E. J. Dailey's Trapper Supply House

Although my father had been a hunter when younger, and owned a rifle and a shotgun, in his middle years he no longer used them.  We children always played with toy guns, but were not allowed to handle my father’s weapons.  It was undoubtedly a good idea, but we didn’t think so.

When I was about thirteen or so, I found a new friend named Dean Cox.  His family owned and operated a greenhouse a couple of miles from our dairy farm.  Nearly every Sunday afternoon I rode my bicycle to his home to hang out and see what sort of mischief we could get into.  Dean, whose parents obviously thought differently than mine, owned an old Mossberg .22 caliber rifle.  At some time in its distant past it had been clip fed, but the clip had long since disappeared reducing it to a single shot, bolt action, model.  Often on our Sunday afternoons together we would use his rifle to target practice.

This is what E. J. Dailey’s Trapper Supply House has been reduced to today.

First though, we would have to make the half-mile trip down the road to E. J. Dailey’s Trapper’s Supply House, where we bought our afternoon supply of .22 caliber ammunition.  I loved that part of our afternoon at least as much as our target practicing later.  Dean and I would walk the distance with Dean telling jokes the entire time.  I never did understand where he learned them all.  Once we neared our destination it was not hard to know we had arrived.  E. J. concocted his trapping scents on the premises and the smell would nearly cause us to gag, but after a few minutes of getting used to it, it wasn’t too bad at all.

The Trapper’s Supply house was a wondrous place for Dean and I even though it was no more than 10’ X 25’.  E. J. had an old desk in one corner, near the front, where he handled his correspondence with trappers all over the world.  He also had an ancient typewriter, on a pull-out tray of the desk, with which he wrote his column for the Fur, Fish, and Game magazine.

Next there was a small area where he had a gun rack with several guns.  It was an ever-changing array as he dabbled in gun sales on a regular basis.  Also in this area was a shelf with many different common calibers of ammunition.

From there you could pass through a doorway into his inner sanctum where he worked on his trapping lures for sales.  Shelves were lined up with the various lures for each species of fur-bearing game.  Also in that section was a selection of knives for hunting and trapping.  I bought a Utica Kutmaster Muskrat Skinner folding blade knife there when I was about 14, and I carried that knife in my right front pocket until I was about sixty years of age.  By that time one staghorn handle had cracked and the blades were honed down to about half their original size.  My brother Fred saw it one day and asked about its origin.  He decided I should retire my old faithful, so he found a new one nearly like it somewhere, and bought it for me.  The newer one had fake bone handles, but I carry it yet today after having given my original to my youngest son.