Fred Bear Research Paper

Fred Bear was born March fifth, 1902 in Waynesboro Pennsylvania. Growing up, he enjoyed fishing, hunting, and trapping with his father, who is the reason why he became interested in these activities in the first place. He began hunting with his dad at six years old. At the age of fourteen, Fred shot his absolute favorite animal to hunt, deer. While hunting, Fred would usually wear a flannel shirt and his signature hat, which looked like a round, black safari hat with a brown band wrapping around the middle along with a feather along the side, Everything him and his dad trapped was sold for money to feed their family. He was always very resourceful making the most of what he had. Growing up, Fred has always had a strong work ethic. When he

wasn’t enjoying these activities Fred would spend his time working on the family farm.
At the age of twenty-one Fred left the farm to become involved in Detroit’s growing auto industry. While in Detroit, Bear worked for the Chrysler company, making glue. During his spare time, he would craft bows, arrows, and strings. His interest in this began after viewing a documentary named The Bowhunting Adventures of Art Young. Shortly after, he met Young, and learned much more about hunting using a bow and arrow from him. Fred wasn’t considered to be a master at bow hunting until the age of twenty-nine. Although Bear enjoyed hunting using a gun, he simply liked the challenge that was involved with using a bow and arrow. This made it more exciting for him in general.
In year 1933, the Chrysler building caught on fire, leaving Fred Bear unemployed.

Shortly after, Bear and his former co-worker, Chuck Adams Worked on raising $1,200 to open an archery business in a garage. In 1933, the company was founded and named “Bear Archery” Shortly after Fred and his wife, Henrietta Bear, moved to Grayling, Michigan where they held residence in a tent in order to save money for their developing business. This became his favorite place to hunt and fish. During this time he had a significant shortage of funds to pay for his everyday expenses, his archery company was plummeting. This had a lot to do with the fact that many states banned hunting using a bow and arrow, and using it to hunt wasn’t very common all

together.
As time passed more and more states allowed people to bow hunt, there was a large increase of people who needed businesses like Bear’s to get their own archery equipment, leading to a drastic improvement in his company's revenue all together.Because of all the extra business, in 1937 Bear hired Nels Grumley to create and design bows. He called it Bears production of Nels Grumley bows.In 1948 Nels quit working at Bear’s Archery, and started his own archery business using the bows he designed himself.
Once Bear Archery was doing well, Fred Bear began going on trophy hunts, many of which were filmed, all around the world. Overall, Bear created approximately twenty-five different films about bow hunting. In the In the year 1935, he shot his first trophy whitetail, this is also the year where Art Young passed away. Later on, television host, Arthur Godfrey witnessed Bear kill an African bull elephant. Bear was also featured in a variety of different magazines. Later on he even had whole movies of him hunting. This was ideal for him, especially considering that he enjoyed hunting as a way to escape from everyday troubles and drama.
Due to all of the publicity, others developed more of an interest in bowhunting as well. Between the years 1934-1939, Fred Bear won the Michigan State archery competition three times. Many hunters and sportsmen considered him to be the pioneer of bow hunting. The first ever bow hunting season was in michigan,1937, started by Bear. After this he began to encourage other states to start a bow hunting season as well. In the year 1967, a museum dedicated to Fred Bear was opened in Grayling, Michigan. In 1968 it became the largest privately held collection of archery art in the world.
Fred Bear created a large variety of different types of bows. Bear Archery made more bows than any other company. Some of the archery equipment he worked on includes: Polar, and Grizzly bows. He marketed the first ground head, as well as a recurve bow called the Kodiak 2.
In the year 1968, Bear Archery was sold, but Fred continued as chairman, which means he is head of the department. After a strike and labor problem arises, in 1978 the Bear Archery company was relocated to Gainesville, Florida, where Fred moved along with it. The Fred Bear Museum was relocated to the same city in Florida as well.
As Fred Bear grew older, he struggled with chronic emphysema, which is a lung condition that causes shortness of breath. He continued to create and design more bows up until the day he died. On April 27th, 1988, Bear suffered from a heart attack which resulted in his death.His body was cremated, and the ashe were spread out along the Ausable River in upper Michigan, where Fred enjoyed to fish.
In the year 2003, The museum that held Fred’s work was closed down, and the collections were sold to Bass Pro Shops.

Detroit Archers, a small club that Bear was president of for a while has a small collection of his memorabilia, which is located in the club house. The most prized piece was one of his polar bear skins. In the year 2006, the Detroit Archers was robbed, and someone took the polar bear skin. To this day, it has never been found.
There is very little known about his family, but what we do know is that besides working on the family farm, Bear’s father built tools in a railroad shed. It’s also interesting to know that great uncle, Daniel Drawbaugh was claimed to be the actual inventor of the telephone. During a trial to decide whether he or Alexander Graham Bell could claim the credit for being the inventor. Drawbaugh was short one vote to be given the credit. The judge who had the deciding vote was found to have large amounts of stock in Bell’s company. This information shows that the creativity, and success runs strongly in Bear’s

family.
Fred Bear has a large variety of achievements himself, such as the company, the movies and videos, designing a ton of different bows, arrows, strings, and building them. He has some world records for animals he’s hunted, and basically began all of this working at his family's farm. Some of his world records include: shooting a Canadian moose in Ontario that scored 170 - 4/8, a Yellowstone elk he shot in 1952 he shot in Wyoming which scored 311. In 1957 Bear also shot a stone sheep in Coldfish Lake, British Columbia. Also in that same year, and place, Coldfish Lake, he shot a mountain caribou, scoring 278 ⅜. In Alaska at a little delta river, he got a barren ground caribou scoring 417. The last of his world record kills is an Alaskan brown bear he shot in 1968 he got in Wide Bay Alaska. This brown bear scored 28. With each and every shot, Bear made sure they were ethical, meaning that he wouldn’t shoot the animals somewhere where they would take a long period of time to die, making sure that their was no suffering involved. Each animal was brought down with a bow. Assisting Fred Bear living up to the name pioneer of bows.
Overall, Fred Bear had a normal start in life, he didn’t have a ton of money, but he made the most out of what he had. He found his passion, designing bows, strings, arrows, and using them to hunt. He took that passion and made a career out of it, starting out with pretty much nothing but ambition, using it to achieve great things such as his business, the designs of the archery equipment in which he sold, and the large variety of records he holds. Viewing how far he took his life, business and the rest of his success, we can all learn how important it is to follow your dreams.