My First Ranger

Jimmy Houston's story about his bass first boat

A friend sent me an article about a man in Paducah, Ky., who had one of the original Ranger boats built in 1968. As the story went, all the man really was wanting to do was buy a truck. He wound up getting the truck and the old Ranger from the guy who owned them both.

It was a very interesting article, and it brought back a lot of good memories about my first Ranger, which I purchased from Forrest and Nina Wood back in 1968. I don’t claim it was one of that first batch of Rangers, because it wasn’t. It was a 1969 model. I bought it in late summer that year after visiting with Forrest and Nina at one of the first B.A.S.S. tournaments.

The tournament was at Lake Eufuala in Alabama. I didn’t have the $125 to enter, but Don Butler told me I was paid up, and we drove down there together. To his dying day, Don swore he never paid my entry, but I’m convinced he did because that’s just the way he was.

I was leading after the first day with 11 bass that weighed 52 pounds, 11 ounces. My three best were 9-3, 8-10 and 8-14. That was back when you could bring in 15 fish a day. I dropped to second the next day and finished sixth in the tournament. I had never fished a three-day tournament and didn’t really manage my fish all that well. I don’t know that it would have mattered, though, because John Powell won it with 132 pounds.

Forrest literally sold me a boat at that tournament. It was about 5 feet wide, and at first I told him it was too wide to get in to some of the places where Chris and I liked to fish. He assured me that I would love it and enjoy fishing out of it. He was right.

I put a gigantic 100-hp in-line Mercury on it, and after a while my Ranger was pretty beat up. In fact, I cracked the transom trying to get the Mercury over logs and whatnot. I called Forrest and asked him if he could repair it if I took it over to Flippin. He said bring it on, but that I should first remove the Mercury and trolling motor. I told him I couldn’t afford to have that big, heavy motor taken off, so he told me to take the rig over from where we lived at Lake Tenkiller anyway. I did, and a couple of weeks later he called me and said the boat was ready.

When we went to the boat yard, he pointed to a light-colored Ranger mounted with my Mercury and trolling motor. I said, “That’s not my boat; my boat is green.” Forrest said, “No, that’s your boat.” He gave me a brand-new boat. Now, this is back in the years when nobody had a lot of money, and it cost him out-of-pocket to do what he did. I’ve always appreciated that.

I don’t know what happened to the Ranger. I finally swapped it for another, and I traded in so many over the years that I lost track of them. Reading about the man with one of those first Rangers built 50 years ago brought back a lot of good memories.

Those of us who started out together when tournament fishing got going didn’t have much. Fishermen like Hank Parker, Ricky Clunn, Roland Martin, Larry Nixon and many others had to scratch along for a while before things got better. Once in a while I get asked why, at 73, do I still fish bass tournaments. One reason is because I’ve got a lot of time and effort invested in it. But the best reason is because it’s enabled me to make friends with some of the best people in the world.