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If a man empties his purse into his head, no man can take it away from him. An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest. Benjamin Franklin

Buel Douglas Rithmire grew up the youngest son of an Alabama sharecropper. He was six when he headed out on his first great fishing adventure, and like many boys during that time in the South, he cut cane poles from the bottoms and dug worms from the chicken yard or under the sorghum mill to use for bait. Filled with the nervous excitement of a six-year-old, he and a passel of boy-cousins loaded in the back of a mule-drawn wagon, ably driven by older brother Dillard, for the half-day trip to Sugar Creek near Pulaski, Tennessee, where his Uncle Wes lived. With no fanfare and with no intent, the foundation was laid for the boy to become a man who loved and respected all the wonders of the natural world.

Ten years Doug's senior, Dillard Rithmire sparked an enthusiasm for the outdoors in his little brother that continues today nearly 70 years since that first fishing experience. Dillard took Doug and another brother, James, who was just a year younger, to the Tennessee River near their home in Rogersville, Alabama, and showed them Indian Cigar trees in the fall so they would know where to find fish bait in the spring when the Catawba worms hatched. He showed them how to gather the worms and turn them inside-out so they would give off an odor and lure the biggest catfish. The boys spent hot summer days in the swamps at the edge of the farmers' fields, sharing a single-barrel 12-gauge shotgun that put many a rabbit in the pot, adding to the butterbeans and corn and greens from the family garden.

Doug had the misfortune of being born left-handed, and in the 4th grade his teacher, Miss Sarah Fuqua, made it her business to beat this inferior quality out of her students with a leather strap. Mrs. Arie Rithmire, a proud and protective mother, didn't think much of Miss Fuqua's teaching style and made it her business to explain that she herself was left-handed, and she could use a leather strap equally well with her left hand as Miss Fuqua could with her right. Doug's formal education ended in the 8th grade when he entered the classroom and read "Miss Fuqua" on the chalkboard, the leather strap hanging as a warning from the back of her chair. He was 14 years of age, not quite a man but no longer a boy. He threw that leather strap out of the window, and left home to enter the School of Hard Knocks.

Over the next twenty years or so, Doug gathered a wide range of experiences, soaking up all the knowledge he could from anybody willing to teach him. He worked at Brown Service Funeral Home, driving (before he was of legal age) the flower truck, the ambulance and sometimes the hearse. He stocked shelves and did inventory at May's Grocery. He met up with the captain of a tug boat for Tennessee Valley Sand and Gravel where he was hired to check the engine room and tie off barges up and down the Tennessee River. After saving enough money to buy his first vehicle, a used Dodge pickup, he took a job at Brooks' Service Station one day when he stopped to buy gas. He had a short career as a welder for Yellow Freight Line in Atlanta, before going to work at Sample's Transmission, learning the business inside and out, for six years. For the next twenty years, Doug owned and operated his own business, Rithmire's Transmission, on Marietta Street, in the heart of Atlanta, where he specialized in Rolls-Royce and Jaguar. He earned masters degrees from the Independent Garage Owners of America and the Automotive Service Council of Georgia, for which he also served two years as President.

While continuing to operate a successful business and raise his daughter and sons, Doug always found time to hunt rabbits and fish with his brothers; but his passion took a different turn in the early 1960s when Luke O'Shields took him to Cedar Creek Wildlife Management Area on his first deer hunt. With a borrowed rifle and a borrowed deer stand, Doug killed a cow horn spike, the "biggest deer" and one of the only deer he had ever seen. In those days, the Georgia deer population was far less than what it is today, and Alabama's herd was even smaller. Luke taught Doug not only hunting skills, but also the value of natural resources and respect for other hunters. He taught Doug conservation and sportsmen's ethics without ever using the words.

The sixties were deer-hunting years, spent with Luke and David Black and other members of the All Seasons Sportsman's Club, and with a new friend, Glenn Reeves. Glenn and Doug were from two different worlds — Doug a self-educated, plain-spoken man from the rural South; Glenn, a no-nonsense ex-Marine and transplanted Yankee. But they were fast friends, and whenever they could get away from their work, they headed to Falcon Sportsman Club at Hughes Fish Camp on the Altamaha River to hunt hogs. Interacting with the dogs and wading through the muck and the mire, fighting poison ivy and turkey-sized