Volume 20, Number 4,
April 1974:
With These Two Hands

Text-only version

ISSUE HOME PAGE

ABOUT THIS ISSUE
- about KSN

IN THIS ISSUE
- section 1
- section 2
- section 3
- section 4
- section 5
- section 6
- section 7
- section 8
- section 9
- section 10
- conclusion

With These Two Hands
by Robert J.Boles

continued...

Richard has always considered taxidermy as a hobby he thoroughly enjoyed. However, as word of his excellent work spread, more and more sportsmen began to ask for his services to mount their trophies. He had now become a commercial taxidermist, and enjoyed a booming business. Even during the worst depression years of the dirty thirties he never needed to look for work. It is understandable that many of his out-a-job friends, with all of their unasked for "free-time," envied this busy man. By the late thirties so many big game trophies were brought to him that his farming seriously hindered his taxidermy business. Most men would have dropped one or the other, but not Richard Schmidt. It was the outbreak of World War II and the great demand for farm products which brought his custom taxidermy work to a halt. After the war he did not resume trophy taxidermy for the sporting public.

When the Hesston College Audubon Society brought him a large raccoon to mount in 1928, Richard thought this might be a stepping stone to college employment in the museum field. Perhaps it was, but it took a long time to bear fruit. It was some twenty years later that he was employed to collect and mount the Hesston College Ornithological Collection.

In the sprint of 1944 the Kansas Historical Society invited him to Topeka to discuss possible employment. With high hopes of a lucrative taxidermy contract, accompanied by his wife, and two-year-old daughter, Kathryn, he drove to Topeka in his old model A Ford. It was with great disappointment that he learned that all the Society wanted him to do was to wipe the dust off the Col. N. S. Gross Ornithological Collection. Such a task appealed to him as a most unchallenging job, and he politely refused the offer.

In the spring of 1949 Dr. R. E. Mohler of McPherson College asked him to join him in presenting a paper on his rare bird and mammal records at the Kansas Academy of Science Convention. He earned a little cash for the trip by drilling post holes with his Ford tractor at ten cents apiece. And, now for the first time in his life, he checked in to an expensive hotel, and celebrated by soaking in a tub brim-full of steaming water. It was a never-to-be-forgotten event for a farmer to have his first experience with hot and cold water on tap.