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I also understand why he wanted to back in. He could pass the driveway and wheel in backwards with a lot more clearance for the nose of big brown. Depending on where you are I got my boots on and found a light, found the driver trying to decide what to do. He thought we were asleep and seemed not to have considered waking the family. This is part of the “being from here” thing, I guess. Out in the country if you need help, you get help. It would be unusual We did get it rigged though, and Steve kept all ten fingers despite Dad’s erratic adjustments pulling the chain taut at unexpected moments. We yanked my New York buddy’s truck out of that mud on the first pull, dragged it a bit further than he thought we might should have -- we were actually headed out toward the pond dam when Dad rolled to a stop and we cut big brown loose. I had climbed up next to Dad during the pull and after Steve unhooked the truck Dad asked me to stay up there with my light as he turned around and circled back up to the barn. “No lights on the front”, he pointed out, and I understood why Steve had come down behind him in the jeep. Then I asked, on a hunch, if he was having any other problems with the tractor. Dad paused and said “Air in the line. No brakes to speak of.” That explained the rocking and rolling as we hooked up and hauled big brown. It took till the next day, as I was thanking Dad for the rescue work, for him to mention that the tractor had also “gotten temperamental about starting.” “Five degrees colder, “ he said, “and it wouldn’t have.”
Picture a kid working for his father, riding the back of a garbage truck. He’s 14 and the location is Orlando, Florida, 1972. The truck is on Orange Blossom Trail and it passes a simple sign in front of a large tract of land with a tree-lined gravel road winding back onto it. “Randall-Made Knives, Showroom and Knife Museum”, it reads. “You’re hanging off that truck, it’s four AM and there’s not much to think about,” Dan Decker told me. “I didn’t have a knife and used to fantasize about what was in that building back there in the orange grove. It’s funny how things come around.”
And indeed he does. Dan (seen here with Jason Randall in the Randall showroom) won an e-Bay auction on Jan 27th this year for a Randall model #14 originally purchased from that same Orlando shop in 1954 or 1955. The auction ended at $28,200.00 with about a dozen bidders participating. The 1954 Randall catalog lists the knife, introduced that year, at $28.50. It is described as having handles of “durable Tenite” and meeting the need for an “almost indestructible all-purpose knife...especially suited for combat.” As time and the test of hard use would prove, Tenite was not durable enough. In the mid-1960’s
When Forbes magazine ran a guide to collecting in December, 2004, they led off with profiles of a number of high-profile, high-dollar treasures: Eric Clapton’s Fender Stratocaster, a Russian cubist painting, a hand-made German marble, a lacquered Japanese pen from the 1920’s, and, at the head of the list, a 1915 Crowell preening pintail decoy which brought $802,000 when auctioned by Christie’s in 2003. It seems only a matter of time (and a few mouse clicks) until a Randall knife makes one of those eye-popping lists, and it may be a relatively new collector whose bids help it get there. But then again, it could be a lifelong collector who, at heart, is still a kid riding the back of a garbage truck at 4 AM, dreaming about a new knife.
"My brother Bill and his eldest son, Brendan, with their first doe of the season! They live in central Wisconsin and this was the first year Brendan was able to go hunting with his dad. As you can see, they're very pleased with the results and now there's plenty of venison in the freezer." - Kim W., Wauconda, IL
Thanks for reading this far! Enjoy the site and come back often! If you'd like to review past editions of Last Cast (over fifty of them!) just click the link below: Last Cast Vol. 4 No. 3 Oct 1 06 (Tophats, Skwerls, & Guitars!) Last Cast Vol. 4 No. 2 Mar 26 06 (Tulsa, Beyond the Blues) Last Cast Vol. 4 No. 1 Feb 5th 06 (Three Uniforms) Last Cast Volume 1-3 (2003-05) Archive |
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Pup's BIGNATION: Holiday Gumbo
sitting that seems easier than pulling in straight and backing out blind around the trees and trash cans and kids bicycles. But it was about nine in the dark heart of a midwinter evening and a strip of gumbo mud, invisible under a cloak of fallen leaves, was lying in wait. Like a snapping turtle, but not sleepy, even in December. Just waiting. My driveway, you see, is really just a few yards of concrete at the back of the garage. Everything else in the half-mile between that concrete and the two-lane county hardball is either slag, gravel, or, if you stray, clay dirt with varying percentages of “clay” and “dirt” in the mix. He caught the whole right side of the truck in a 60/40 clay/dirt slurry that took big brown over at a fairly alarming angle, mud to the gunwales on that side. The driver had to climb down from the new heights the driver’s side had reached. I heard him before he did, running the engine up and spraying mud halfway to top of the pines. 
if a stranger were turned away, much less a stranger with a five-ton van stuck in your yard. So anyway I helped him. It was easy -- I just woke up my father-in-law. Now that’s nothing to do with being “from” anywhere, that’s just family. If you call, even if you’re the son-in-law who left his day job to sell pocketknives on the internet, they generally come.
Dan finally got his first Randall knife a few years later, a model #8-4. “Back then you could walk in and buy one off the shelf. After I purchased mine my friends all ended up buying them,” Dan remembers. “When we were cleaning deer we wouldn’t say “Do you have your knife?” We’d say “Do you have your Randall?” Well, I have my Randall now!”
Randall switched handle materials and began providing brown micarta (a phenolic resin reinforced with canvas still in use today). Early model 14’s with undamaged Tenite, rare to begin with, become even harder to find in colors other than the standard dark green. White Tenite, for instance, fetches a premium, and when Dan first spotted what would become his prize on e-Bay he assumed it was in fact the sought-after white. For many years it was assumed that the occasional off-white Tenite piece that surfaced was white Tenite that had changed color over time. Close examination, however, discussions with Gary Randall (son of the late founder, W.D. “Bo” Randall) and comparison with a model 15 Tenite from this era (owned by Randall dealer Rick Ward) have shown that the tan pieces are a separate color altogether from the white. In the early days the Randall shop had Tenite samples in other colors than white and green, and they used them. Dan’s knife is tan on both sides. Rick’s knife is also tan on both sides. Dan says “A few tan tenites were made from samples that Bo didn't want to throw away along with a number of white tenites. We believe that what most Randall collectors believed to be variations of white will soon be understood by most to be "tan & white.”
Even outside of the “tan or white” discussion, this public sale generated intense interest and excitement in the knife collecting community. For a 20th century fixed blade knife to reach this price point (and to do publicly) seems quite a milestone. A number of factors specific to the knife itself surely played a role: the fact that the piece was being sold by it’s original owner, the near-flawless condition, the rarity of the handle material. And there is a very strong interest in 20th U.S. military knives in the market that extends to non-issued items such as the Gerber Mark II, popularized during the Vietnam conflict, and of course the Randall fighting line (models 1, 14, 15, and 18 in particular). 
Letters arrive daily about knives, among many other topics, and I enjoy them all! Keep in touch - what separates an e-zine from a blog, if such distintions even matter, is reader involvement! In my mind Last Cast is neither a newsletter nor a soapbox - it's (hopefully) an entertaining forum for friends and customers to enjoy one another's perspectives on the knife hobby and wider cultural issues - as well as life in the outdoor sports in general.