Want The Good Life? Just Work 12 Hours A Day

Once a week for nearly 30 years, Fred Peterson has served sportsmen his formula for success.

“I just give them honest and true reports,” said Peterson, who founded The Outdoor Press with his wife, Gwen, in 1966.

“Where to go hunting and fishing and how to get them, that’s the meat and potatoes,” Peterson said last week from his Spokane office.

Although the formula hasn’t changed, the times certainly have.

For years, TOP was a tabloid for the sportsman. Now Peterson bills the weekly as “outdoor information for the Pacific Northwest sportsperson.”

The secret for keeping this small business afloat had a lot to do with having a wife and a son who were willing to work 12-16 hours a day.

“But we also went fishing a day or two a week,” he said. “You can’t do it all from the end of a telephone.”

Peterson is not getting out much these days. After he mentioned his bout with cancer, readers flooded him with cards and even home remedies.

Several people suggested he tape magnets to his body to relieve the pain.

“If you do wear magnets,” he wrote in a recent column, “be aware they affect the magnetic needle on your compass.”

Peterson, an incurable outdoor gadget freak, suggested magnet therapy could be a good excuse to buy a high-tech $500 Global Positioning System navigation device.

To be able to hunt and fish and call it work has been a privilege for Peterson.

“I’ve had five trips to River’s Inlet for salmon, a number of trips to Westport and Sekiu when the salmon runs were unbelievable, a half dozen trips to the Missouri River and at least six to Yellowstone Park,” he said.

Twenty years ago, the trout fishing in Spokane area lakes was a good as anywhere he might go.

But the fishing has gone downhill with environmental concerns thwarting the old program of rehabilitating lakes, he said.

A biologist told Peterson long ago that he had seen the best of fishing in the Spokane area. He doesn’t doubt it.

Along with the demise of the local fisheries went the grand ol’ days of area fishing resorts.

“Many of them have simply become RV parks,” he said.

Peterson, who will be 70 in May, was reared in Spokane. He remembers fishing in Long Lake before the sewage treatment plant was installed.

“It was all sewage and toilet paper,” he said. “But we could really catch the perch.”

He remembers cleaning a trout there that had a condom in its gut.

Peterson remains enthused about creative efforts to improve fishing, including the net-pen projects to raise trout for waters such as Lake Roosevelt.

Longtime TOP readers have had to endure Peterson’s excuses for being outfished by his wife.

“Gwen loves to fish,” he said. “We used to go to the North Fork of the Clearwater and camp at Breakfast Creek. It’s inundated now, and I can hardly bring myself to go back.”

Unlike most girls of her time, Gwen grew up fishing with her Idaho family in Bovill.

“We went camping a week at a time. We’d fish all day and then sit up until 2 a.m. because grandma wanted to play canasta.”

Three decades as an outdoor publisher have taught Peterson some lessons.

“I’d have made some money if I’d have started this business in a bigger market, like Texas,” he said.

“But this is a much better place to live.”