For People Who Love Up North
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.
(page 4 of 4)
Sheppard’s climbing credentials offer a clue as to why he chose the quote at the top of The Call’s editorial page (not to be confused with the quote on the masthead). It is from Albert Mummery, an Englishman who was the greatest alpine climber of the late 19th century: “Politeness, that arch corrupter of truth … Truly those who aspire to work with the quiet gods on more than Olympian heights should shun the formal politeness which conceals truth and say their whole meaning.”
After returning to the Lower 48 Sheppard worked for a number of newspapers, including the New York Herald Tribune. He wound down the 1960’s as editor of the Charlevoix Courier. Then in 1969, he took over The Call, founded in 1953 by Marguerite Gahagan, who’d run it mostly as a mix of gossip and fishing, hunting and bird watching news. But over time, Gahagan developed a prickly attitude about DNR officialdom. Readers still find replays of her original columns on page 5 of The Call under the heading “Pine Whispers.”
Sheppard took Gahagan’s prickliness and honed it. He was an experienced, hard-news reporter dedicated to conservation. He had no desire to write standard hunting and fishing fare. No how-to-articles about stalking turkeys, skinning a deer or tying a fisherman’s knot. And certainly no macho tales of the “A Cougar Chewed My Leg” variety. “That’s boring,” he says. “It’s trash. It doesn’t do anything for the resources.”
Instead, Sheppard went after the things that make a difference—government, politics, scientific research, bureaucracies and where the money goes. He developed sources, dug up facts from field office scientists and pestered DNR managers.
Sheppard was tough. During the Engler administration, The Call got so abusive that the agency banned it in the field offices. Sheppard loved that.
Lately, Sheppard talks of retiring. Bagging it. He’s considered it for several years but frankly has not moved much closer to doing it. To his mind, not just anyone can take over The Call. The people whom he fantasizes moving into his job already have good jobs, with good pay and good benefits. As Sheppard’s friend Rusty Gates points out, running the paper has basically meant taking “a vow of poverty.”
Not that money—or lack of—matters much to Sheppard. Once he was offered $1 million for the newspaper, but he refused to sell it. The buyers simply were not up to his standards. Sheppard’s fans agree. “I hope he lives another 20 years. There is nobody capable of doing what he does,” Gates says.
Humphries, Michigan’s DNR director, echoes the sentiment: “He is the thread that has held together the conservation community,” she says. Dozens of us around the state wonder what life will be like after Shep. Not having that presence, that voice … beating the drum, holding officials’ feet to the fire for conservation in Michigan.”
The publisher of The North Woods Call can part with things he believes have outlived their usefulness. Decades ago he decided he didn’t like his hair. “A damned nuisance.” So he shaved his head. Sheppard’s teeth gave him trouble. So he had them all pulled. Now he has dentures. When he spotted red squirrels stealing from his bird feeders, he grabbed his .22 pistol and shot them off the railing on his deck.
But The North Woods Call is not on that list. There’s too much work to be done.“Conservation is always in jeopardy,” Sheppard says.
Gerald Volgenau writes from Ann Arbor. His recent book, Islands, Great Lakes Stories, is in bookstores and on the Web. gvolgenau@yahoo.com
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