Growing up as the last of the Bill and Mollie Stowers’ children, Cordy Brake Hunting Club was always there. I have no clue when it first began but it had to be near or after my birth in 1963. Located on land in south Sunflower County owned by my grandfather, Cordy Brake also encompassed more acreage from farmers whose land butted up to it.
There was a main club building with a kitchen that rivaled any restaurant and a seating area that seemed like you could fit at least a hundred but it was probably more like 50. There was a bunkhouse next door with what I remember as two large rooms with lots of bunk beds. Out back was the meat house with a meat saw where the spoils of the hunt were kept and quartered and shared between the lucky hunter and the club. Beside the bunkhouse was a huge dog pen that housed what seemed like a couple dozen of the best deer hunting dogs in the county, if not the state. Behind that, the skinning rack. All the comforts needed for a first-class deer hunting club.
When I moved away and got married my wife asked me what my Thanksgiving traditions were. I had to stop and think a minute. Then they all flooded back. There was morning deer hunting followed by a Thanksgiving feast fit for a king that included mounds and mounds of fried deer meat, mashed potatoes, butter beans, biscuits and cornbread, and sweets – all washed down by a 12-ounce ice cold bottle of Coca-Cola. No turkey, no dressing – that was Christmas dinner at Miss Willie’s house, my grandmother. And plenty of her homemade ambrosia. And I’d pay good money to have either of those meals once again any day of the year, especially Thanksgiving.
When I called a few folks to get some memories of Cordy Brake, there wasn’t the “remember when so-and-so killed that huge buck?” It was all about first guns and workdays and food and learning from the men who started it all. This was the ‘60s and ‘70s when deer were kind of scarce and before big buck programs.
Inverness native Buddy Bennett, the second-oldest son of one of Cordy Brake’s co-founders, the late infamous Bill Bennett, had a few memories to share.
“I remember Bill Stowers had a Bino-Buddy 30 to 40 years before anyone else did,” Bennett told me.
The Bino-Buddy was actually a hand-sewn binocular strap that my mother made for my dad that kept his binoculars strapped to his chest and he could easily stretch them up, release and get his shot. I had no idea that other folks didn’t have one. But he was like that, always making something functional. And not to make this all about my dad but Buddy had another memory of him as well.
“He had the first orange vest. It was pinned to his jacket so he didn't have to deal with taking it on and off. He was a cool guy,” Bennett said.
The Bennett boys, the late Billy, Buddy, the late Lynn and Ken were all “volunteered” to work the workdays of deer camp – cleaning up, working on roads, and clearing trees and overgrown stuff around the camp. Buddy was part of the original construction crew that built the meat cooler.
“The deer freezer, we built the thing and put sawdust in the walls and all that,” he recalled.
On the hunting side, Bennett remembered that not many folks were into archery season.
“You know, when I started hunting, there were two people that bow hunted. It was me and Bill Lang. He taught me how to bow hunt, he started me hunting.”
The bunkhouse had its own Las Vegas-esque stories that are hard to acquire. Buddy did have one.
“We stayed in that bunkhouse and we enjoyed it and had a good time,” he said. “Until the big kids would come down there and wrestle us up a little bit. One guy came down there. I can't remember his name. But he ran us out the back of the clubhouse and back behind the clubhouse wasn't nothing but a big field. We started running and he started shooting over our heads with a rifle. I don't know how far we ran until we started taking a left and going toward Bear Creek. All of us came back around the front, and we all got that dude. All of us jumped on that guy. This guy was like five, six years older than us. We all got on him and whooped him good. He never did come back out there.”
Inverness native Johnny Ammons – son of the late Cordy Brake member Bill Ammons – also had a few memories. He wasn’t sure of the beginning of the club but remembered me running around in diapers over there, so sometime early-1960s. One of his most vivid memories involved the kitchen.
“We went into the clubhouse and I remember her name was Emma B. She was a black lady, and she was about six-foot-two and probably weighed about 270. She and Mrs. Pete Bennett were cooking,” Ammons said. “They had the biggest cast iron skillet I've ever seen, there must have been 18 or 20 eggs she's fried in there. Biscuits and eggs and ham and bacon and sausage and Lord knows what else. You went down on the left side and you paid for the meal, whatever it was. It wasn't a lot. And a lot of times there was a game warden sitting there. He was checking you, making sure if you were old enough, if you had a hunting license.”
He recalled an early gun and his first rifle, which he still owns.
“I can't remember if I had a gun or not early on. I may have gotten a new 20-gauge pump, Remington. 870 Remington. We would sit up on the ground and wait for deer, and it was later on before I finally got me a deer when I could hunt it by myself,” Ammons recalled. “I was a senior in high school, and I got my first rifle.
It was a Browning .30-06, and so it didn't even have a scope or anything on it back in those days. But I remember that your dad and my dad got together and they went out to zero-in my .30-06. And, of course, your dad was a sharpshooter in the Army (both right and left-handed). I remember when he got back from sighting it in, I didn't even shoot it. I wasn't even with him. He told me, ‘this is one of the most accurate rifles I have ever shot.’”
The normal hunting day was breakfast, hunting, dinner, a break, and then more hunting, according to Ammons.
“The older men would give us the hunting plan for that day. ‘We're going to let the dogs
ut everybody will line these woods.’ Bill Bennett usually walked the woods at that time. And they would walk and whoop and holler and get the dogs going and get deer running, and people were shooting and missing. And, of course, if you missed you got your shirt tail cut off and then hanging up on the beam on the ceiling. Everybody would come back in and Mrs. Bennett and Emma B. were cooking fried deer steak and biscuits and gravy and all kind of vegetables and tea. The food was good and there was a lot of it. Then the stories would begin. Some of the men would sit and be sleeping and snoring. And us younger ones would listen to the tales. Some people would always pull jokes on other people, and they would be laughing and picking on them and everything. About the middle of the afternoon, everybody would load up and typically go back in the woods. And that was still hunting time.
“The older members of the club were always happy to help the younger generation of hunters.
“I remember Red Bell, Mr. Red Bell. He had the first Jeep and he would take me way back into the woods, way back in the woods. Then towards lunchtime, I had to walk through all the mud across one of those flat, broken-up fields and that gumbo – your feet would get about 12 pounds of it stuck on there!”
And the club was an “equal opportunity” hunting club with lots of mamas and daughters toting guns and hunting and enjoying the club as much as the boys and men.
“A great place for young boys to go. And remember, we had one girl that loved to hunt, Marilyn McGregor. Back in those days, Cecil Belk's wife and Pete Bennett, they hunted, those two ladies and all the Belk girls. I would go in the woods and hunt with Marilyn some.”
And there the requisite traditions to uphold.
“When you killed your first deer, you got your face blooded. Those men loved to bloody your face, too. They did a good job. Not just a little streak either.”
Cordy Brake wasn’t a palace but it was palatial in what it gave and provided for the members. A place where boys became men, girls became women and we all became family. The fun, the food, the memories of good folks coming together for a common cause that blessed several generations – at a hunting club that physically doesn’t exist anymore but will never be forgotten.
