was elected to several terms as president. He has also served as an officer or board member of the Southeastern Outdoor Press Association and Outdoor Writers Association of America, having been a member of the latter group for more than 40 years.

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