by Terry Brady

The stories kept coming like curves in the road leading home from the coal regions of Schuylkill County. We remembered the hunt that was our camp’s best, and the man who helped make it that way.

We only had the pleasure of hunting deer with Frank E. Casey one season. But when the cabin closed in early December 1985, nine bucks would hang from the game pole. It was a camp benchmark, recorded in a giant color photo now hanging above the mantle at the Montour Rod and Gun Club. Casey never fired a shot, but he was there in the photo, smiling with the rest of the hunters. At the age of 50 he had killed his share of deer. With his two sons at his side, he was doing what he loved to do with those he loved. It did not matter to him who got the shooting.

Frank always seemed to get the toughest and highest part of the deer drives that year across the ridges and benches of Bald Eagle State Forest. No matter. He was healthy, strong and very fit. He did not question, but he did make sure his two sons, Brian and Daniel, were close by. If he was “on top,” he would be in charge, and he did it so well. Two drives, same mountain, same results: 3 bucks killed each day and several missed.

“Frank Casey had us seeing deer both days,” recalled Jeff Friel of Eagle. “He told us to go slow through the thick stuff. To stop often, watch and listen. I know we would have walked past so many deer if it wasn’t for him.”

I, too, was there, both days, watching as Casey, his sons and the same group of young fellow hunters climbed over and snaked through laurel and white pine cloaking the back side of Paddy Mountain. As they slowly neared, Brian shouted that I and fellow “standers are up ahead.” I heard the warning of a then-16-year-old contested by a fellow hunter. Minutes later, two shots killed a seven-point, and endangered me.

Amid the echo of too-close rifle blasts, laurel branches cracked out in front, and a shouted directive locked me in new fear: “Brian, there’s a spike with it. Take the shot!”

From the ridge above came a booming voice of reason: “Brian, you be very careful down there,” shouted the senior Casey. “You’ve got standers right out in front of you.”

“I know, Dad, I never raised my rifle,” the teenager replied calmly.

Skilled hunter. Staunch advocate of gun safety. On that cold night’s drive early last month, we ticked off the reasons why we liked having Frank Casey around camp that year. Bill Roverano of South Philadelphia remembered the hunter’s mischievous side on the long ride home.

“Remember that night he led us over about four mountains and through six towns to find that place tucked away in the woods?” Roverano asked, laughing. “Pitch dark, no road signs. We never thought he’d be able to find it, but he did. Remember how proud he was?”

For want of a better word, “that place” best be described as a modern-day speakeasy. Frank would be the first to tell you he didn’t wear the collar of a priest. He wore the work clothes of a union carpenter who labored hard and could play hard. He would not tell you how to walk the straight and narrow, but he could tell you where the deer bedded down in a driving rain on White Mountain. And he could tell you how to work a killer minnow rig in the pools of Penns Creek. You only had to ask.

Oh, he’d grumble, maybe even snap his advice in a gruff sort of way. But he’d make sure you understood when you asked about the woods and water he knew so well on the Union-Montour county line. It was his dad who first unlocked those secrets, bringing him to the cabin faithfully since he was a youngster.

“He did everything for us,” said Casey’s son, Daniel, now 39, of Mount Carmel. “It was, you might say, ‘His bark was worse than his bite.’ He was gruff on the outside, but he had a heart of gold.”

It was that heart that loved good rabbit dogs. It was that heart that warmed long ago to a man 12 years his senior. And it was that same heart that probably cost him his life.

On Jan. 3, accompanied by his beloved beagles and surrounded by rabbit-rich farmland, Casey died at the age of 65 in a hunting accident in Northumberland County, near the Montour County Line.

He had taken a man, 72, under his wing as friend and hunting companion. And it was that man’s shotgun that discharged, fatally wounding Casey in the leg. He would bleed to death before reaching a hospital.

“After he was shot, he was more worried about his dogs,” said his youngest son, Brian, now 30. “He told the man who had shot him, ‘Don’t worry about me. Go get my dogs.’ Knowing my dad, he probably didn’t think the wound was that bad.”

For Brian, Daniel, and sister Diane of Slatington, the woods and waters never will be the same. They never are when you lose the one who introduced you to it all.

“It’s going to be hard hunting without him next year,” said Daniel. “He was a real good man.”

Some of us already knew that. Those who hunted hard and laughed heartily with him in the late fall of 1985. But we were a minority. Other camp members saw things they did not like. Maybe it was because he could be gruff, or that he did not pronounce his “ings” when he was out “huntin’” or “fishin’”. More likely it was because this son of a coal miner believed in calling manure what it was when he saw and heard it.

For whatever the reason, Frank Casey was barred from the camp his dad helped found. After his dad died, the vacancy would not be filled by his son. A camp vote saw to that, and made Casey bid farewell to the waters and woods he had roamed since childhood.

When the weather breaks, his children and grandchildren will travel to Penns Creek and pick a pool where their dad knew how to always catch trout. Their dad’s ashes will be cast upon his beloved stream, flowing just behind a cabin where the doors were closed to him.

Irony abounds in this outdoors tragedy. It came to life in my favorite Frank Casey story from the hunt of '85 when he already saw the deck stacked against him in his upcoming camp membership vote. Others remembered it as we drove home from Casey’s viewing in Ashland:

I was the coffee man, serving the long table and reaching a hot pot over Casey’s thinning pate, when someone’s arm shot up in animated conversation. Steaming contents from the jarred pot rained down on Casey’s head.

“Yoooohhhh!!! I know some of you guys here don’t like me, but you don’t have to scald me to death!”

We liked you, Frank. Others loved you. All of us will miss you.

Originally appeared as a column in a February 2000 edition of the Reading Eagle.

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