To the Editor,

By now some of you are aware of the health issues that Mr. Fred Bonner, author of Carolina Outdoors, whose columns are syndicated in several North Carolina newspapers, one of which is the Washington Daily News. Fred has had to give up writing for the immediate future and that is the reason you have been missing his informative columns blended with a touch of “down home Southern Humor.”

Fred grew up in Aurora and learned early in life how to hunt and fish; standard fare for most subsistence families. Fred has been a blessing to North Carolina sportsmen and sportswomen for more years than I care to remember. If any conservation/wildlife group needed some free “PR” for one of their pet projects, Fred was the man to call. He helped me on two specific occasions: once while I was heading up a fundraising deer hunt for Chowan University and again with the Save Blounts Creek awareness program.

Fred was a graduate of North Carolina State University with a degree in wildlife biology. Over the years, he truly got to know everyone at the federal, state, and local level in the field of wildlife conservation. All who read Mr. Fred’s articles over the years will miss how he was able to weave new hunting and fishing information/regulations into a story about how the rules have changed since he was a young boy growing up in rural, southeastern Beaufort County. Fred is out of the hospital and rehabbing from his surgery at his home in Blacksburg, Virginia. Will you please join me in adding this outstanding southern writer to your prayer list in hopes that he will soon be back and continuing his tradition of educating North Carolinians to the joys of “Nature’s Cathedrals.”

Fred, dear friend, get well soon, we miss you.

 

Gilbert A. Tripp Jr.
Blounts Creek