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PAT MCVAY
Pat McVay, left, his grandson Cody Voermans, and great-grandson Lane Voermans, pictured with
a mule deer they shot last year.
COURTESY PHOTO
everything out there — when you pull the trigger, the fun is over and the work starts,” he says. “All your plea- sure is before that.”
Like all instructors across Montana, McVay teaches these classes for free.
“One of my mottos has been for many years that a minute was never lost when it was spent with a child,” he says. “And I just thoroughly enjoy watching the kids and seeing them react and learn. And then one of the big perks is when they come up grinning like a watered mule and hand me a picture of their first deer. I’ve got a few of them around the house. It just makes it all worthwhile.”
An estimated 1,800 instructors volunteer their time annually to train about 10,000 students each year in FWP’s hunter and bow hunter education programs.
McVay is among a small fraternity of hunters who have over 50 years experience. There are nine men in the entire state with plaques from Montana Fish, Wild- life and Parks recognizing their volunteer service for over 50 years, including Bob Larsson in St. Ignatius, who has also been teaching hunter education since the first year, in 1957. Leonard Howke of Whitefish has taught classes since 1965.
“They have had such a big influence on our heritage of hunting in Montana,” says Ron Aasheim, spokesperson with FWP. “They have influenced generations of hunt- ers in Montana.”
Hollister Pat McVay was born in 1920 in Okla- homa to a farming family. They moved to a homestead south of Great Falls, where McVay was raised.
“My granddad gave me a .22-caliber rifle when I was 6 years old. I was in first grade. My brother had one, too, and he was a few years older,” McVay said. “We were on our own out there on the ranch south of Great Falls. He just told me be damn careful. That’s the only advice we got.”
McVay developed a passion for adventuring in the mountains and for shooting. He started with gophers on the ranch but it evolved into a desire to chase deer and elk. Harvesting a deer was also an important source of food for families struggling through the Great Depression.
As a young man McVay trained with the Air Force before serving in the Army from 1942-1946. He earned a job at the Grand Coulee Dam in Washington, but in 1952, he transferred to Hungry Horse Dam. It was there that he became involved with a firearm safety program for young shooters through the National Rifle Associa- tion’s (NRA) Junior Rifle Program.
By the 1950s, the popularity of hunting was spik- ing across the U.S., but with that came an increasing number of accidents, primarily involving guns. There were no formal training programs and most hunters
learned from rugged experience, similar to how McVay did. Some states began implementing hunter education courses, and that caught McVay’s attention.
He studied the programs and what other states were doing with gun safety and sent a letter to the NRA asking for materials he could use for a homemade course. The materials arrived in the mail, and in the mid-1950s he was holding a firearm and hunting safety class in Hun- gry Horse for young kids in the Junior Rifle Program. McVay’s close friend, Mel Ruder, the owner of the Hun- gry Horse News, detailed McVay’s upstart program in news stories and used it as an example of something that could benefit statewide hunters. By 1957, the Montana Legislature passed a law establishing the hunter educa- tion program.
“Mel Ruder called me at 10 p.m. from Helena, and said, ‘Pat, it passed.’ The next day I mailed all the stuff to Fish and Game,” he says.
On record with FWP, Pat McVay is listed as the first official instructor, starting Jan. 1, 1957.
“Pat was a visionary,” says John Fraley, spokesper- son and education supervisor for FWP’s Region One. “He saw the importance of this over half a century ago. When I think of Pat, I think of Aldo Leopold.”
Leopold was a famed ecologist and conservation- ist credited with developing the modern environ- mental ethics through his writings and advocacy. He
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OCTOBER 14, 2015 // FLATHEADBEACON.COM