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May 2009
Sheppard’s Call

Sheppard’s Call

Glen Sheppard likes trees, animals, clean water and fresh air, and he doesn’t care for people who diminish them. Oh, and he’s not shy about sharing.

May 6, 2009 Gerald Volgenau

(page 3 of 4)

Sheppard admits that being restricted to the office has not helped his reporting. He can no longer stop by DNR field offices to make face-to-face contact. He does not cover the Upper Peninsula as well as he used to. Nor, he admits, does he cover the Upper Lower Peninsula as well. And often his sources are retirees, well experienced but long off the job. But, he says correctly, “I do stay on top of the major issues.”

In many ways, Sheppard seemed fated to his career as a newspaperman dedicated to protecting the outdoors. Growing up in Romulus, Michigan, Sheppard remembers his dad, an engineer, taking him on fly-fishing trips Up North. “I can still show you where I caught my first fish on a fly on the South Branch of the Au Sable,” he says. “It was a streamer. I was 5 years old.”

His father loved fishing so much that he stopped to fish the Au Sable before heading home to Romulus on his way back from duty in World War II. Sheppard also credits his father with encouraging him in the newspaper business. After he told his dad he was going to be a newspaperman someday, his dad would pull articles out of the daily newspaper and then command the boy, “All right, rewrite this.” Sheppard smiles at the memory. “I don’t know how he knew it was better [when I got done].”

The Korean War interrupted Sheppard’s career path. “In June 1950, I went into the Army for three years,” he says. And at that point he stops and speaks no more of it. Sheppard, who regularly machine-guns questions at interviewees, can barely suffer being interviewed about anything, but especially his war years. He rebuffs questions with “I don’t know,” “I can’t remember” and, more candidly “I’m not going to talk about it.”
But his friends tell stories. “He has 11 Purple Hearts. He got into the war when he was 16. He lied about his age,” says Rusty Gates, president and founder of Anglers of Au Sable and a longtime pal of Sheppard’s. “The Au Sable River means a ton to him. When he was in Korea as a POW, it was the images of that stream that got him through it.”

Howard Tanner, a former Michigan DNR director and friend of Sheppard’s tells his own tale. Not long ago, Tanner recounts, Sheppard went with Mary Lou to buy some lemons. When they got to the store a man was sitting out front. When he saw Sheppard he said: “You’re Lieutenant Sheppard.”
Sheppard answered, “Not for a long time.”

“I want to thank you,” the man said. “One time I was lying wounded in front of the wire, and you came out and dragged me back to the trench. I still have the scars.”

Sheppard returned from the war to work at various newspaper jobs. He started at the Ypsilanti newspaper working for $26 a week. Then he moved on to Associated Newspapers, covering Detroit’s western suburbs.

Later in the 1950’s, he went back into the Army for three more years and was stationed in Alaska at the Army Cold Weather and Mountain School at Fort Greeley. “I climbed Mount McKinley two and three-quarters times. The three-fourths was a rescue,” he says.